{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/6t0gt5gk6w/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Mahlon Maris"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine.  Disclaimer:  The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2021-03-16 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["video"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Arkansas","family doctors","rural family medicine","physicians"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians (corporate name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: \u0026nbsp;The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/196/760/small/Mahlon_Maris%283-16-2021%29.mp4_1689089486.jpg?1689089490","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Mahlon__Maris_(3-16-2021).mp4"]},"duration":7429.47205,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/196/760/small/Mahlon_Maris%283-16-2021%29.mp4_1689089486.jpg?1689089490","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/196/760/original/Mahlon__Maris_%283-16-2021%29.mp4?1689089463","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":7429.47205,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760/transcript/45025","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Transcript of Dr. Mahlon Maris interview [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760/transcript/45025/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Dr. Sam Taggart: Good afternoon, my name is Sam Taggart and I am in the studio of Dr. Mahlon Maris formally of   Harrison and now of West Little Rock, Arkansas.  We are going to talk today about his life as a country doctor in Arkansas and also talk about his life in part and partial of the history of the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians.  Thank you for inviting me and the perfect place to start is at the beginning.\n\nWhere and when were you were born? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I was born the 13th of January 1942, very shortly after Pearl Harbor at Trinity Hospital at the East End of Little Rock.  Trinity Hospital was the hospital that my grandfather, Dr. Mahlon Ogden started along with Dr. Judd and Dr. Scarbrough.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Really; I did not know the Trinity connection.  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah and I was born there and was delivered by Dr. O.K. Judd who was the preeminent OBGYN doctor there in Little Rock in those days.  My dad was duck hunting that morning when mom went into labor, so she was sitting at the Trinity Hospital with her brother, Dr. Mahlon Ogden Jr., who was reading to her.  Dad came in, in his hunting clothes, and mom said, “Ok, he’s here; let’s go” and they took me in and delivered.  I was the second of four boys.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Now you spell your name M-A-H-L-O-N; is that correct?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes, it’s from the old testament in the book of Ruth.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Mahlon and Chilion were the two sons of, I think, Ruth’s sister; but, I’m not positive about that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I looked that up, because I love name wordings, and the name Mahlon means sickly.  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes, it does.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Were you sickly as a child?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I was as a child, yes.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: But that had nothing to do with your name?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No, it’s been in the family for several generations.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok; what is the nationality of your family?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: The Ogden side, which is my grandfather Mahlon Ogden, they were from England and the Maris side, I think, were probably from France…maybe France by the way of England.  When you look at the family crest, they are both English.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Talk about your mom and dad: when they were born, what their names were, what kind of work they did, those kinds of things.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: My dad was Guy Maris Jr., no middle name, and his father was a conductor on the Missouri Pacific Railroad.  The Maris family had moved to Arkansas out of Kansas after a blizzard stacked up their herd of sheep against a fence and froze them to death.  They moved to Arkansas and dad grew up in Newport until about the age of 15 when a third of Newport burned and their house was among the things that burned.  So, they moved to Little Rock where my granddad, the conductor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, went from Texarkana to, I think, Walnut Ridge on a daily basis making the round trip.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: They didn’t live in North Little Rock? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No, they never lived in North Little Rock.  Mom’s family, of course on her dad’s side, she was an Ogden; but on her mom’s side, she was a Worthen.  My great grandfather, W.B. Worthen, is the one that started the Worthen Bank.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Really?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: And there is a whole story about the depression then; it was the only bank in the south that didn’t close until the government made them close in the beginning of the depression.  They stayed open even during the rush and everything and that’s why they are so successful.  After the depression, those people remembered that W. B. Worthen didn’t close until the government made him close; the government finally declared a bank holiday and shut everybody down.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So, how many siblings did you have; brothers and sisters and what are their names and ages?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: My older brother, Guy Maris III, lives here in Little Rock and has the Standard Abstract Company.  He is 82 now and is undergoing chemo for myelodysplastic syndrome with bone marrow cancer, but he is tolerating the chemo well and is doing pretty good for an 82-year-old man. He is a big game collector and will work until they carry him out because he loves to work.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You’re about 78?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I’m 79; I turned 79 in January and then, my next younger brother is Pete Maris and he has the Bank of Little Rock.  He has a couple of sons and is married to Barbara Breit Maris; her dad was a family doctor in Harrison who I was going to go into practice with him when I got back from Vietnam, but he died the day I got back from Vietnam.  So, I bought the practice from his widow \n\nfor $35,000, which was a big amount of money for a guy coming straight out of a war with no money.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I knew a bunch of the patients as I had done a couple of locums for him for one or two weeks over the previous couple of years before I went to Vietnam; so, I kind of knew the patients and knew how the practice ran.  So, I had a little bit of precious billing there…but anyway, Dr. Breit died and we’ll get to that later.  My next brother is Bob Maris whose wife you just met up the hill here and Bob is a PhD level clinical psychologist and master woodworker. So, he and I share the shop and this is my studio.  When we were getting ready to move down here from Harrison; our kids live here in Little Rock….Kay and I grew up in Little Rock, moved to the country, practiced for 44 years, raised the kids in the country, and when the kids grew up, they moved to Little Rock.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So, I didn’t want to leave; when I check out, I didn’t want to leave Kay in the middle of 135 acres outside of town with no support system and so, we moved back down here.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I told her that if we were going to move down here and cut our square footage in half, I had to have a place to go or our marriage wouldn’t survive; so, I built this shop before we moved back to Little Rock on land that my brother owns and so, we have this shop together and I come out here almost every day.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok, it sounds like a wonderful existence.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: It is.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Let’s go back a little bit about your childhood; you have pleasant memories of your childhood?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I do; I lived in an idyllic time in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, you know, and nobody locked their doors and you know every family had one car; so, they had to actually plan to get places… opposed to every member having a car.  We grew up in the Stifft Station area down close to the blind and deaf schools and we had a neighborhood just absolutely full of kids our age.  There were four of us and every family there had 2, 3, or 4 kids.  Did you ever know Dr. Hoyt Choate?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I know the name.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: He was an OBGYN and they lived just down the alley from us and we matched their kids, age for age through all four siblings.  But, it was just a neighborhood full of kids and you know we’d \n\nfinish breakfast, go out, and wouldn’t be seen again until we got hungry.  We’d come back in and then in the evening, the same thing; we’d just out after lunch and stay out.  About the time it got dark, my dad would whistle, you could hear him for a mile; he’d whistle and we’d beat it to the house to have supper.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Where did you go to elementary school?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I went to Pulaski Heights Elementary School and Pulaski Heights Junior High.  The year that I was in the 9th grade was the year that they opened Forrest Heights Junior High and so half of my friends moved west.  My sophomore year in high school, I went to Little Rock Central and then, they opened Hall High School and I was in the first junior class at Hall High School.  In ’58-’59, Faubus closed our schools and I was in the lost class of ‘59.  A friend of my dad’s…..\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: But you were going to Hall High School then?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I was in Hall for my junior year and then my senior year, I went to Arkadelphia.  My dad’s friend, Mr. Frank Lyon Sr., had a good friend who was an attorney in Arkadelphia and this attorney and his younger partner, Otis…..I’m blocking on his last name right now, but I’ll think of it in a minute…..but anyway, they each said that they would take a kid.  So, Frank Lyon Jr. went and lived with the McMillan family and then, we moved in with Otis and Molly…..I’m sorry, I just blocking.  But anyway, my younger brother Pete and I…dad bought us a ‘52 Chevy and we drove every Sunday night to Arkadelphia and lived in the front room of this wonderful couple and then Friday afternoon, we’d drive back to Little Rock and spend  the weekend with our parents.  I mean, it was a fun year; but, it wasn’t the year that I had planned for my senior year in high school.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right; now you are just about the age and this is a personal question, you were just about the age of Pat Caviness.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Pat Caviness and I were classmates.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So, y’all were about the same…….the reason I’m asking about that is Pat lives in Thailand.  He lives in an island off the coast of Thailand.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Really?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Samui and he’s married a French lady and we communicate back and forth.\n\n Dr. Mahlon Maris: That’s amazing; I saw him on Facebook.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah, yeah.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I just saw his picture, you know; but, I had no idea where he was.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: We are sharing and I’m going to interview him at some point.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Did he get interested in the far East?  Did he go to Vietnam?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I have no earthly idea; I think he ended up with a PHD in health planning, health management, or somewhere along that line and I don’t know or have any inside on how  that happened.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok, that’s amazing……Turner; Otis and Molly Turner was their name, the attorney down there and subsequently, he was an Arkansas judge.  But they had two small children and the agreement was that we could live in their front bedroom, but they weren’t going to feed us and they weren’t going to raise us. So, dad told us to watch out for each other and we ate our meals at the Dairy Queen.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: (Laughing)…Well, I mean, that sounds like a wonderful arrangement; you know, you took a bad situation and made it right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Your family did…is your family religious?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Mother was and we all went to church; we grew up in the Episcopal Church.  Dad played golf on Sunday mornings….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: …Or duck hunted; we asked him about that and he grew up in the Christian Church and he said…this was his explanation to his young sons….when he was growing up, his mother made him go to church three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night.  So, he got all his done before he got fully grown.\n\n(Laughing)…\n\nSo, he didn’t have to go anymore.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Mike Young from Prescott told me, when I interviewed him several years ago, that he had a drug problem when he was a kid….his parents drug him to church every time the doors were open.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: (Laughing) I know, I’ve heard that and I like that.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I thought that was cute…it’s the same take your father had.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: But, your childhood was happy…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: It was.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You enjoyed your childhood…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Absolutely.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You enjoyed school?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Absolutely.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Where there any particular interests that you had in school that just really…..English, Math, Science?  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: It probably sounds silly to say, but I was premed from the second grade on.\n\n    \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Really?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: My grandmother Ogden, I found out I guess after I had finished med school, used to say to me….I was kind of her pet and my grandfather, the doctor, out of all these grandchildren …my grandmother when I was very small would say, “He’s going to make a fine doctor.”  Hence, you know, they named me Mahlon; the two Mahlon’s were both doctors and so, it was preordained. So, basically, I was…I loved the sciences because I knew I was pre-med literally probably from the second grade on.  