{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/bc3st7gx6v/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Sam Peebles"]},"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":["2016-12-01 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Sam Taggart (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["family medicine","family physician","American Academy of Family Physicians"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Dr. Sam Peebles (personal 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: 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/000/291/679/small/SamPeeblesM.D.DVD.mp4_1758120238.jpg?1758120242","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Sam_Peebles_M.D._DVD.mp4"]},"duration":3499.62947,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/291/679/small/SamPeeblesM.D.DVD.mp4_1758120238.jpg?1758120242","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/291/679/original/Sam_Peebles_M.D._DVD.mp4?1758120210","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":3499.62947,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679/transcript/84346","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Sam Peebles interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679/transcript/84346/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview with Dr. Sam Peebles      \n\nGood evening; it is 12/01/16.  My name is Sam Taggart and we are in the conference room of Howard County Hospital in Nashville, Arkansas.  We are here today to interview Dr. Sam Peebles.  Thank you for inviting us Dr. Peebles.  We appreciate you agreeing to sit for this interview.\n\n“Well, I’m happy to do it.”\n\n We are going to go through a lot of questions and it seems reasonable that the place to start is the very beginning.    \n\nTell us about when you were born and the circumstances of your birth as well as who delivered you, was it in a hospital or home; those types of things. \n\n“I was born right here in Nashville, Arkansas on July 26, 1948.  My folks lived down at Saratoga, Arkansas, which is about 17 miles down the road.  My dad was the superintendant of the schools there and my mother taught school.  My dad was also a Lay Minister as well.  I was born; they had the old what was called “Citty Hospital.”  Ms. Citty had a hospital that was like in a big old house.   They did surgery there and had an operating room.  They had inpatient rooms as well and that was where I was born.  It was down on North Main Street now.  The building is no longer there as it has been torn down now, but it was here for several years even after I moved here to Nashville.  Dr. J. G. Waldrop was the doctor that delivered me.  He still practiced here until I was probably 7, 8, or 9 years old and then retired and moved to Tennessee.  I’m not sure where he was from originally, but he did deliver me.  There is a plaque out here in the hall of people who donated money when they built the previous hospital over on 8th and Leslie Street.  People who donated rooms and stuff like that; but Dr. Waldrop and his wife actually, their name is up there with the people who donated money to help furnish the old hospital there on Leslie Street.”   \n\nTalk a little bit about your mom and dad; their names and how old they were.\n\n“My dad was Milton H. Peebles and like I said, he was a school superintendant and a teacher and my mother was Nannie McQuitty Peebles and she was also a teacher.  My dad was also a late Minister.  He would sort of do a lot of circuit preaching at different churches; one every Sunday, so we got to hear that same sermon every Sunday for a month.  He finally took up a full time position at Hope and was actually there from 1963 until he died in 1981.”\n\nSo how did your family come to end up in Hempstead County?\n\n“Ok, let me tell you.  Back in the early 1900s, the Red River flooded.  When it flooded, there was a Dr. Walcop and he was going to Texas with his wife and two daughters.  He was going to establish a practice in Texas and when they got to the Red River, they couldn’t get across.  The \n\n\ntrain was there for days and days and day.  Somebody said, “Well, Dr. Walcop; they are having a yellow fever epidemic up at Sweet Water, Saratoga” and so, he went up there and just stayed.  He later had a son, whose name was Clark Walcop, and Clark went up to Harding when it was at Morrilton and his roommate was Milton H. Peebles.  When my dad got ready to graduate from Harding there, he was looking for a place to go and Clark said, “Well Milton, we have an opening at the school down at Saratoga.”  It was during the depression and they actually agreed that they would pay him in money, but they didn’t; they wrote him a script.  So, we ended up in Saratoga because the Red River flooded.  I found that interesting.”\n\nSo how did your family come here or what is the ethnicity of your family?  Are you German or English?  \n\n“My mother was a McQuitty, so she is Scott-Irish and Peebles is actually Scottish.  There is a town in Scotland named Peebles over there by the way.  Some of my family has managed to go over there and see the place.  There is nobody named Peebles who lives there anymore, but that would be the origin.  Supposedly, the two brothers were in Kentucky and moved to Tennessee and my dad ended up moving from Tennessee down here to Arkansas.”\n\nHow many brothers and sisters do you have?\n\n“I have three older brothers.  I have one that is recently deceased.  My oldest brother was Milton Harvey Peebles Jr., but we called him Harvey.  I have a brother Larry Mason Peebles who did radiology.  He was in Texarkana and retired about three years ago.  