I did a little bit of and enjoyed art.  I liked Math until we got…one of my favorite subjects ever was plain geometry because it made sense and if you learned the rules, you could do the work.  That just; plain geometry made more sense to me than any course I ever took in 20 years of schooling.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right, I agree; it’s logic.   \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: It was logical and if you learned their rules, and played by their rules, they couldn’t trip you up.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: That’s right.  I mean, I think it might have made you…it might not have made you; how many physicians who are in our age range say something very similar. \n\n Dr. Mahlon Maris: Really?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah; about mathematics in general, but especially about geometry.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah.\n\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Were there any teachers in either elementary, junior high, or high school that really had a big impact on you or even people outside like business people, preachers, parents or……?   Besides your grandmother, we know about your grandmother. \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, two different courses and one about the teachers; I got to thinking about that when I read the outline and I think that….I had a lot of illness as a kid.  I had ear infections, recurrent pneumonias, I had asthma and so in elementary, I missed a lot of school. I always made great \n\ngrades because we didn’t have T.V. in those days and so, I’d do my school work if I was in Trinity Hospital getting every eight hour penicillin shots in the hip.  In the early days of penicillin, you didn’t take pills or get IVs; you got an every six or every eight hour aqueous penicillin shot.  I was ill a lot and I can remember as a matter of fact going in in the middle of the night and waking my mother up with an ear ache more than one time and saying, “Please call big brother”…which is what she called my uncle Mahlon who was a physician.  “Please call big brother and tell him to come stick my ear” and I would ask her to have him come lance my eardrum…..\n\n        \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: (Laughing)…you must’ve really been hurting.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Because I knew it would get the pressure off.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah, right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: There’s no greater relief….there’s no greater pain than when they run that knife through that tympanic membrane, but there’s no greater relief than when that thing drains.  But, I would literally go in and ask her to call him at 2 in the morning and ask him to come stick my ear.  So that being said, having missed a lot of school, but still being academically up with my peers; I always….I wasn’t a good athlete, I was more a nerd than an athlete as a child, and I think I always appreciated teachers who were kind more than anything else.  Now later, I appreciated teachers who were good Socratic teachers and that was in college and med school.  In high school, no teacher really stands out at any point.  I went to three different high schools and I was always competitively academically; so, that wasn’t an issue.  We were never really encouraged as children to be in organized sports or scouts because when the weekend came, mom and dad wanted to go to duck camp and we’d either go fishing or hunting.  So, if we’d had all this parent sitting in the gym stuff, it would’ve interfered with that. So, we were never really pushed as far as …..none of the four of us…Pete played maybe two years of junior high football, but that was it…for all of us boys and all of us, we got our growth late.  We got our growth late in high school; we were all relatively small through the early grades and so, we wouldn’t have been good athletes probably anyways.\n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So, you enjoyed high school and you said that you kind of knew that you were going to go into pre-med; did that change what you took in school as you remember?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah; well, it certainly changed what I took in college.  You know, I left Arkadelphia and went to the Science Hall at Hendrix and as a result of that, I had all my science courses and everything and got accepted to med school after my junior year in college, which they used to let you do.   You could skip your senior year in college and then get a BA in medical science from the University at the end of your freshman year in med school back then; they don’t let them do that anymore.  But it’s really interesting talking about teachers, one of my favorite teachers who I also wrote his name down was Dr. Walter Moffitt who was from Monticello originally.  He taught in the English department at Hendrix and I had taken a couple of comprehensive courses from him and I had taken a couple of literature courses from him picking up my required.  Of course Hendrix was 600 students at that time and so when I got accepted, everybody on the campus knew it and those of us who got accepted early or those of us who were in their senior year and got accepted…everybody on campus knew who got accepted to med school.  I got accepted to med school and less than 48 hours, Dr. Moffitt sent word through one of his minions, secretary, or somebody saying, “Mr. Maris, Dr. Moffitt would like to talk to you sometime during the next couple of days; would you stop by his office?”  So, I went to Dr. Moffitt’s office the next day because I really admired him and really liked him; he’s a wonderful man and a good teacher.  He said, “Come in; have a seat. I understand that you got accepted to med school.” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, “Well, congratulations.  Now, I’m going to encourage you as it’s my understanding that when you get accepted, you’ve got three years to activate that acceptance”… I said, “Yes, sir; but, I’m going next year” and he said, “Well, I’d like to talk to you about that. If you go to med school now”…this was the spring of my junior year….”if you go to med school this summer or this fall, you’re smart enough that you are going to be a good doctor, but I would really much rather you become a great physician and that’s going to involve getting a broader piece of knowledge than the Science Hall.   It’s also and I would encourage you to get one more year of maturity before you go into graduate school because I think you’ll fair better there.” So, I thought about that, you know, long and…..and the conversation was obviously a lot longer than that because he kind of went line and verse about why I ought to defer.  So, I called my dad a couple of days later and said, “I need to come home and talk to you about med school”…”Sure”…..so, I hitch hiked back to Little Rock as I didn’t have a car in college and I told him about my conversation with Dr. Moffitt.  Dad said, “I promised each of you boys four years in college.  I never went to college, but I promised each of your four years in college with the agreement being that you promise each of your children four years college.  So, I graduated with no debt; dad sent us to school.  But, I went over all of this with him and he thought about it for a few minutes and said, “I promised you four years of college, you got another one, what do you want to do?” and I said, “I think I want to graduate from Hendrix.”  He agreed and it cost him another $1700.00….that’s what it cost when I went to Hendrix, $1700 a year.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Was that 1959 or ’60?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I graduated in ’63; so ‘62-‘63 was the fourth year that I was at Hendrix.  The other thing that I wanted to do that fourth years; they built the Grove Gymnasium at Hendrix…I don’t know if you’re familiar with Hendrix very much…but, they built the Grove Gymnasium at Hendrix and finished it during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years.  This may be a whole lot more than you want to know about….\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I want to know about everything you want to say…. \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So when I was registering in the fall for my junior year at Hendrix, there was a note on my folder that said, “See Coach Cortway in room such and such.”  I didn’t know who Coach Cortway was.  So anyway, I finished registering and said, “Is this a mistake?” and they said. “No, Coach Cortway is expecting to see you.”\n\n               \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How tall were you at this point? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I was probably 6’7 at this point in time….6’6 or 6’7.\n\n(Laughing)\n\nDid you know Bob Cortway?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: (Laughing)  No; no, but I can see where the story is going……..  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: He was the….he had just come to Hendrix and he was going to be the swimming coach.  So, I went in and he; of course he had coached swimming at Wilson, Arkansas and I think he had done a little bit of college coaching somewhere else  and then, he came to Hendrix to be the athletic coach director and swim coach when the previous athletic director retired.  So, I went in and introduced myself and he said, ”Mahlon, sit down; I know a little bit about you and I watched you swim a little bit in age group swimming back when you were in junior high and late elementary school.”  I swam a little bit then, but just through a Boy’s Club Program. He said, “So, I know that you’re a swimmer” and I said, “Well, I haven’t kept it up coach” and he said, “Well, you’re going to be on the first swim team at Hendrix” and I said, “Coach Cortway, I’m pre-med and I’m going to be in the labs.” He said, “You can train after lab; that’s not a problem.” \n\n(Laughing)\n\nBut, he was the most convincing person and Coach Cortway just always had the feeling that you could do it and he could make you believe that you could.  If he said, “Run through that brick wall...I’d be through it.  So anyway, I went out and was on the first swim team at Hendrix.  It was a very close knit group and there was no funding for it.  We borrowed our parent’s cars to drive to Missouri and Tennessee to swim at swim meets. We paid our own motel bills if coach didn’t have some place; but he would usually call the school and say, “We want a corner of the gym floor; my boys can sleep on the floor.”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah; y’all competed against South Western, White Roads, or ___________?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah and we swam against Missouri School of Minds and Missouri State…..Uh…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Sewanee?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: We didn’t go as far as Sewanee; we swam a big meet at the Millington Naval Base in Memphis and then, we swam the AIC Schools in Arkansas…Tech, Teacher’s College which is now UCA; all of those….but, I wanted to swim another year because we were doing; the whole team was doing better.  Every meet most of our guys would beat their previous best and it’s just a wonderful feeling and a lot of camaraderie and a lot of mutual support.  It was a great two years of that; also if you’re swimming, #1) you can’t go to _______ and drink beer and #2) you need to study when you’re not in the pool.  So, I went from like a 2.0-2.5 in my first two years, I loved that good college life my first two years, to somewhere between a 3.7 and 4.0 my last four semesters and that’s why I got in med school.  So, I’m going to say that swimming had a lot to do with my getting into med school.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Discipline…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: It was like turning a switch on when I started my junior year.  I didn’t drink beer during the season and I didn’t…I trained and I studied.  I also had a couple of good roommates who were pre-med and so, we studied.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Discipline…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Exactly and that wasn’t real high on my list my first two years.” …… (Laughing)….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So when did romance start playing a role in your life and at what age?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, I dated all the way through junior high and high school, but you know, you have a girlfriend and then six months later you’ve got another girlfriend.  In college, I dated a lot but was never serious enough with anybody that I thought I’d want to get engaged until, I guess, my senior year when I met my wife…my current wife.  But, we started dating, it may have been late in my junior year, and dated through the rest…she was a year behind me at Hendrix and then when I went to my freshman year in med school, she was still at Hendrix.  At some point during that year, we broke up never to speak again and then about three months later, we got engaged. So, I think we both; you know, we were apart and I was just immersed my freshman year in med school; as you will recall, you didn’t have time for anything except your freshman year in med school.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right...\n\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So, we broke up and then, we ended up getting married between my freshman year and sophomore year in med school after she had graduated.  She went and taught; she actually taught at Pulaski Heights Junior High school.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Where you had gone to high school...\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Where I had gone to school and where my mother had gone to school.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Oh really; what a lot of continuity there….really wonderful; that’s good.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: That’s good; how long did your wife teach?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: She taught all the time I was in med school and then, I went to Kessler Air Force Base in southern Mississippi, down at Biloxi, for my internship and she didn’t teach anymore after that.  We had a son when we lived down there and from there, we went to Myrtle Beach Air Force Base in South Carolina.  I was in family practice clinics at Myrtle Beach for a year and then my third year in the military, I was in Vietnam as a surgeon.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: We’re going to come back to there.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, that’s a whole other story.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: We’re going to come back to that, because I do want to go there; but we will come back to that in a few minutes.\n\nLet’s talk about medical school…… your impression off medical school … how long did it take for you to adapt; did your last two years at Hendrix already adapt you to study all the time to the extent that you….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes; I used to always tell people that when I was at Hendrix. I could compete with people who were smarter than me because I studied all the time those last two years and I could compete with people who studied all the time because I was smart enough to get by.  So, I finished Hendrix with great grades when I started with mediocre grades.  Med school, I finished dead center in my class and there are a couple of reasons for that, I think;  I mean, I have been introspective about that, I guess, ever since Dean Shory…..did you know Dean Shory?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Nuh Uh….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Dean Shory had an interview with every graduating medical student during the spring of their senior year.  I went in and he had the book already and I was tickled to death because I was finishing dead center in the middle of my class.   I had my life planned out for myself; you know, I thought I’d do my internship and then, two more years in the service and after that, I was going to go into pediatrics…I just had it all figured out.  Roger Boast was a big influence on me my last two years in med school and actually during my senior year, I did one rotation as an acting intern in pediatrics; they literally took you as a senior student and made you an intern for that…...” \n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: That would’ve been what year?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I graduated from med school in ’67.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: That you were doing that is what I’m talking about; I’m trying to figure out what Boast was doing at that particular time….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, he was head of the pediatric department.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok; he…..for most of us…Roger Boast, Joe Bates, Tom Bruce, and George Ackerman were the four pillars….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, they were; they absolutely were.  Your mentor….I was really intimidated by Dr. Bates.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Oh, I was too.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I was horribly intimidated.  Dr. Boast wanted me to become a pediatrician; we geed-and-hawed very well.  Tom Bruce and I always got along real well. George Ackerman was one of my heroes; I just absolutely loved him.  But, I thought I had my life pretty well planned out until the government sent me to Vietnam; well talk about that again in a minute, but I got off the subject…but, the people that I remembered in med school….academically in med school, I was ready for my freshman year because I was committed to studying all the time.  I would go to the beer bust after every big final; but on Sunday morning, I was in the books again usually with a hangover.  For that reason….I was going to tell you about Dr. Shory when I had my exit interview with him; he said, “You finished dead center in your class and judging by the way you did your last two years at Hendrix, I would’ve expected more from you” and I thought about that for a minute and said, “Well, let me tell you; I did not spend my last three years in med school in the library.  I did all the assigned reading and studying, but I spent as much time as I could in the ER and in the clinics because I like people, I like working on people, and I want to be one of those doctors who is a hands-on doctor.  I thought I could learn more there than being an academician and that’s why my grades don’t reflect my knowledge as I’m leaving med school.” He thought about that as he is an academician, as all those guys are, and I……but, I guess that kind of sounds self serving in saying that I didn’t finish school with a 3.5 or 4.0, but that’s exactly what I did.  When I got my studying done, instead of studying it all one more time and getting four more points on a test, I’d go to the ER and I knew all the residents because they’d let me do things. So, I’d be in the ER as a sophomore student sowing up cuts.\n\n    \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: And that stood me in good stead over my life\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah, I know…..I’m smiling because I did pretty well the same kind of thing…..now, what were your years in medical school?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I went in the fall of ’63 and finished in the spring of ’67.” \n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok, alright; lots and lots of changes were going on about then.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Oh, yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Medicare and Medicaid passed…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: For Arkansas’ purpose, Medicare passed.  As you said, Dr. Boast….talk a little bit more about Dr. Boast.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Dr. Boast was brilliant, I mean he knew pediatrics, but Dr. Boast also…if there was something new or something that he didn’t recognize, he wasn’t hesitant to pick up a phone and call somebody at Hopkins or wherever to learn about it and I learned that from him.  I learned to not get above your raising, you know; if there’s something you don’t know….I used to tell my patients that for years…I said, “Now, I’m going to tell you right now; if I don’t know something about something that is going on with you…I’m going to tell you I don’t know, but then we will go find the answer”…..and people appreciate that.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah; trust.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Trust, yeah….trust.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Really, really, really, really important….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Some of the worst trouble that I’ve seen doctors get into was doing things they didn’t know how to do or assuming they knew how to do things…thinking they had all the answers.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right; right…..now, I’ll be remiss if I don’t go back….please tell me your wife’s name and her date of birth.  I don’t think we said that already.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Kay Maris; her maiden name was Rausch.  Her dad had the ________ company here in Little Rock, which is a plumbing/fixtures company. Her mom was a stay at home mother and then, she worked some in retail after Kay and her little sister got grown.  We had two children, Mahlon Jr. who was born in ’68 and then, Beth who was born in “71 after I got back from Vietnam.  Mahlon is an andrologist and lab supervisor at the Woman’s Fertility Clinic here in Little Rock with Dr. Bachress.  He runs that lab and has since he left Hendrix basically; he initially spent a couple of years in the fertility clinic at the Med Center and then those docs all picked up and moved to start their own fertility clinic and that’s where he is now over on Kanis Road. Our daughter, Beth, is an architectional engineer and she is the project manager for Matt Holtz Construction and at any given time, she has two or three big projects that she is overseeing.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Were there any crises during your medical school years?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: During med school…..dad had an MI, I remember that.  Basically, they put you in the hospital… that was before they had an ICU, Lidocaine, or monitor your anything; basically, they put you in and monitor your vital signs and hoped you got over it.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: And gave you something for pain...\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Uh huh….uh, I really don’t remember any crises during medical school.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: What informed your decision on where you would go and do your internship?\n\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Uh, I had a couple of friends who had done what I did a year earlier, people in the class ahead of me, and even though I was working…..I had always worked; except my freshman year, I always worked while I was in med school and I’ve always…. I come from a long line of self-starting entrepreneurial people and I wanted to be able to generate a little bit better income than what I was going to get as an internship someplace else.  I talked to people who had done the internship at Kessler and that was back when they had the Berry Plan program and so, the guys that were my mentors in that internship were not career military people; they were guys who were drafted or went into the military after the Berry Plan  program deferment. So, I had a guy who had just been chief resident at John Hopkins in pediatrics, we had a surgeon who had just been chief resident at one of the big hospitals, one who had been an internal medicine guy from Detroit General; so, the guys that were our teachers when I was an intern, our mentors, were people who had just finished being the chief residents at major hospitals. So, it was a won…..you wouldn’t think going military would necessarily be an academically challenging and rewarding experience; but because of the situation of times and the war that was going on, it was perfect.  It wasn’t like we had a bunch of burned up Colonels who was just spending their time; we had these young fire eating guys who just finished their residencies and studying for their boards…..\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Where is Kessler?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Biloxi.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Biloxi, Mississippi….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah; it’s in Biloxi.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So you did your internship and you were on the Berry Plan …..\n\n \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I was not on the Berry Plan, because I went straight into the military after med school.  The Berry Plan was to defer and let you finish your residency before you went to the military.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok….so, you did your Kessler and then from there, you went where?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: After a year at Kessler, I went to the duty station at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a small Air Force Base, for a little less than a year and then, I got my orders for Vietnam and I was at Vietnam for a year.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: What year did you go to Vietnam?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I went to Vietnam in the fall of…in the summer of ’69 and came back in the summer of ‘70.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Talk about your Vietnam experience.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, I guess the quick and dirty on it is, I was assigned to a MILPHAP team; that’s military speak for Military Provincial Hospital Assistance Program.  So when I arrived at Saigon, I reported to a Colonel at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.  Myself and two other captains; this Colonel sat and we stood, and he looked up at us and said, “Which of you is the surgeon?” and the guy on my right said, “I was on the Berry Plan through a psychiatry residency” and the guy on my left said, “I was on the Berry Plan through a dermatology residency.” \n\n(Laughing)\n\nHe looked at me and said, “Can you cut and sew?” and I said, “Yes, sir.”  He said, “Why can you cut and sew?” and I said, “Well, I worked for a cardiovascular surgeon for three years, Dr. Moss Hera, who we can talk about in a minute if you want to….I said, “I worked for a cardiovascular surgeon for three years and basically did most of the operating in his dog lab for him.  I first assisted him in chest and cardiac surgery and made rounds with his residents on his post-op cardiac patients, and prior to that, I worked summer and holidays as a scrub-tech at St. Vincent’s infirmary in Little Rock.  So, I know my way around an operating room before I know my way around an operating table and basically, that is why I can tell you confidence that I know how to cut and sew.”  He said, “You are the commanding officer and lead surgeon of the MILPHAP team at Van Long.”  \n\n(Laughing)… \n\nSo by the laying arm of the sword, I became a qualified surgeon.\n\n(Laughing)..\n\nSo that night, a quick aside, I was staying in the BOQ, which is the Bachelor Officers Quarters, and was to fly out the next day to my duty station in Van Long, which was down in the delta; that night I went from the BOQ over to the big hospital there at Tan Son Nhut, that was the main Air Base in south Vietnam.  They had a big hospital and when I say “big hospital” people think tall building; I’m talking about one one-story building after the other, after the other, after the other….a typical military hospital situation.  But, they had a great library because they were at the top of the food chain.  So when a box of Grey’s Anatomy came in, they had one on the \n\nshelf at Tan Son Nhut library, opposed to one going there and the others going down stream to the other units, you know. So, I walked into the library at the Tan Son Nhut hospital with an empty B-4 bag, which was a travel bag, and I walked around the library, watching and making sure that nobody was looking and pulled a Grey Anatomy out and dropped it in the bag, I pulled a surgery text out and dropped it in the bag, a plastic surgery text, and internal medicine book; I basically got myself a reference library to the tune of about 80-90 pounds in this B-4 bag and then ,I pulled this small volume out and went up to the check out because everybody was in transit at that time; so, it was not unusual to see people carrying a travel bag with them whether they were in church, the library, or the grocery store.  So, I walked up and sat my bag on the floor; I handed the book to the lady and said, “I’d like to check this one out and read it tonight. I’m staying at the BOQ.”  She said, “Oh, we pick up books there every morning.  Just leave it with the clerk at the front at the Bachelor Officer Quarters and we’ll pick it up in the morning.”   I said, “Thank you very much” and so, I walked out with that book as my excuse to having been in the library that long and a complete library in a B-4 bag to take down country with me….because I knew I was in over my head when I was headed down there, you know.  So when I got down there, we set the library up.  I had a surgical suite; it was at a Vietnamese hospital that was built in 1933 by the French and we had no screens and no glass for windows; it was just open windows.  My main surgical ward was a 40-bed ward and at any given time, I would have 3-8 patients per bed and they would sleep crossways in the bed…feet here, head here, feet here, head here….that gave room for the family to be around and help to care of them because we were so short staffed with Vietnamese staff and we were basically consulting there.  The CBs had built a three room; they built a small building, which had three operating suites and a central supply and that’s where we operated.  So when I got down there, we just set my library up there and I put an extra mail stand in each of the operating rooms so that if I got in…most war surgery, you are following a projectile in as opposed to violating an un-violated body. So that was the redeeming thing for me that most of the people I operated on were going to die if I didn’t operate on them, they might die if I did, but I might be able to help them and so…...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Now, most of the people that you operated on were these primarily Army, Air Force, or….was it just anybody?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No, Vietnamese civilians; this was a provincial hospital.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok, I thought so…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: The Vietnamese Army had their own hospital and the Americans had their own hospital; this was a Vietnamese civilian hospital and so, I was actually operating on the peasants from country side or the poor people, the lower Islamic people, from in town…it was a very small town called Van Long.  