David Peebles was a PHD math person and went to Lubbock, Texas and taught at Lubbock Christian University there until just about two years ago.  He recently retired.”\n\nThat’s quite a pedigree; I mean brothers, PHDs and MDs.\n\n“Bob, that was in our class, I was telling him about my family and he said, “Well dam Sam, you’re family has a lot of drive; don’t they?”  We laughed about that, because I hadn’t ever thought about it.  My oldest brother, Harvey, actually had a Masters degree in Library Science and was a librarian at Henderson State University as well.  My dad said none of his boys could ever seem to get educated because we kept going to school all that time.”     \n\nWas education a big deal to your family?\n\n“It was because they both taught school and I never occurred to me to do anything other than to get an education.”\n\nNow living in Saratoga, did that mean you lived in the country or in a town?\n\n“It had a population of 62 when I grew up there; but we lived right next door to the school building.  I really wasn’t like a farm boy; we just lived in a rural area, you know.  I say that; my \n\n\ndad had cows until I was around five years old and then he got rid of them.  I never got to have the farm experience very much.”\n\nDo you have fond memories of growing up around Saratoga?\n\n“Oh man, it was a great place.  You know, it was one of those that everyone knew everybody.  Everybody looked out after everybody.  You know, you didn’t worry about where you went or what you did.  I had a couple of good friends who on Saturday I’d get on my bike and ride out to their house or they’d come over to my house.  We’d go out in the woods and take BB guns and that kind of thing and go all over the place.”\n\nWhere is Saratoga?\n\n“Saratoga is 17 miles south of here; between here and Fulton towards the Red River.”\n\nDid you have a large extended family that you were close to? \n\n“No, I did not.  See, my dad came here and all his family was still in Tennessee or in the Murphysboro area; it was kind of interesting how that turned out.  My mother’s family; my grandfather McQuitty had been a railroad man and a preacher and he and my mother lived everywhere.  Her family lived everywhere from Huntsville, Alabama all the way out to Modesto, California.  My aunts and uncles; I didn’t get to see them all at one time until my grandmother McQuitty died when I was 10.  We had a family reunion again in the 80s and I got to see them all.  We didn’t see them very often; the closest one lived in Dallas.”\n\nDid religion play a big role in your life?\n\n“Well with my dad preaching, it was a very big role.  We went to church every Sunday and a lot of times even more than that, you know, Wednesday night and all that kind of stuff with him preaching.  He also did a lot of revivals in the summertime. When school got out, he would do revival meetings; he’d go back home to Lavern and to Smyrna, Tennessee and he would go up around; when he was at Harding which was at Morrilton, he’d go up to a couple of places there, like Clinton and Choctaw to hold revival meetings there.  He’d go down to around Gladewater, Texas as that’s where my grandfather McQuitty had been.  So, he held revival meetings all summer and when it’d be summer and he’d be here, we’d go to church every night.  So, it was a big deal.”            \n\nWas he a good preacher?\n\n“He was a very good preacher and very well known.  He probably married, buried, and baptized more people in south west Arkansas than anybody.  You can ask around, he did.” \n\nSo how old were you when you started school?\n\n\n“Six; down there at the school at Saratoga.  Actually, the elementary school at that time was OK.  We had never heard of OK; they had a cement plant there and came in in the late 30s.  The economy there at Saratoga was actually rather good because they had rather good paying jobs there due to the cement plant.  So, there was some poverty; but not much, because of the cement plant.  Mr. Scott who was the superintendant down there had the first eight grades down there so his son could be down there with him and then he sent him off to military school when he got in the ninth grade.  It was a good place.  It was one of those that had two grades in each room; first and second, third and fourth, fifth and six….”    \n\nAre there any teachers, church people, or community people; men or women who had an impact on you growing up that you look back on?\n\n“Oh yeah; there were just gobs of them.  Of course the community had a lot of people like Mr. Charlie Riggs who had the general store there.  He was a good friend of my dad’s and there were some great teachers.  I actually had both of my parents a few times in school.  I had my mom in the fourth grade.  She was a good teacher.”\n\nWere they difficult?\n\n“No, it really wasn’t; you know, I just had to behave.  But, I had to behave anyway and I couldn’t get into trouble because they’d know about it.  My dad was a math professor/teacher and I had him for Algebra and Geometry; he was good and I liked having him for a teacher.  Mr. James McCorkel was the history teacher and when I went to college and took American history, as far as any of the know ledge itself, I’d already had it all.  I mean it is a little small school; I had twelve people in my graduating class.  But I felt like, I had as good an education as anybody.  I remember in my history class that I took at Harding; there wasn’t anything that they taught me there that I didn’t already know.   But, he was really good and funny and he’d know little side stories about things.  He’d tell stories about being a scout in WWII in Patton’s army and he wouldn’t talk about that very much; but he would say things every once in a while.”         \n\nIs there still a school at Saratoga?\n\n“No, it just recently closed about 4-5 years ago.”\n\nDid they combine them?\n\n“With Willow Springs; it just got to be where there wasn’t many people living there and they finally had to close it down.”\n\nWhen did the cement plant close?\n\n“Back in the 90s.”\n\nIs your old home place still there?\n\n\n“No, they tore it down.  It’s funny, well not funny; but my old home place there was right next to the old school and the old school building burned.  They build a brand new one and when they built it, the put a big gymnasium there named the Milton H. Peebles  Building; but they are not using it for anything now and it’s sad; but that’s that way it goes.”   \n\nWhat was your mascot?\n\n“The bulldogs; the Saratoga Bulldogs.”\n\nDid you have any particular interests in school; either elementary,  junior high, or high school that you really enjoyed that really kind of caught your attention more than anything else?\n\n“Well, of course, all we did down there was play basketball.  You know, there weren’t any other sports.  The bad thing; I wished we had more baseball because I liked playing it after school.  Mother and dad both went back and finished their degrees and we went to Commerce, Texas and I played little league down there for two years and liked it; but then, I never got to play anymore baseball and wished I had.”  \n\nHow long did you live there?\n\n“Just in the summers.  But yeah, I’d say Mr. McCorkle was probably one of my best teachers that I had when I was growing up.”\n\nDid illness or disease or those kinds of things play any role in your childhood?\n\n“Well, not for me personally; no.  But I will bring this up, my brother Harvey and my folks were in a car wreck when he was 10 months old.  They got run over by a drunk over there as they had been to Nashville, Tennessee to visit his folks and came along and this drunk ran over them.  My brother Harvey suffered a skull fracture and this was in 1930 something; there wasn’t much they could do.  They kept him at a hospital in Hope and of course, he still had enough of his thing where he could swell and have room for it to be ok; but he ended up with a hemiparasis of his right side and all.  So, that was a deal in our family, although we never did feel it.  Somebody said something to me about my disabled brother and I didn’t know who they were talking about because he didn’t even a quarter; you know.  He played ball with us and stuff like that, you know.”\n\nDid he pretty well recover from it?\n\n“Well, no; he ended up with a hemiparasis of his entire right side.  He could use it, but he had limited use of his hand.  He went down to the Schreyer’s hospital in Shreveport and had surgeries to lengthen his leg and all and that was pretty much…..he told me later on how much they let him down.  They wouldn’t even let him know what was going on.  They wouldn’t let momma and daddy know until it was time for him to come home; it was a different world back then, you know.”            \n\n\nIs he the one that’s recently deceased?\n\n“He’s the one that recently died; yeah.  He was 80.”\n\nAt what point in your childhood or teenage years did you start to think about what you wanted to do when you grew up?\n\n“You know to be honest with you, my brother Larry was a doctor and I just always figured I’d teach school like my folks.  That’s what everybody does; you go and teach school and he went to medical school.  It never occurred to me to do anything like that.  Of course, you know, he finished up there at UAMS in 1965 and he came to Texarkana and practiced down there.  So, I liked what he did and I drove down there and would hang around his office.  I spent some summers working over there and that was kind of what influenced me more than anything.  Up until he did that, it never occurred to me to do anything except teach school.”\n\nYou mentioned Harding, is that where you went to college?\n\n“I went to college at Harding; yes.”\n\nYou graduated from high school when?\n\n‘In 1966.”\n\nWhat directed you or pushed you into going to Harding?\n\n“Because everybody in my family went to Harding.  Like the guy said in the movie Blindside, “That’s where my family goes.”  My dad was actually on the Board of Directors there.  So, he went there and Harvey went there.  Larry went there and Dave went there.”\n\nIs that Church of Christ?\n\n“Church of Christ; Yes it is, uh huh.”\n\nAnd your family was Church of Christ?\n\n“Yes, they were.”\n\nSo that was what pushed you in?\n\n“It was pretty much a family thing; I had to go to school there or they would have disowned me.”  \n\nWhen you went off to college had you worked in high school?\n\n“Just little odd jobs here and there; but then in the summer of 1965, Lendon B. Johnson had the neighborhood youth core and had these jobs for kids, you know, or young people.  I got a job in \n\n\nHope, as we were living there at the time, working for the Hempstead County Road department cutting right away on little rural roads with a bush axe.  I got a real good taste of manual labor and made me know I wanted to go to school.  It was an experience that was.”\n\nDid your education in Saratoga prepare you for what you’d get when you got to college?\n\n“It really did.  Everybody in the student handbook; five teachers in high school, all had Master’s degrees and they were good teachers.  Like I said; my folks, Mr. McCorkle, and Ms. Wiley did the English and stuff like that.  She was a good teacher and then the guy who was the basketball coach did all the science stuff named Pete Stone and he had a Master’s degree.  