So that’s who…I would say probably a third of my patients were Viet-Cong, they were the enemy, and you could tell that because when you started taking bullets out, you were taking American bullets out of them and so...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Did that year change what you wanted to do? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes a bunch….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Uh…. #1) At one point I thought I might want to do surgery and that year made me decide I definitely did not want to come back and do a five year surgery residency because I would be coming in as the freshman resident, the youngest resident, and I would’ve done more cases than the junior resident or maybe even the senior resident.   I couldn’t see myself, although I would’ve done all those unsupervised, being dressed down by some cocky senior resident when I’d done….you know, he might be dressing me down about doing a cleft lip and I’d already done 17 of them.  Whenever we had a decrease in causalities coming in, we’d start doing a bunch of elective stuff and there were people…I was doing cleft lips on people who were 25 years old.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Hmmm….. \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: You talk about grateful patients….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah, I bet.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: But, I just didn’t think that the rigger of a surgical residency coming straight out of a war zone; they start dressing me down, I’m liable to have killed them or at least taken them down and that just didn’t make any sense to me to plug into that situation for 4-5 years.  Plus, I didn’t really have anything that I needed to prove in the operating room at that point, I’d done chests, brains, cleft lips, and everything else simply because I had to. Then, I was going to do pediatrics and I talked and communicated with some pediatricians while I was in my internship after I left Dr. Boast.  There were a couple of really good pediatricians who had been drafted out of their pediatric practice who had been practicing 2,3,4,5 years….drafted out of their practice to come into the military during the war and just had to leave their practice or leave it to their partners, their senior partners.  To a man, they said that the general practice of pediatrics was not like the academic practice of pediatrics; it became drudgery….”just one runny nose kid after the other”; quoting them, you know.  They really; you know, they were always looking for the interesting case, but when they got an interesting case, it ended up being referred to one of the centers and the guys in the centers where the ones who managed it.  So, none of them were happy….as a matter of fact, most of the ones that I knew were not planning to go back into pediatrics and a couple of them were planning on staying in the military and just ride it out as it was a good life and they could play all the golf they wanted to without having to work too hard.  The others were going to go back and either sub-specialize in something in pediatrics or go back and do something different.  So, I looked long and hard at that and pretty well decided by the time I went to Vietnam that I wasn’t going to do pediatrics and Dr. Breit had invited me to come into his general practice .\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Did you think about staying in the Army?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No….no.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Never; that didn’t stick….?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No, the reason is you get above the rank of Major, you become an administrator instead of a doctor.  So if you become a lieutenant Colonel, you think you’re real important; but, you’re not taking care of people anymore and so, that held no….there’s another story about that that I probably shouldn’t tell, but I’m going to…is it alright if I swear once?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You can swear as much as you want to….. (Laughing)…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: When I was in my internship and I was on the ER, we were on-36 and off-12 my whole year of my internship.  I was on about my 34th hour of a 36 hour stretch, we’d get all the trauma off that freeway that runs the width of the Gulf Coast, and so, we had been working hard for 30+ hours.  I get a message that Colonel Stumpy wanted to see me in the head shed, which was the front office, and I told the core man, “Send word back down there that I have a car wreck that just rolled in and as soon as I get these people stabilized, I’ll be down there.” So, I get a message back, “That wasn’t a request, it was an order” and so, I handed off to the other docs in the ER and went up to the head shed mad as hell because I was taken away from doing what I was supposed to be doing.  So anyway, I go in and salute, he says, “Sit down” and so, I sit down.  He was a circuit rider, full bird Colonel, and he’d go around to all the internships and try to recruit physicians to become career medical officers and he said, “Captain Maris, what can I do to entice you to become a career medical officer in the United States Air Force?”  I said, “Colonel Stumpy, not a fucking thing; may I go back to my duty station?”  \n\n(Laughing)…..  \n\nHe said, “Dismissed.”  I was sleep deprived and very angry because I had people bleeding and this egotistical jerk wanted me to come down there to be recruited on his time.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So anyway, pardon me for saying that, but that was….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: No, it’s alright…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: But, that was exactly how that transpired.  Now less than a year later, I got orders for Vietnam…..I think there’s a connection.\n\n(Laughing)…..\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So in the middle of Vietnam, Dr. Breit up in Harrison…\n\n \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: While I was in Vietnam….Dr. Breit, because I had done some locums for him, he had encouraged me to come back and go into practice with him.  Well, I hadn’t been over there real long before I thought, “You know, that may be what I need to do.  When I get out of the military, I need to go to work and make a living.”  There was one family practice residency at that time in North Carolina and I had looked into it and they weren’t letting them deliver babies, they weren’t letting them do surgery, they were doing a lot of behavioral medicine….not that I have anything against behavioral medicine, but I wanted to be a working doc and that was in the days when GPs did it all.\n\n   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right...\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So, it looked better and better to me and so, I wrote and communicated with Dr. Breit; he invited me and I accepted.  So in the spring of 1970, he showed up with lung cancer and had a rapid decline.  I think they found; they found it initially in his lung, but it was already in his liver and his bones.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How many doctors were there in Harrison when you went there?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Not a lot; there was Dr. McCoy, Dr. Kirby, Dr. Uless Jackson, Dr’s Gladden and Williams who were surgeons, Dr. Paul Mahoney who OBGYN…there was an older doc whose name I can’t remember right now who was an E\u0026T as opposed to just ENT that’s how much older he was; he didn’t practice my longer.  Uh, Dr. Breit and that’s pretty much it; there may have been one or two others, but that’s pretty much it….mostly family practice or general practice in those days.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: What kind of hospital facility did you have?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: We had a pretty good hospital.  Boone County Hospital had a drawing area; Harrison was probably 6,500 people at the time and we had a drawing area of probably 55,000, because we went half way to Fayetteville, half way to Mountain Home, half way to Springfield, and half way to Little Rock. Conway and Clinton weren’t much in those days either.  \n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So, that was kind of our drawing area and we….when I went in; like I say, he died on the 4th of June which was the day that I got back from Vietnam.  I actually got back on the 3rd and my brother and I drove to Harrison in the very early hours on the 4th….. I mean, I literally got off the plane, kissed my wife and little boy, and jumped in the car and drove to Harrison.  I sat with him for about an hour before he died. I walked in and he was heavily medicated, but his wife said, “Bill, Mahlon is here” because he was devoted to his patients…. “Bill, Mahlon is here”…will we ever know if he heard that or not I don’t know, but it was almost like he relaxed and thought, “Ok; it’s alright, I can go” and he died an hour later.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right; how old a man was he?\n\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Bill was in his late 50s; 58 maybe.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: A young man….big smoker?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah; yeah, big smoker.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Did you ever smoke?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I smoked for a week at church camp one time.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: (Laughing)  So, not really…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No, no…but, I drank a lot of whisky.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So this is in 1970, when you go into practice…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, 1970 when I go into practice.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Your wife’s from Little Rock, you’re from Little Rock, you’re not from the country in Arkansas….did that take any adapting?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Right, right, right; dad grew up in the country at Newport….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: By the way, I’m from Augusta just south of there.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Little Rock wasn’t all that cosmopolitan when I was growing up.  The people I knew had country beginnings; not really rural country beginnings, but at least small town beginnings.  Most of dad’s friends had grown up in small towns; you know businessmen in Little Rock that I knew.  No, it wasn’t that big an adaptation and I knew there would be an adaptation, but, I was really looking forward to it and you don’t get any more rural than the delta in Vietnam.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Plus the language barrier.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: So, Kay went up and found us a place to live before I got home.  I got home on the 4th and I opened the practice on Monday the 15th of June 1970; so eleven days later, I opened the practice.  Actually the night before, because I had set up my malpractice insurance and all of that, I was staying at Dr…..Kay was closing out our house in Little Rock and so I was staying with Dr. Breit’s widow in her home and actually using his black bag to make house calls.  The night before, I got a phone call and this guy said, “My name is Bill Bonstill and my daughter has a sore \n\nthroat.  Could you come see her and give her a shot of penicillin?”  The Bonstills; I didn’t know at the time, but the Bonstills were good friends of the Breits and the first thing I thought was, “Oh my God, I’m going to end up with a malpractice suit six hours before my insurance goes into effect.  So, I called the insurance man and said, “Mr. Campbell”…John Campbell is his name...  “This is Dr. Maris; my malpractice insurance doesn’t start until tomorrow morning when I open my office, but, I got a call from a Bill Bonstill wanting me to come see his daughter to give her a shot of penicillin for a sore throat.  I’m hesitant to do that without coverage.” He said, “No, you can do that; that’s my best friend.  Go on over there and treat her, which one is it…LeAnn or Sherry?          \n\n(Laughing)….\n\nSo, I said, “Ok, I’m on the way” and so, I went over and gave this shot to Sherry Bonstill who was my first patient.  She, in fact, had strep throat and I gave her a shot of penicillin and started her on some pills; but that was my….you know, the next morning I had planned to go to the office about 8am to get started because that’s when my girls would have it open, I got a call at about 4am to come deliver a baby.  So, I went in and delivered a baby and when I got out of the delivery suite, I got a call from the emergency room that one of Dr. Breit’s patients had a appendicitis and Dr. Gladden was getting ready to take her to the operating room and would I come down and first assist; he thought it was probably going to be a ruptured appendix.  So, I walked from there and first assisted on that, got out of there about 7am and went to the office, saw 70 patients, delivered a baby at noon; during the course of the day, I saw 70 patients and that night I went and saw 2-3 in the ER, and got home about 10-30-1100pm my first night.  I thought, “If I live until tomorrow morning, I’m going to call Dr. Boast and sign up for a ped’s residency.\n\n(Laughing)….\n\nBut I got called back out about midnight or 1.00am to do something and just stayed at it for 44 years.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How long did you practice in Harrison?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I actually had an active practice for 40 years and then, I lived there for four more years doing just my nursing home patients.  When I retired; I had quite a few nursing home patients as I was a medical director of four nursing homes and when I fully retired, I told Dr. Brownfield, he worked for me for three years and then, I worked for him for three years; I said, “Shannon, I’m going to keep my nursing home patients. These people are 80 now and they were 40 when I started taking care of them” and he said, “Yeah and you’ve got them spoiled rotten, please take them.” So, I said, “Ok, that settles that” and did that and we lived in Harrison until 2016.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: This may be a meaningless question, but I’m going to ask it anyway; how long did it take for you to become a public utility in Harrison?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: 45 minutes; it was quick.  It was quick and the reason is is because I was available.  A lot of the older docs would just; several of the older docs didn’t think anything about going quail hunting, but not check out to anybody….somebody would call and they couldn’t get the doc, so they’d call his nurse at home and she’d say, “Well, call Dr. Jackson or call Dr. So-and-so. Dr. Fowler is out.”  But they had all done it for so long and the community was so conditioned that if they couldn’t get Dr. Fowler, “call Dr. So-and-So” and they’d just keep trying until they found somebody who could see them and when I went, I was available; I was always available in solo practice. So, I became a public utility pretty early.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I first heard that line from a guy from Walnut Ridge, Ted Lancaster.  His wife said, “You know, it didn’t take long for him to become a public utility” and that’s exactly what it is…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I never thought of it that way, but it is.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: That’s exactly what it is…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Exactly right…exactly right…and you listen to it…what did patients say in those days… “I use Dr. Maris.”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes, you do.  (Laughing)…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Obviously, you had a couple of good….well at least one year…of really intense surgical training when you were in Vietnam.  Did you end up doing a lot of surgery in Harrison?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: For the first couple of years; yeah. I did my own appendixes, I did my own tonsils, I would do and did all lacerations, I didn’t do gallbladders, I didn’t do orthopedic surgery; one of my classmates came to Harrison three…no two years… after I got there, Dr. Charles Ledbetter.  So, I just handed all the orthopedics to him then, even the close fractures that I was setting early on.  We had an orthopedic surgeon who would come over and hold clinic one day a week from Fayetteville, Dr. Coy Kahler, and when Dr. Ledbetter came, Dr. Kahler quit coming…but any operative orthopedics, we shipped in the early days.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: To Fayetteville or Mountain Home?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Fayetteville usually; Dr. Kahler’s clinic worked really well with us and always sent the patients back to us.  If you sent somebody into Springfield in those days, they got on what we called the “merry-go-round”; Springfield was a specialty dominated town and what they would do is you’d send somebody up there with a broken hip and they would talk about a runny nose when they \n\nwent back for a post-op check and get sent to an ENT.  Then, they’d talk about my wife’s been kinda of depressed and she’d get sent to a psychiatrist and they’d get on that merry-go-round and we never quite got them back.  The Fayetteville doctors were also real good about sending us #1) a referral letter back and we kind of trained them; we not only wanted the patient back, but we want to know what you did to them and why you did it.   So, it was basically a form of continued education and they would write these wonderful two page letters basically giving you the full specialist run down on what your patient had.  There was always friction between Harrison and Mountain Home dating back to football competitions in high school and so, none of the doctors who grew up in Harrison would send….or even think about sending….anything to Mountain Home.  I had been, in my senior year when I did my radiology rotation, Dr. Max Chaney who was; did you know Max?\n\n Dr. Sam Taggart:  I know the name…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Max was in Family Practice in Mountain Home, but he kind of did a sub-specialty in Pulmonology.  Because they didn’t have a pulmonologist, he went back and did a year in Pulmonology.  He was doing a pulmonic radiology rotation and so, he took me in and taught me how to read films when I was a senior student; so, I knew Max and really liked him.  So, when I was; one of the punishments you get for going to Harrison in those days was after your first full year in Harrison, you had to be the President of Boone County Medical Society and the sole job of the President of the Boone County Medical Society is to find speakers for the monthly meetings.  So, I called Max Chaney and asked him to come over and do a talk on COPD for us as there was some new stuff coming out then; up-drafts, some newer bronchial-dilators, and stuff like that.  Well, he came over and gave a wonderful presentation; afterwards Dr. Jean Gladden, one of the surgeons who had grown up in Harrison….an old Harrison family….pulled me aside and said, “Dr. Maris, we really don’t need to know anything from people in Mountain Home.”              \n\n(Laughing)….\n\nI thought, “OK…I understand that now.”\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: In the 1950s, the road system in north Arkansas was atrocious; all gravel roads…by 1970, you had pretty good roads, I think….was that ever……was getting people in acute emergencies within the golden hour with whatever you’re trying to do…getting people somewhere else to get tertiary care, was that ever a real problem?  \n\n     \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, it was until after Vietnam.  It was a problem for us in the early days after Vietnam; after Vietnam, people bought into the idea that helicopters were the way to move critically ill people rapidly because you didn’t have to…….you know, it was a four and a half hour drive to Harrison from Little Rock in those days; it’s two and a half hours now. \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: And it wasn’t much closer to Springfield; was it?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: It was well over two hours and Fayetteville the same, you know; but, the main roads were good except for in the winter…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Were they all paved?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: All the main roads coming and going from Harrison at that time were paved; Fayetteville, Springfield, Little Rock, and Mountain Home.  Yeah, the main roads were paved; but once you got off that main road, we were all gravel.  So the answer to your questions is, if you got really sick in the backwoods of Newton County, there was no…the golden hour was spent trying to figure out how to get you from in the woods to a pick-up truck on a mattress to haul you to Harrison and be put in an ambulance to go to Fayetteville…so, the golden hour turned out to be about four and a half hours.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: At least; yeah.....\n\nObviously, your first day…you were full busy and that continued?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes...yes.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: At what point did you start thinking, “I need some help”?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Uh, the second day…. (Laughing)….I contacted a classmate of mine, I found out that he was about to get out of the Air Force and I contacted him; I asked him if he would like to join my practice and I sent him some pictures of myself holding a couple of big bass that my friend, Dr. Tom Bell, had caught.  Jerry was a fisherman and he liked it outdoors a lot, Jerry Geyer was his name, and he always said that that picture with the big bass is how I caught him.  So, Jerry came and practiced with me and then, we got Dr. Hugh Nutt who grew up down at DeQueen.  Over the years, there were a lot of others; but…..Jerry was not a hard worker, but he was better than nothing, you know, while I had him and Hugh Nutt was a working fool; he loved to work…..\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You talking about the guy from Fordyce…?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Fordyce, yeah; I said DeQueen, but I meant Fordyce.  Hugh Nutt was a working fool.  I would go through periods of time when I’d have several partners and then, periods of time where I’d be solo again. Dr. Geyer got an offer; he was not happy in Harrison and his wife wanted to move back to further south Arkansas as she was from _______ and her folks wanted her home. So Jerry; we agreed to split up and he moved to Stuttgart and worked for Carl Northcutt.  He didn’t work very hard down there either according to Carl. Dr. Nutt at some point, his dad called and said, “When are you going to come home and practice?” and so, he moved back to Fordyce.  Then, I had a young man who was literally passing through the day he walked in and he ended up going and doing a urology residency.  There were others and one time I had; I was the first doc in Harrison to utilize nurse practitioners and probably the first in North Arkansas…because I used to be….I was a preceptor for 35+years for med-students and then, was a preceptor for the nurse practitioner program when they developed it at the Med Center .  I would have those students actually come live with us in our home for six weeks and if I got up at 3am to see somebody in the ER, I’d get them up; so, it was….I had had a good preceptorship experience with Dr. Jim Guthrie in Camden and a good association with Dr. Jim Holly down there also while I was with Dr. Jim Guthrie.  I also worked with Dr. Holly a bunch and he was as country as a brown egg, but he was a great guy.  We hunted and fished together and drank a little whiskey together too. But, I wanted my students to have a good preceptorship experience and so, we did that and I think it was…I know it was good for me and I think, it was good for the kids in the end.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I want to just change course here a little bit…... \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Sure, I think I’m getting off on tangents here ….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: No; no, these tangents are…..\n\n Dr. Mahlon Maris: This is stuff I haven’t thought about in a while.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: This is important stuff….I mean, this is stuff your great, great, grand-kids would want to hear. \n\nBut I want to talk a little bit here; in 1970, you go to Harrison, building a practice, you’re really enjoying doing surgery that you want to do and that you can support, and all these kinds of things, getting partners sometimes …..and your name begins to appear in the minutes of the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians in about 1974. Do you remember anything about that?  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Do you remember when you started that?  I think you told me earlier that you had been involved in the Arkansas Medical Society as well….  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Right, I went to the Medical Society annual meeting and I went to; do you know who Dr. Lane was?  He was a family doc down at ……\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I don’t think so.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Its north of Russellville; what’s that last little town you go through north of Russellville?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Dover?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Dover; he was a family doc for years at Dover and I guess it was in about ‘72 that I thought, “I need to join these two organizations, the family practice organizations, if for no other reason \n\nthan to go to the annuals meetings and get the continuing education” because I can’t take time off  to go to Memphis or somewhere else and do a week course.  So I called Dr. Lane, they were starting to have some residencies around at that time, and I said, “I’m not residency trained. I was a student member of family practice; can I join the academy?” and he said, “Sure.”  There was some reason that I had a question about whether I qualified or not, but anyway he said, ”Sure” and so, I sent in my $20.00 or whatever it was back then and became a member of the academy.  I would go to the annual academy meeting, but I was more active in the medical society because a couple of the guys from Harrison were active in the medical society.  So when I went down to the medical society annual meeting and showed an interest….when they see young people coming along and show an interest, you know, “Well, let’s put him on the committee and see if we can bring him along.”  So, I came along and you know, I was the Third Vice President….then, I was the Second Vice President….and then, I was the First Vice President of the Medical Society; I never wanted to be the President of the Medical Society because I didn’t want to talk to reporters.  But, I was active in the committees and I served on a national committee as a; they had a nation committee called the Committee for Services to Young Physicians at the AMA and I served on that….there was about 6-8 of us from all around the country that served on that.  So, I was active in the medical society and through that I met Amail Chudy and from Fort Smith…….uh…..Kutate and Lilly……Ken Lilly and Kamala Kutate; they started bringing me along in the academy. Basically, I was in sequence right after Jim Weber and so, I was the program chairman for the annual meeting the year after he was and then, I was the…. .\n\n      \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Membership committee; you were on the Membership Committee for several years….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, all those things and ascended to ultimately the President; well, I had spent a year as the Past President and at that time, the past president was on the board to give feedback.  I don’t know if they still do that or not, but I told them at my past president year, “I’m out of here. I don’t want to be a delegate, I don’t want to be any of that; I’m out of here and I’m going to Harrison to practice medicine” and so, I quit doing any organized medicine at that point other than going to the annual meetings.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok; now a question about….this is a subject not technically about you, but you were there when this process happened…Amail Chudy remembers that he was involved, this was before you were even in medical school or about the time you started medical school, do you remember that he was involved in integrating the medical staff of St. Vincent and Baptist?  Morris…..a wonderful man…..I’ll think of it later; but, there were several physicians, several African-American physicians, who were practicing in a small hospital on 9th Street and he and several other people were active in getting …do you remember any, other than and we’re going to talk about Sammy Armstrong in just a minute…..do you remember Sammy? \n\n       \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Sammy was a student; he was a very aggressive young African-American student…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: What year?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Oh….Sammy would’ve come along in about ’77-‘78.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok...\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I’m really looking for any information about African-American Physicians either in the Arkansas Medical Society or in the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians prior to that time or about the time that you started getting active….   \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok, I have no knowledge of the integration of those two medical staffs.  In my med school class, we had Richard Green and another fellow, I can’t remember his last name right now; two black students in my class, each of whom were headed north the minute they graduated.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Richard was going to Chicago and I don’t remember where the other guy was going.   I don’t remember in the early days of the academy very many; there were some black physicians, but I did not know them personally and I don’t know when that happened.   \n\n\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Well, you were mixed up with the committees and stuff and about the time that the Family Practice Club, I don’t remember or understood exactly what that was supposed to do, at the Med Center got started and Sammy Armstrong was involved in that getting started.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok, I was not involved in any of that.  I think people after me may have been involved in putting that together.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Derek Lewis…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: The name is familiar.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Dr. Betten….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No...\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Obie or Oba Moore ….Oba White is his name….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I know the name Oba.