They were all good teachers you know and of course we were small classes.  You know, you had a lot of right there with you helping with stuff.”\n\nSo you go from Saratoga with a population of 62 to Searcy with a population of 15,000-20,000.  Harding is a pretty good size school; then it was a big school.  Was that a little bit of a culture shock for you?\n\n“Well, not really; I had gone up there before with my brother David.  I’d spend some weekends with him and I knew a lot of people there already.  I had known them as I had actually worked there at church camp at Wildwood and there were a lot of people there.  So, I had friends there already and it was a little bit…..I guess being away from home was big and not being able to go to the kitchen and get something to eat.  You now, you had the cafeteria and how that was and the cafeteria food, but it wasn’t… I guess I was sort of mostly prepared for that, so it was ok.”                      \n\nDid you enjoy your first couple of years in college?\n\n“Yeah, I really did.  I had some good experiences there too.”\n\n Did you have a settling down period where you had to go from being away from home to settling down and start studying? \n\n“Oh yeah; when I was in high school, I never studied very much because I was……let’s be honest, people who go into medicine have an above average intelligence.  So, I had to really actually study there in colleges on some of those things.  Because of my math background that I had and my scores, they stuck me in Calculus I my first semester and I was lost there for a while.  It took me a while to catch on to what they were doing and what they were saying, but by the time I got to the end of the semester, I was ok; but it took a while.”\n\nWere there any teachers in college who had a big impact on you; same question as earlier?\n\n“Right; there was a guy there at Harding named Don England and he was a chemistry teacher.  He was interested in people going to medical school and would try to help us out there and encouraged us.  He sort of took over I guess you would call it the program for pre-med students.  He was sort of in charge of that and I ended up getting a degree in general science rather than \n\n\nbiology or chemistry, but the reason was at first I still thought I’d want to be a math teacher, so I had two years of that and then I switched over and got all my pre-med stuff done.  Dr. England was just a really sharp guy.  He just retired 4-5 years ago.”           \n\nSo with your brother’s example and you knew you could do it, apparently you knew you could do it; at what point did you finally make the decision, “this is what I want to do”?\n\n“I would pretty much say by the time of my sophomore year in college, I said “this is what I want to do.”  Larry and I talked a lot about what I needed to do and what I needed to take care of.”\n\nWas there anything else that motivated you to become a physician?\n\n“Well, he played golf on Wednesdays and drove a GTO.” \n\nI understand; that was motivation.\n\nWhen you took the MCAT test and prepared for all that were there any problems there?\n\n“Well like anything else, you wondered “how did I do?”  You don’t know and just wonder how it’s going to turn out.  “Did I do ok?” and “Did I do well enough to get into medical school?”  I didn’t just knock the top out of it or anything like that.”\n\nDo you remember anything about the people who interviewed you for medical school?\n\n“Oh yes I do; it was a guy named Hughes, he was a pediatrician and a biochemist.  He interviewed me and he started in asking me questions like, “Well, do you think the Church of Christ would be made to integrate?”  I wasn’t expecting questions about things like that you know and then he says, “Well, why do you think we ought to get out of Vietnam?”  I mean he was….he flustered me.  I didn’t know what to think about it.  Then you had to take the MNPI and I’m a little extroverted so they sent me down to see somebody from the psychology department.  They said, “You’re an extrovert” and I said, “Yes” and she said, “Do you party all the time?” and I said, “No, I don’t have time.”  So, I did think it was kind of funny when I went down there and interviewed that day; that was the one thing I remember.  I may have had another interview, but I remember that was the one.  I’ll tell you what was funny, they sent me this letter of acceptance and it came to my dad’s house here in Hope and he wrapped it up and gave it to me for Christmas.  On it, it said I have five days to respond.  I thought, “Heck man, I’ve got to get this in there.”  So, it worked out.”               \n\nSo let’s talk about that first couple of years of medical school.\n\n“Wow, that was a big deal; it was hard for me.  Back when I was in college, like I said I didn’t study much in high school and in college you could study one day for a test.  You studied for two or three days for a test and you still didn’t know how it would go sometimes.  It was hard and a lot of material.”\n\n\nWere there any teachers in that first two years of medical school or people who had an impressed you?   \n\n“The guy who was in the pathology department, Robin Jones”\n\nI know who you are talking about; very flamboyant.\n\n“Yeah, that’s him”\n\nHe was also very flamboyant.  Yes, you can say just about anything you want.\n\n“He was….I don’t know, when I really struggled in my first year I went and talked to him a lot and he was helpful to me and said, “you’re doing alright” or “you’re doing ok”.  Sometimes, you just didn’t know how good you were doing and he was real nice to me.  I’m trying to remember who else was there during my first year… who was the guy; Dr. Sherman, I liked him real well.”