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: He was an African-American....what about females in the Arkansas Academy or in the Arkansas Medical Society? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, it was….when I first went in, it was male dominated; but over the course of the time that I was active, there were females that were coming up and I ‘m at a loss to give you names right now.  We had very few females in our class and I think the classes are something like half or more females now.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: A little bit more than half, yeah….particularly with the osteopathic schools, I think they are dominated by females.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Oh really…?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: From what I’ve been told.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: That’s really interesting.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah, it is kind of interesting.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I have thoughts about that too….\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Does the name Elizabeth Fields or Mildred Ward, those to names, mean anything to you?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Both of them are very familiar, but….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Mildred Ward; John Tudor brought Mildred Ward from west Texas to teach in the Family Practice Program at the Med Center. \n\n \n\n Dr. Mahlon Maris: Ok, I probably have met her ….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: And Elizabeth Fields, I think, was of the same character.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok…..John Tudor never practiced.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: No…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: And I always thought that was a drawback for him in his bis…to try to run a family practice program; I always thought that you needed to have been in the trenches.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right…..you were there when the conflict over whether John could run the department was going on….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I may have even had an opinion.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: But you were there; by the way, I recently looked, and looked, and looked at those archives and there is a letter in there from all the residents….I was one of the people signing the letter; so, we both were there…..\n\n \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: What did it say?\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: It just said, “We think he’ll do ok.” \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ok.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: It was kind of…..a backhanded compliment is what it was….basically…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah...\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: What about Ben Salzmann?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Ben and I had a good relationship.  Ben was one of the most overtly political people I’ve ever known and he was good at it.  His patients loved him and I liked him.   liked Ben, but Ben would not have ever been a mentor of mine because Ben was about Ben a lot more than I think he needed to be; that sounds more critical than I really mean to be, but I would have….I don’t have a warm fuzzy feeling for Ben that I had for Roger Boast.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah…..yeah…..one year when you were head of the Membership Committee during this ’75-’76 range,  the Academy got an award from the National Academy for having the second largest increase in the percentage of members in one year.  Do you remember that?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I think I do; yeah.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: It went from like 300 to 400; it increased to 404 at had been 303 the year before.  Do you remember anything about that?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: We actively sought new members and we put on a wonderful educational annual meeting that year.  We, as I recall, contacted a lot of nonmembers and said, “We’d love to have you be a member, but more than that we’d love to have you come to the annual meeting” and then we put together a meeting, as I recall that year and I can’t even tell you what the curriculum was, but basically it was answering questions that the doc in the office in Dumont was asking.  We put…..we had good speakers and good subjects, as I recall, and that was our draw and we got as bunch of people to join that way….and if you joined the Academy, you got to come to the meeting cheaper; so, there wasn’t a financial disincentive.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: In your earlier years on the board, there were several mentions of……I guess it must have been a department at the Med School…..called the Post Graduate Rural Education Department; does that ring a bell?   \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Not really.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok, I think it was just this ongoing thing of who’s going to provide the continuing education….If we’re going to require these 150 hours every three years….who’s going to provide it?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah… right, who’s going to do it?  I do remember that discussion.  We had to figure out a way to make that available to our people; yeah.  You know, that was around the same time that I was on the…I don’t remember what years I was on it, but I was on the admission committee at the Med School for three years.  Those of us who were in Rural Family Practice were …..in those days, you could……they had a rural scholarship program or something where you promise to go to a small town for a year if you got this scholarship for a year; I think it was a year for a year trade-off.   I can remember that we were trying to tell the people that were funding those scholarships, it’s just not fair to take a freshman, or incoming freshman, and telling them, “You’re going to be”….the idea was that they fall in love with the small town, but what it actually did was forced them to go to a small town when they wanted to go to a residency or go do something else and turned them off it; so, it was not effective I don’t think.  Tim Bruce used to say, “The most effective way to solve the family doc shortage in small town Arkansas is to allow him to choose the wives of the medical students.”  If he could pick a girl from Dumont, he can send a doctor to Dumont.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: (Laughing)….That’s excellent; yeah, I remember him saying…..I interviewed him before he died.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Did you?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah and he has all kinds of lines like that.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: But that was; he used to say that back when we were trying to think of ways trying to keep all the residents coming out of AHECs and staying in the towns where AHEC was…you know, Fayetteville just filled up and Pine Bluff just filled up, but  Dumont and Lake Village didn’t get there with those guys.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Now, there were several large issues going on that were political issues; one was a political issue that had an impact on the practice of medicine pretty dramatically and that was the whole idea of federal block brands.  Do you remember that having any impact on you and your practice?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Not really, but I was not as good a business man as I was a country doctor and I pretty well left most of the running of it...I tried to pick good office managers and I usually did and I saw patients; if I needed more income or the practice needed more income, I worked harder.  It was all fees for services in those days and I saw more patients.  Then when I had a financial crisis in 1991, a personal financial crisis which I will share with you if you want it later, I actually continued working full time and then worked weekends; usually a 40hr shift in the ER on Saturday and Sunday.  So, I would leave the office on Friday afternoon, check in at the ER, and leave the ER on Sunday night to then be back making rounds at 5am on Monday morning.\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: The 1970s were a time when Betty Bumpers was involved with.…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Immunizations…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Immunizations, big time; and then, Dale went to Washington with she and Rosaline Carter…. there was mentioned several times, especially in ’76 during the swine flu; do you remember much about that?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I remember the swine flu and I remember Jerry Ford; wasn’t he president during that time?\n\n  \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I believe so.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I think so and so, I do remember the swine; but basically, you know, we treated that like we treated….we didn’t treat it like a pandemic; we just…if they showed up, we treated it.  In those years, we were doing a whole lot more crises control care than we were preventative medicine. If you saw a trend, then you’d go look at the water supply at Jasper of something like that; but basically, we were raking care……it was all we could do to keep up with the sick people as far as….you know, now you see that the real way to go is to keep them from getting sick; if they’ll let you. \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah….1970, Dale Bumpers and Roger Boast were able to push through the Arkansas Legislature the Medicaid services for medical payments.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I believe that I got that correct; I believe it was 1970.  So, that created financing for health care for a BIG part of the population that wasn’t covered before that.  Do you remember that having any impact on your practice?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Absolutely, because I was still treating the same people and the same number of people, but I was just getting paid for it and that’s exactly how that worked out, you know.  When I hear about; I can honestly tell you, I never turned a patient away for economic reasons.  Now, I might turn somebody away because they are a jerk, because they cussed my staff or things like that; but, I never turned a patient away for economic reasons.  I was making a good living, working hard, and taking care of people and it was just wonderful when we started getting paid for all those patients from Newton County, backwoods Searcy County, and Marian County.\n\n       \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: What some people would say is that a lot of those people just wouldn’t come in. \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: A lot of them wouldn’t or they wouldn’t come in until….\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Until it was just dreadful...\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: They were extremist, you know.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Coming forward to 1978; we’re kind of hitting back and forth, but that’s ok….you were president for a year of the Arkansas Academy…  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Is that the year it was, I couldn’t remember; yeah.\n\n                          \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I’ve got it right here…….1979-1980…….was there anything eye opening or unusual at that time?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Oh yeah; I had something big going on in my life.  I was...let me get this right…I was 36 in ’78…I was born in ’42…that math works doesn’t it?  Yeah, that was the year I got sober.  For all the world to look at me; I’ll just give you the real quick and dirty on this….I come from a long line of people for whom cocktail hour started at 5…but, I’m talking about self-starting captains of industry, banking, medicine….but a strong alcohol culture in that.  None of whom let the alcohol affect their effectiveness and they all started at 5 or noon on Saturday and then drank in the evenings.  So, I always joked that, “I didn’t know that everybody didn’t have a cocktail hour at 5 in the afternoon until I married my wife”…then, I also joked that “Kay never knew I drank until I came home sober one day.”  (Laughing)….But anyway, I started struggling with the fact that my drinking was getting more out of control….it was not effecting my practice, it was nights when I was off and weekends and stuff…but it was becoming more of an issue for me, not even within the family; but personally, I knew that I was starting to lose control and I could see that I was going to end up making exceptions and drinking when I was on call and stuff like that.  So….because I always liked if somebody was…say if some old college-mate would show up in town and want to come out for the evening, I’d call and get somebody to cover me so we could have some beer. But, I could tell that that wasn’t going to always be the case and I might start making exceptions.  So, I really started to look at my drinking, talking to a couple of friends who had gotten sober in AA, and then, I started trying to control my drinking.  I decided, “Ok, I’m through with whiskey.  I’m not going to drink whisky anymore and I’m going to have wine with meals and beer on the weekends”.  Well if we’d go out to eat, I ordered two bottles of wine to let the second one start to breathe….you know, that’s what the wine freaks talk about…it breathing…  Actually, I was assuring that there would be another one that we could just get right into.  I always even back in college, even in high school, had this capacity to function regardless of the amount of alcohol I had in me.  I always drove everybody home because I could still drive; the joke was, “Maris, you drive because you’re too drunk to sing”…but that was…. (Laughing)….But, I always had a big capacity…..I drank a large volume of alcohol and as a result of that, I think it accelerated my dependence on alcohol.  At one point, I just made a decision that it was out of control and talked to my friend who was in AA and said, “I think I need to go to a meeting”…he said, “No, you’re about a year late.”  When I got to the meeting, I had a couple of friends who I did not know were in AA….I got to my first AA meeting and one guy, a fellow named Bill, said, “We’ve been waiting on you.” (Laughing)...So, I got sober in AA.  A thing that rang a bell with me was at my first meeting, an old fellow named Carol Cummings, he’s dead now….I said, “I’m not even sure that this is what I need to be doing“ and he leaned forward and said, “From what you’ve told us, you’re way isn’t working; why don’t you try our way and come back tomorrow night?”  So, I went back the next night; I don’t go to AA meetings anymore, but I work my program every day and I’m in touch with someone from AA every day.  But, I went to a lot of meetings the first 15 years and I’m what 45 years sober now or close to it.\n\n                 \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How hard was it for you?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: HARD; the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and that’s one of the things that keeps me sober….I don’t think I could do it again.  I miss it…I loved alcohol.  I loved the way it made me feel, I liked everything around it, I liked cracking a beer, handing a beer to my buddy, floating the Buffalo drinking a beer, coming in from the duck woods and having a beer….I liked alcohol and I was a gregarious drinker.  Never solitary or in the closet or anything like that; I was right up front with it.  Fortunately, I never killed anybody on the highway and never killed anybody in the practice of medicine because God and Sunny Grenade intervened in 1978, I guess it was or right around then.  You said, “Was there anything significant going on that year”….I had just gotten sober when I was sworn in as the President of the Academy.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Oh my goodness….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: And I don’t know whether there is a text of my speech the day I was sworn in or not….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: I bet there is somewhere; I haven’t seen it.\n\n\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well in that speech, I said something about, “We need to help our fellow physicians who are struggling and don’t know where to turn”...I didn’t mention alcohol, drugs, or anything else; but I said, “We need to be…as practicing physicians…. to also think of our fellow physicians as potential patients and be available to them and help them if they’re are struggling.”  The president of the National Academy was there and afterwards, he came up to me and said, ”I’m not prying, but there’s some depth to one of those statements that you made; that’s not a routine incoming president speech that you just gave.”  I said, “Well, I don’t think I’m a routine incoming President.  I just got sober a few months ago” and he said, “I thought so.”  He never said whether he was or wasn’t in the program or anything else and it didn’t matter to me, but he picked that out of that and came and actually talked to me about it afterwards.  He also did say, “If you ever think that you need any help, here’s my number.”\n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Did drying out…no lets go back a little…did the process of not being able to control your drinking plus the drying out process, did that change how you practiced medicine? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I think it made me a lot more tolerant of people who needed what I had found and it made me more willing to…after a visit with the patient, I’d tell them,  “I’d really like to talk to you.  Call me when you get home and are alone” or when I smelled alcohol on a patient in the morning, do a little checking to find out if that was a daily thing or just a morning after he had a nip with his neighbor.  So, it made me a lot more sensitive to addiction, practically alcohol addiction; I always felt that drug addiction and alcohol addiction were two different diseases and AA has always felt that way too.  We would work with people who were poly-addicted and most of us, who later being old timers with alcohol addiction, could not get our heads around the fact that…I think that people who are poly-addicted have a lot more trouble getting honest when they get dry and I think that has to do with the endorphins and what…..say what cocaine does to you that alcohol doesn’t do to you….I just think it does different things to you and I know that working with them is an entirely different thing and I’ve worked with both.”   \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: What is your impression of rehab services, detox, and sober living activities and programs in the state of Arkansas alone?   \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, I had to help a brother get sober; I say help, he got himself sober by his family and almost dying.  But, I took him several times to the Benton Unit for detox and to dry out and they said that he was back on the street.  Then within less than six months, I brought him to Harrison and let him live with me and dried him out and detox’d him a few times….. There again, he wasn’t ready; he got sober because he couldn’t go on like he was, but having got sober and he went back to it.  There’s a saying that an old guy in AA told me one time, he said, ”you know for years I wanted to want to get sober, but it was when I finally wanted to get sober that I got sober” and I think that’s true of a lot of people; they have to want to get sober.  But, it’s a commitment…it’s a commitment.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You said at one point and, I think, I suspect not everybody…. John William Morris over at McCrory practiced until he was...he died at 104; he practiced until he was a little over 100. On his 100th birthday, the town of McCrory gave him a birthday party and he went back to his office and saw 26 patients after the party.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Wow.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Not many of us do that.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Most of us begin to either dramatically withdraw or reduce our work load or actively cease the practice of medicine.  They either go to work at the VA or go to work at an insurance company or something usually after 35-40 years….when did you start thinking about retirement?\n\nWell, when Dr. Brownfield…because I used to work a 5 ½ work week in the office….when I was solo, I had 5 ½ days of office work and then, I would…if somebody was sick I’d see them back on Sunday morning and just meet them at the office or something like that.  So, I worked hard for a lot of years and of course, we didn’t have ER docs in the early days; so if somebody showed up in the ER and wanted you, you’d get up and go in.  So, I would; the first 16 years, I did OB and almost every night I’d go to the hospital at least once and that’s two hours, you know, any way you cut it. So, I had put in my time; but when Dr. Brownfield came in with me, I started taking…I think Friday afternoon off because I thought it would be a lot better to put that with the weekend than to try to take a Wednesday afternoon off…you know, you can’t do anything on Wednesday because if you see somebody who is really sick at 11 o’clock on Wednesday morning, you’re going to follow them to the hospital to get them out of trouble as we didn’t have hospitalists either…. so, you’re going to end up spending the afternoon at the hospital.  When I first started taking time off, I started taking Saturdays off.  We quit opening on Saturdays because there was a doctor in a box that opened in town and somewhere people could go besides the ER.  Then, I started taking Friday afternoons off and then, I took Friday mornings off to have the whole day Friday.  Over a period of 4-5 years, I started adding time off; but worked full blast all the rest of the time.  Then when I went to work for Dr. Brownfield…see, I had established two satellite clinics; I had a satellite clinic at Jasper and a satellite clinic at Lead Hill. So, I would go and spend a day at Jasper and a day at Lead Hill every week.  Lead Hill was not as busy, so I would go in real early and work till noon at Lead Hill; then, started taking Thursday afternoon off unless we had a big load, it was flu season, or something, and I’d work all day.  So, I started lengthening my weekend, but still seeing the patients at the satellite clinics. So, I cut back in that way; but when I was in Harrison or in the office, I never cut back from 40 patients a day.  When we started doing appointments, I cut down to 40 patients a day from  used to see them until they quit coming, which would be 7 o’clock at night, and we’d usually see 70 patents a day…..or I would see 70 patients a day.  But, I cut back when we started doing an appointment system and people; which took us a year or two to train people to an appointment system, and we built some walk-ins into that.  But by the time I retired, electronic medical records had come along which I “STILL” think is an invention of the devil and I’ll tell you the reason…you cannot tell what the doctor is thinking about the patient when you read an electronic record.  It’s a check list, it becomes wrote…they check stuff off….they check things on the list….I do legal consulting for the defense for medical malpractice in nursing home negligence cases and I read a lot of medical records….you read that and you know damn well that they didn’t process that patient’s chest or that they didn’t look in their ears…you know, they are just checking boxes…..that’s what they’re doing and I think there is a thought process that is going on with handwriting a record that is lost in electronic medical records; the only  remedy for that that I can see would be to hire a brief narrative at the end of each visit dictated or typed in about what you really thought about the patient and not have canned sentences that you can put in there.  Because you can’t, or I can’t, tell what that doctor really felt about that patient; you read my handwritten record, you know exactly what I thought when that patient left the office and you know what I told them.  Now, there may sometimes be some parenthetic things that I didn’t tell them, but I’d write those notes for myself as a reminder to broach that subject next time as I hammered them hard enough this  time; you know, patents are only going to get out of the office with 50% of the information that you gave them and so at some point, you’re going to have to quit overloading them even if you’re writing it down.\n\n             \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So, how is your health? \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: My health is pretty good.  I’m in chronic atrial fibrillation; it’ll be a year in three days.  I was in intermittent atrial fib for probably 10 years before that. I’ve had two oblations, neither of which worked, and have been on every one of those toxic drugs; none of which worked.  So, I’m living in atrial fib; that makes me short of breathe with exertion and besides that, I’m in good health.  I don’t have any arthrosclerosis that I know of….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Is that a big deal in your family?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, my dad….\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Your dad had a heart attack.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: My dad did; he had several heart attacks and actually died of a pulmonary embolism even though the death certificate says heart attack.  Mom had had a Grand Mal Seizure and he was sitting for three days in the hospital with her and a chronic; he wasn’t still smoking at that time, but he had been a chronic smoker and had a lot of vascular disease.  He stood up, went into the bathroom to have a BM, sat down, and when he stood up from the commode, he died.  Within 45 seconds, they had a cardiac arrest team on him and he was in the hospital when he died.  They never got anything back and I’ll guarantee you that he threw a saddle embolus.  Mom had an Oligodendroglioma and she had bled into it.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Now, that’s not even a name that I recognize; what did you just describe?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Oligodendroglioma; it’s a brain tumor. \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Sounds like a brain tumor, but I just don’t remember…..\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: She had one; actually, she had this grand mal seizure as a result, I think, because of that brain tumor, which never got diagnosed because when she had the seizure, she sustained some compression fractures with the grand mal seizure because she had osteoporosis.  She was in the hospital and when dad died, she said, “I’m going home to be with my boys and I’m going to the funeral.” So, she never got a work-up for her head and the neurologist just put it off atherosclerotic cerebral disease and never had her back or checked her or anything.  Well, three years later, she had fallen; she’d had a few more seizures and was maintained on Dilantin for that….but I left the duck camp headed for Harrison and I thought, “I think I’m just going to run by and check on mom in Little Rock” because usually I’d go the back way up through Romance and up that way….Rosebud and all up through there.  Anyway, I drove to Little Rock went in to see mom, we had a good visit, but she had fallen the night before and had a massive hematoma on her knee and so, I said, “Mom, we need to get that x-rayed.  Why don’t you just get in the car, go to Harrison with me, and we’ll x-ray it so there won’t be a lot of hassle in going through the hospitals here in Little Rock?” So, I loaded her in the car and we drive to Harrison.  That night, or in the very early hours that next morning about 5 o’clock, I heard stertorous breathing and so, I got up and went down and mom had decerebrate rigidity.  She was having a grand mal seizure and what she did was bleed into this brain tumor.  We took her to the hospital and the guy told me……\n\n    \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How old was she when that happened?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Mom was 62 or 63.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So young…very young….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah….no, mom was 64 and dad was 62 when he died.   But, I took her to the hospital and told the internist when I took her into intensive care I said, “She has obvious decerebrate rigidity and her brain is gone; do not intubate her because she would not want it.”  So, he didn’t intubate her and I called my three brothers and told them the decision I’d made and they said, “Look, we do banking, we do…you make the call” and I said, “I made the call.  But if you want to see her while she’s still alive, she won’t know you, but if you want to see her, you better head for Harrison now.”  So, she passed within 24 hours and I had asked the internist, because I really was never convinced that her seizures were atherosclerotic, to ask the family for an autopsy.  He asked and the brothers all looked at me and I said, “Guys, I think we ought to do it because I’d like to know what killed her” and they said, “Ok.”   So, we got an autopsy or we’d never known.  But that explained the seizure disorder and the guys don’t have to worry whether their kids will have epilepsy; it explained a lot; but of course, I’m old school enough to think that every death should have an autopsy because there is so much to be learned. \n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right, right……now, so you retired how long ago?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I retired when I was almost 69 in 2010.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: 10 years ago….\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I retired in December and actually, I saw a full load of patients that day and went and the hospital had a big nice farewell reception for me; I think that was a Friday afternoon and the following Monday morning, I was in a duck blind and have not looked back.  I have never; I’ve known so many people who retired too early or too late, I did it the third bear…I did it just right.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You knew when to get out.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Absolutely.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You had said when talking about athletics in school that you did some swimming; have you been athletic as an adult?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Active in hunting and fishing and for a number of years, I was a runner.  I was real devoted to Kenneth Cooper, he wrote the books on aerobics; I hosted him at the Arkansas Academy one year and we got to talking.  We had a real good visit and I went down and went though his program down in Dallas.  Kay and I ran for years; but in the last 20 years, I have not been as physically active.   I’m back to trying to just maintain …Right now, I’m just trying to get where I’ve got…..you know, I used to bicycle.  I had a mountain bike and had a bad wreck on a mountain bike.  