\n\nRobin Jones was his name.\n\n“That was it, Robin Jones; that’s right.”\n\nWere there any of those courses that you liked in particular?\n\n“Uh; well, I really kind of liked all of it.  I probably did like path seemed like better than I did the the first year better than gross anatomy and microanatomy or stuff like that you know.”\n\nWhen you got off into your clinical years, was that a big change for you?\n\n“Yeah, because that was a lot more fun.  You got to do people stuff, you know.”\n\n By that time had you started calculating what you were going to do with the rest of our life besides drive a GTO?\n\n“At that time, Larry was in practice in Texarkana at a family practice group and that was what I was going to do when I got finished; I was going to do that and go practice with him in Texarkana.  But my senior year in medical school, he decided to go back and become a radiologist.  So, I had no place to go at that time.”\n\nSo your brother was in family practice?\n\n“Yeah, he was in family practice in Texarkana and then back and did radiology.  He then went back to Texarkana and just retired about 3-4 years ago.”    \n\n So, did you end up with a lot of debt in medical school?\n\n\n\n“Not too bad.  My dad helped us ad Suzanne’s dad helped us and I got some loans.  I think I had about $20,000.00 at the time; that’s probably not compared to what they have now.   It took me, I guess, 10 years to pay that off; but you just pay it off.  It’s government stuff.”\n\nAt what point did you start to think romantically and get married and start having children?\n\n“Well, this is real funny.  I was up at Harding and there was a girl from West Plain, Missouri that would come to these youth meetings; these high school kids would come in and she’d come, and we’d kind of go out and have a good time.  She came down in the spring of 1969 and I started hanging out with her and we started running then she kind of gets real standoffish.  Come to find out, she had gotten a steady boyfriend and was feeling guilty about going out with me while she had a steady boyfriend in West Plain.  I didn’t think much about it, so I said, “Well, ok.”  I go back to the leave where this meeting was and this girl comes up to me and says. “Hi, do you remember me?’ and I said, “Oh yeah, you’re the Jones girl from Nashville.”  I knew who she was I had seen her at church things and stuff along.  Her dad had actually built the Parchnedge down at Hope, so I had seen her along and knew who she was.  So, I went back over to my dorm room and said, “Well, I’ll be home for spring break, I wonder if she’s going with anybody?” so I go back over there and I said, “Are you dating anybody these days?” and she said, “no.” which was a lie.  I said, “Well, I’ll be home on spring break next weekend do you want to go out Saturday night?” and she said, “yes, I’d love to” and I said, “Great.”  She gave me her phone number and address and I drove from Hope over here to Nashville and we went out.  She meets me at the door……let me back up, there is a guy named Steve Reedman who was a guy up at Harding and he was here too.  I said, “Do you know that Jones girl?” and he said, “Oh man yes, she’s real forward” and I thought, “Al right, I’m going to get me some here” I thought, boy was that wrong; a big mistake.  Anyways, she meets me at the door and just gets right in on my side of the car and I thought, “Man, this is going to be alright.”  Then, she starts talking about how she’s been doing all these religion campaigns and doing personal studies with people about the Bible and I thought, “I don’t think that this is what this is about.”  The reason she did that and the reason she got into that so quick was because she had been going with this ole boy from Dirks and he was just sort of driving down and picking her up and never calling or fully paying attention. She went out with me to make him jealous.  So anyway, we kept going out that week and then I did some musical stuff there at Harding and she came up and watched me do that.  When I came home that summer, we dated.  We just started going out and she came up and went to Harding with me for a year and then we got engaged at Christmas and married that spring.”\n\nAll before you started medical school?\n\n“Yeah, we got married that year in June.”             \n\nNow you mentioned being in musicals; talk about that a little bit \n\n\n“Ok.”\n\nAre you a singer or player?\n\n“I’m a singer and player.  I don’t play as much as I used to because of my hands.”\n\nWhat do you play?\n\n“I play guitar and piano.  My mother made my brother, David, and I.  She was from a musical family and she made the younger two of us take piano lessons. I went from there and in my 10th and 11th grade of high school, I started playing a little guitar too and singing around for different little local stuff and all.   Then when I went to Harding, I actually took some voice lesions and was in the acapella course there.  They had a spring musical, so I tried out my freshman year and got a role.  From then on, I just tried out to be in the chorus as it was more fun.  You could mess around back there with girls.  So, yeah; I had some vocals.  You know around here, I still sing occasionally.  Not as much since I’ve gotten older; my voice is a little bit weaker than it used to be.  I sing at church some too.”\n\nAre you a tenor or baritone?\n\n“I’m a tenor.   I’m actually the first bonafied first tenor who could sing when I was in college a high “C.”  I could actually sing a high “C”.  I can’t anymore, but I could then.  I did some musicals there and we’ve had some musical events here in town.  