I ended up with a concussion, it broke the helmet, and I had three fractures of my left clavicle….\n\n     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Somehow I knew about that; I’d heard that.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Did you?\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Yeah, somebody in the ….I just heard about it.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I fractured four posterior ribs, compression fracture of C-5 and fortunately, no neurological deficit from that.  I don’t ride bicycles now because I couldn’t prevent that wreck from happening again if I was on a bicycle and I have pretty significant cervical stenosis; so, I would probably be a quad the next time that happened.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Tell me; talk about your art.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, I just enjoy it.  I started out, as I said, painting oils; actually I wanted to start out painting water colors and my staff gave me a water color set for Christmas one year. So, I called this artist in Harrison and said, “I’d like to come start taking water color lessons”…”Oh, we’d love  to have you” and so, I go down there and he said, “Oh, you’re not going to need that.  You can’t paint if you can’t draw; so, were going to start with just drawing.”   So for about 4-5 weeks, we drew and established the fact that I could draw.  So, I brought my water color stuff in again and he said, “Oh, let’s not do that. I want you to learn oils first, because you’ll be a better water colorist if you learn oils first…because you can correct your colors and really learn color and hue.” So, I said, “ok” and I pained oils for 4-5 years and then finally…..I have another friend who is a fishing guide over on the White River and an artist name Dewayne Hagen from Mountain Home and so, I took a couple of water color seminars from Dewayne and started doing water colors then.  I’ve been doing water colors since then.  I’m getting better and as a matter of fact, this is the old original church in Old Campbell, which is north of Leslie, on the farm of a guy who is…actually the guy….I’ve got a personal trainer now trying to get some kinks out of some joints that don’t want to work, particularly this left shoulder… but his wife is from Leslie and she grew up in that country and her family farm is at Old Campbell.  So, they gave me this picture and I’m going to surprise them in either oil or water of that old church.     \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: That’s neat.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: That’s been a lot of fun with my painting; the ones I’ve given away.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You have two children and you’ve got grandchildren….. \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah……and I have two grand children.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: How about great grandchildren?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: No.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Not there yet.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: My son has two sons; one is in his second year of his Masters program at Virginia Tech in…his specialty is water quality.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Really?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, he is in…crop sciences and I’m trying to remember the school that he was in in Fayetteville; he graduated Magna Cum Laude in Fayetteville in environmental sciences…Environmental engineer…and he is now doing a Masters in that and I think he will probably go into private industry after that.  Then the next grandson is finishing up his sophomore year at Fayetteville and he is in crop sciences and he wants to be a crop consultant.  Part of the driver there is that crop consultants work 12-15 hour days in the summer time and they duck hunt all winter.    \n\n(Laughing)\n\nThey end up with the same number of work hours per years as their peers.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: But…\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: They spread it out differently.  He is a working dude; a hard working smart kid, but he likes the outside and he’ll be outside doing crop science; you know.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Now just…I might not even need to say this; but my son, my oldest son, teaches cultural anthropology at Virginia Tech.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Oh…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: And my daughter in law started the Arabic language program at Virginia Tech.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I’ll-be-darn.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: So they’re ….His name is Will Taggart and her name is Nadine Taggart; she’s originally from Lebanon.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I want to write those down before you leave and I’ll ask Jacob if he knows them; that’s not all that unusual, particularly with him being a grad student.  If he was an undergrad, I could understand.\n\n \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: A couple of questions; again, these are questions that if you said, “I‘d rather not answer that”…..it won’t be in there… \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Sure…\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Do you believe in God and if you do believe in God, what kind of God; a personal God verses the watchmaker who put everything in motion and then sits back and watches?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yes….uh, I believe in a power greater than me and I choose to call that power, God; that’s straight up out of AA.  I could not have gotten sober by myself and I could not have gotten sober just by the help of my friends.  Something happened and I did not have a big epiphany or anything else, but it was…sobriety was kind of a moving target for me and then, it started being a moving average and then, I was sober.  I tried several things to quit on my own and I believe that a lot of people benefit from grace, which is an unearned blessing.  I believe that probably there are forces of evil in the world.  I am enough of a scientist to wonder if each of our lives are being fine tuned on a minute to minute basis by a higher power. I believe that we have to have a personal responsibility for some of what we do with the help of God. I don’t proselytize either about alcoholism or religion; I classify myself more as a spiritual person than a religious person.  I don’t discount any of the non-Christian religions; there is a guy named “Fox” that wrote a book, “One River, Many Wells” and I’ve always said, “Same God, different house.”  I have trouble reconciling some of the things in Christianity, a lot of the things in Islam, and some of the things in Judaism.  I’ve read about Buddhism and read about a bunch of them; studied a bunch of them.  The common thread seems to be that men do better if they believe in a power higher than themselves and try to help their fellow man… that sounds kind of pompous, but that’s after 69 years of thinking about that subject.  So, I think that people do better and people have more peace…and if I die and that was it, that’s ok; because when I had believed…having come all the way through being raised in the church, being agnostic, and frankly being a physicistic, agnostic again, and now a believer; this is an evolution not just something that I woke up with and if I’m wrong about every bit of that, I think that the world and my fellow man have probably profited from my believing that.  So, if the afterlife is exactly what people think about you after you’re gone, if they think, “he tried to help people” …that’s enough.” \n\nDr. Sam Taggart: In the beginning of the 20th Century, there were about 1.6-1.7 billion people on this earth and as of today, there are close to 8 billion people on this earth; is that sustainable?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I don’t think so, because you can’t get those 8-billion people to start taking care of it; they act like we got a spare in the trunk and we don’t and there’s also so much dishonestly about it on both sides.  You know, if the climate change people would’ve been totally honest with us about \n\nthat stuff, they’d be a lot more credible.  I mean it makes sense to me when I look at the amount that we recycle, let’s take that for one example, we used to send that to the landfill and multiply that times 8-billion people; you’ve got to bring reason into that somewhere.  Now, do I only buy plastics that have a 1 or 2 on the bottom of it; no.  Do I only eat organic food; no.  Do I use Round-up; yes.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: In our lifetime and I almost said “especially medicine” but it’s not just especially medicine…in our lifetime, technology has just mushroomed.  What’s the one thing in your life that you can remember and say, “That really made the biggest change of anything that I’ve seen in my lifetime?”\n\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Well, I don’t know if I can identify one particular technological advance, but at the time I went into practice and for the next 20 years there was some better way to look inside a patient developed and that was huge for me in the practice of medicine.  Now what we lost in that was the uncanny ability of the physicians who came before me, many of my peers, and I think myself for a long period of time, to do physical diagnosis by doing two things: looking at the patient, by that I mean literally looking at and feeling the patient, and listening to the patient.  Both of those things in my experience from having brought in a lot of younger partners have been lost; they know what test to order next and so, I think hands on medicine suffered at the hands of technological intervention…..both of those are good things and both of those are bad things; that may be a stock answer that everybody gives you, but I think about that and have thought about that a lot.  When I would have the medical students and we’d go to the ER with a patient there, we’d walk in and we’d hear, you know, from the ER nurse who had triaged….you know, this is the information and we’d go in….walking in they’d say, “are you going to order Troponin or are you going  to …” and I said, “No, we’re going to go look at the patient, ask the patient, and then we’re going to listen to the patient.”  You know, you try to teach that, but we had to do it and that why we got good at it.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: (Laughing)…Yeah, that’s right….we didn’t have any choice.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: We had to do it ; we had to know if we were just feeling a gas bubble, pain, or feeling a acute appendix; now, you do an MRI of the appendix and you know if they need it out or not.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: 50 years from now, you’re a picture on the wall…  \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Probably not.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: You’ll be a picture on the wall and your descendants will look at that and say, “Now, who was that old guy?  Who was that old guy that lived in Harrison and ultimately was a painter?”   What do you want them to know about you?  ….Because there is a possibility that they might see this. \n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah….I want them to know first how very deeply I loved my wife, children, and my grandchildren; that is just the core part of me.  I would want them to know that I spent a long time trying my best to take good care of people, both through my practice and through my life from day to day.  I would want them to know that I faced adversity and successfully over came it and they can too...more adversity than just the alcohol; there had been other things, you know economic crises and that sort of thing.  I would definitely want them to know “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and sometimes that’s all you got.  If I don’t let this kill me, I’m going to come out stronger.  I would like for them to think….I have a very good friend who likes me more than she should and we served on the board together.  I’ve advised her on her aging parents and stuff like that…she says a lot of nice things about me and that’s why I say she likes me more than she should…nothing other than that…but she says a lot nicer things about me than I would say myself.  She keeps telling people…he’s a renaissance man, he’s a bee keeper, he’s a painter, he’s a scholar, he’s a physician...you know, she just kind of goes down the list and  I think it’s probably one of the biggest compliments that I’ve ever had.  I think most physicians, if they do it right are renaissance men, but I think that was one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever had.  I would like for my descendents to think that and try to be that...not like me…not be one like me, but not to live life so narrow that they don’t see the rest of it.  You know, how much would I have missed if I hadn’t studied art and I made a study of it…you’ve see my library.  I didn’t just sit down and start painting; I studied Monet, Degas, Andrew Wyeth, and Michelangelo; all of those people.  I read all that I could read about those people and I don’t know; it probably makes me a little bit better artist…it defiantly makes me a better person.  All of those people had their foibles and they still produced beautiful art.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Right.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I am a flawed man; but I think I’ve had a beautiful life.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Last question: what do you want for those descendents…I think you’ve already answered this, but I’ want to ask it anyway; what do you want for them in their lives?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I would wish for them a beautiful life interspersed with trials which they gain strength through overcoming them, a broad life not so narrowly focused that they miss what’s going on around them.  You know, life can be what you want it to be and that’s something I didn’t learn early.  You know, I think we can spend too much of our early life trying to be what other people want us to be and some of us have  to get to this age to be who we really are….and sometimes we still backslide and try to be what other people want is to be. So, I’m not saying that everybody needs to rebel and tilt to every windmill, but I think that you need to have a confidence and love for yourself as much as for your fellow man.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Thank you; oh, that’s perfect.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: When you get to thinking about it; there it is.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Thank you; that’s all I have.  Do you have anything else that you would like to share or throw in here?\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: I don’t think so….Vietnam is a whole different story that we can do as a whole different interview sometime if you want to.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: Ok.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in the operating room and I learned a lot about myself in Vietnam; it’s kind of a fascinating story.\n\nDr. Sam Taggart: If you want me to come back, we can sit down and do it; I’d be tickled to death to do it.\n\nDr. Mahlon Maris: But, it was such a big section; it was just one year, but it was a big segment of making me what I am……you know, you keep operating during a mortar attack and the windows are blown…","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/99080/file/196760#t=0.0,7429.47205"}]}]}]}