We had a big 4th of July celebration and I sang for that and I’ve sang for some other groups after that.”             \n\nYou went into medical school with the idea of you going into practice with your brother and that kind of fell through.  What direction did you take after that?\n\n“There was a doctor here who was my in-laws doctor, Dr. John Henry Wesson.  He weighed about 300 lbs, but he was their doctor.  They had these things where you could do these preceptorship with locals, so I came down here right at the end of my senior year and did six weeks with him.   He offered for me to come back down here and practice when I got through.  So, that’s how that happened.”\n\nSo how did you do it?\n\n“My class was the last one that could still do one year of either a flexible internship or residency and then do the three years of practice and 150 hours of post-graduate studies and still sit for the family practice boards.  I was that way, Mike Young over at Prescott, Phillip was that way; we all did that.  You know you could go out and make some money; you thought.  But anyway, John Henry had me come down and be with him and that’s how that worked out.  I came here and went into practice with him.”   \n\n  When you came to Nashville, did you feel prepared?\n\n\n“I was a lot cockier then and thought I knew a lot more than I did.  I got real humbled before it was over.” \n\n“Where did you do your internship? \n\n“At Baptist in Little Rock.; John, the old doctor who was there and had been a surgeon was in charge of their internship program and was an endocrinologist….I can’t remember his last name.”\n\nShults; a little bitty tiny guy?\n\n“I believe that’s right; but anyway, I did a year there.   Dr. Wesson, when I came here, done a lot.  He did surgery and went to school when they did more surgery, you know, so he’d help me.  Of course, I did OB and delivered babies, did C-sections, and tubals, and all kinds of stuff like that.  I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was at the time.”   \n\nDid you enjoy it?\n\n“Oh, I loved it; I loved it, yeah.”\n\nHow hard were you working?\n\n“Oh really hard; see he left.  He retired; well, he didn’t retire, he took a job with the health department.  When Hilary and Bill came and changed up the health department with regional health facilities, you know; they had a regional medical director and he took a job with the health department and had been working 20+years.  He was ready to retire as he had been in the military and WWII, so he didn’t get started and left for college until he was older.  So, he left me and there I was by myself in solo practice. Boy, I didn’t really want to do that and be by myself.  I actually looked at moving to DeQueen or moving to Searcy, but I guess the Lord was looking out for me because I stayed here and Joe King basically agreed to give me some time off.”\n\nIs Joe a couple of years older than you?\n\n“He is two years ahead.”\n\nSo did y’all share call?\n\n“Well, we’d do that when I wanted to; he wouldn’t do it all the time for me, which was kind of bad.  I worked a lot of long 24-7s back then and didn’t do much going anywhere.”\n\nBy the time you got into practice; did you have any children?\n\n“Oh yeah, my first child was born when I was a sophomore at the University. Alex Thorp Gillespie delivered the baby.”        \n\n\nGive us your daughter’s full name and when she was born.\n\n“Amy Suzanne Peebles was born in 1972 when I was a sophomore, but she’s deceased now. “\n\nWhat about your other children?\n\n“Damon Jones Peebles, my older son; the father of this child with the cancer, was born in 1974 at Baptist. Orman Simmons was her doctor, but Bill Floyd delivered him.  Samuel Wymoth Peebles, Jr. was born here, my youngest son and I delivered him.”\n\nHow long did it take for you to get comfortable in the practice of medicine?\n\n“Oh, I don’t know if you’re ever completely comfortable.  There are some days where you’re just, “I don’t know.”  I mean, I see new things all the time.  Basically the goal is to get where you do no harm, you know, and to take care of people.  I don’t know, maybe 4-5 years you get to where you feel like you’re doing ok.”      \n\nYou had an active hospital here at that time?\n\n“Yes, the hospital was over there on Leslie Street.”\n\nWhen was this hospital built?\n\n“In 2009.”\n\nSo you practiced in the old hospital?\n\n“Yeah, I practice in the old hospital.”\n\nDid you enjoy hospital practice?\n\n“Oh I did; I liked it all.”\n\nDid you do a lot of house calls?\n\n“Not many; there wasn’t much….I was always the _______ and there wasn’t much I could do on doing house calls.”\n\nHow many acting physicians were there in the community when you came in with the other physician you came in with?\n\n“There were six of us.  Dr. King and a guy I wish you could have met; he died a few years ago named Edmond D. Dildee and he was an older physician.  He had been here for years and had a lot of philosophical sayings and was one of those people who made you feel good just to sit down and talk with him.  He made me feel good when I talked to him.  There was also a fellow named Dr. Wilmoth who was a golfer and was more interested in that than practicing medicine.  \n\n\nJoe king had come here the year before I did and a guy named Bob Sikes.  Bob Sikes came here right after Joe about three months; so they were both here when I came. “\n\nDid you have a surgeon?\n\n“No we did not.  Hearnberger came in three years.  One of the reasons I came to Nashville was because Dale Morris was going to come here.  He was friends with Woody Futrell too and was all set to come here.  I didn’t really want to do any surgery, I did what I had to, but I didn’t really like doing it.  Dale all of the sudden decides to stay in Little Rock and the next thing we know Hearnsberger came; that was a God send.  He’s a super guy; you know, surgeons are usually ass holes.  I mean Guy can be stern, but he’s easy to get along with.  He talks to people, speaks to people, he’s good to the patients, and he does good work still.  He’s well read, I don’t know if you even know that or not.  He reads things besides medicine and money.  He’s a renaissance man, I call him.  He wouldn’t want me to say that about him, but that’s what I think.  He’s just always so good to me.  He left and this place went to pieces really for about 10 years ago.  We had a couple of goofy bad surgeons here, but that was very helpful because when John came, I just quit doing any kind of surgery at all.”            \n\nHow are some of the ways of him not being here affected your community?\n\n“Well, you know you get a GI bleed you can’t keep them here; you have to send them off.  Or maybe you get a possible appendix, you know, you can’t sit them here for 24 hours to see if they worsen.  There are just all those possible surgerical candidates that you couldn’t keep here; you know.  You’d find people that had gallbladder disease and all kinds of things that needed done.  Wounds that needed debrided and limbs that needed amputated; all those kinds of things.  He made a big difference when he left.  We had help, we had three different surgeons come in here and none of them were his quality in my opinion.” \n\nHow does your family adapt to being a family of a busy country doctor?   \n\n“My children knew, of course they always give me a hard time about that.  But, I did my best.  You know when I was in private practice; I would try to close the office on little leagues games.  I’d try to get done by 3:00 and go watch the little league games; I even coached some.  I spent some time doing that.  Of course, my daughter was a singer and a Miss Arkansas pageant person.  I would play and she would sing.  She did the whole pageant thing, you know.”\n\nThis was Amy?\n\n“Yeah, my daughter that died.  I will tell you what happened on that if you want me to.  But, I did a lot of that with her and spent time with the boys.  We liked to swim and we’d go out to the country club when I’d get through at the office and swim till 9:00 at night.  I used to hunt more.  I used to deer hunt and the boys would go with me to do that.”\n\n\nWe will come back and talk about your family in just a minute, but talk about setting up your practice in a small town.  You went in with an older guy; did you just start doing the things like he did?\n\n“I just came in with him and basically he was in charge of it.  He paid me a percentage of what we made and that’s what I did until he left.  Then, I made some changes.  I rented the building from him and made some changes in how things were done.  He didn’t want to have appointments.  He just had everybody come in and they’d sit there all day sometimes.  I went to appointment schedules and to a different billing system as well as charting system; things like that.”\n\nWhen was that?\n\n“1978.”\n\nBut you did surgeries when you first came.\n\n“Yeah, I did.”\n\nWere you trained in that?\n\n“No, other than what I did as an intern, you know; we did some.  But, I didn’t do much you know, because he was here and he did surgery.  If I’d do it, he’d assist me and tell me what to do.  I didn’t do very much, like I said, I think I remember I did two different appendixes and I did c-sections.  I did those because I learned those out a Baptist; they let you do what you were big enough to and I did c-sections, tubals, and D\u0026Cs; stuff like that.”\n\nDid you enjoy OB?\n\n“I did; I really did like it.  They were the only people in the hospital that wasn’t sick, you know.  I did like it, yeah.”  \n\nHow long did you continue to do OB?\n\n“I did it for several years, you know.  After he left, that was when Joe would cover for me when I was going to be gone and stuff like that and I don’t know somewhere around there, I guess around 1980 as I’d been doing it for about five years; he and I got to talking and I said, “This is just wearing me out some.”  You know, you’d have patients up at the hospital in labor and also patients at the office and you’re back and forth checking and it just got to be too much at that point.  I was ready to quit then.  Then in 1986, Dr. T.J. Humphrey’s and I started trading off some call and he said, “Let’s go back to start delivering babies again.” So, we did it for another four years until I got this bill for malpractice insurance that tripled from the year before and I said, “I can’t afford this” and so, I stopped again.”\n\n\nHow long did you stay in private practice?  I understand that you do ER work now.\n\n“I stayed until 1993, so I stayed from 1975 to 1993; 18 years and then went to ER work.”\n\nWhat prompted you to make the move?\n\n“Well two things; Humphreys had been trading off call with me for all these years and then he went to it full time; that’s what he always wanted to do was ER.  We didn’t have a full time ER doctor here; the local doctors took the call.  I took ER call once a week and every other weekend for years; then he set us up a full time ER department and we didn’t have to do that anymore.  He kept saying, “Man, you need to come do this with me,” “You need to come do this with me,” “You need to come do this with me.”  I don’t even remember; but we had the clinical laboratory ______ and I just did manual CBCs, blood sugars, strep screenings, and wet preps; I wasn’t doing much but I figured out that it was going to cost me money just to do these and I thought, “I don’t want to mess with this” so, I went to work in the ER with T.J.”            \n\nHow many of you were in that group?\n\n“There were just the two of us; he and I then we got some residents coming out of Texarkana that sort of filled in.”\n\nWhat was the difference in your income from being in private practice to being in the ER?\n\n“My income went up.  You know, my accountant had me bad debt for everything that people owed me about a year and a half before I quit.  By the time I had gotten to where I was again, I was up to $150,000.00.  These were people who were older people and on straight Medicare with no supplement and couldn’t afford it; it was there deductable and that was the biggest part of it.  Plus, you do just have the people who wouldn’t pay; so, it was a big difference to go from office into the ER.”\n\nWhat did you find most gratifying about private practice then we can ask the same for the ER?\n\n“Oh well, you know, especially in a small  town like this; you see the patients, you see them back and you can see them getting well; you know you’d helped.   You walk around town and you see people that you have helped; you try not to think too highly of yourself, but still people would come up to you and talk to you saying, “Oh doc, thank you; I’m doing better” or you have the ones saying, “We’re doing better.”  Especially this town, this is a great town; people always come up and speak to you.  The guy at the building next door, back then when people had a heart attack, we didn’t send them somewhere else; we’d put them in bed right here.  There weren’t any stints, none of that happened; we kept them here in our IC for four or five days and then ambulated them and then home.  Then when they got out in about six weeks, we referred them to a cardiologist; that’s how you did it back then.”          \n\n\nWhat do you do with them now?\n\n“Oh man, you put that clot buster in there and you send them somewhere else real quick; that’s what you have to do.”\n\nDo you have a helicopter pad?\n\n“We do, its right out there.  But the guy next door, he actually had a heart attack when Dr.  Wesson was still in practice on a Sunday.  I had just gotten home from church when my beeper goes off and my phone goes off and this guy had defibulated.  I got up here and I popped him and he came around.  Then I kept him here because he kept defibulating and I finally got smart enough to send him up to the VA as he was a patient there.  Every time that man would seem me he would cry and thank me for saving his life; but you know, that’s nice.  You just see people you know and then you’d also have those days like when your wife’s best friend from high school’s kid gets killed in a car wreck right there in front of their house.  You also have to deal with those kinds of things with people you know and have to tell them, “I’m sorry, he’s dead.”  So, you know there are good and bad things, but overall being in a small town where you know people and they know you; they are very kind and you are very blessed to get to do what we do.  Not everybody gets to do what we get to do.”      \n\nHave you been adequately compensated for what you do?\n\n“Oh yeah, I’m ok; yeah.  I wish I had put more money back, but I’m fine.  I mean goodness me, if I want to go buy something I just go buy it.”       \n\nLet’s talk about ER work. You’ve been doing to ER since when?\n\n“1993.”\n\nSo that’s twenty…….\n\n“Twenty something years now.”\n\n How many are there now in your rotation?\n\n“Well, I don’t know now, we just changed companies today.  We had about 4-5 regular guys.  Humphreys had been the main guy besides me and he had a heart attack about three years ago. He had a big ole widow maker and got a 19% injection fraction.  He is about 4-5 years younger than me and kind of a bad deal.  But it was just us for the longest and we still just had other people filling in.  Right now, I don’t know; we’ve got a new company and there are just two of us local here; Joe King and I and that’s it.”      \n\nSo you have an outside contract?\n\n“We do.”\n\n\nDo you work for them?\n\n“I work for them.”\n\n Was it that way when you started?\n\n“No, Humphreys and I worked directly for the hospital.”\n\nSo what time schedule did you have now?\n\n“Now, I still do 3-24s a week.  I’m too old to be doing that, but I’m trying to put some money away.”    \n\nHow many doctors are here in town now?\n\n“Let’s see; Dr. Sykes died and Dr Patel died.  Joe has now quit practicing and is doing ER.  But, we have Clay Ferguson and his dad was a state historian.  I don’t know, we have a guy named Caldwell whose dad is the sheriff over in Pike County.  We have Wilkins and a fellow named Brian O.J.  Brian was one of the community matches where they almost could get into medical school, but they if did a community match they got moved up on the list.  Brian was one of those and he made just one of the finest young doctors and community person; so was Clay.  Caldwell was just here a year and Dr. Wilkins was from somewhere in Africa but trained in Texarkana.  We also have three nurse practitioners in town now.”        \n\nWhen did they come to town?\n\n“I’m trying to remember; one of them just came when Joe closed his office.  O.J. has one in his office and then there is one down at the old Wal-Mart parking lot.”  \n\nIs there a doctor there to supervise?\n\n“Well, OJ does the one there at his place and Dr. King is the one over is his old office and I don’t know who does the lady down in the old Wal-Mart parking lot.” \n\nDid you encourage your children to go into medicine?\n\n“No, none of them were interested.  They didn’t, no.”     \n\nHow did they respond to you being a physician?  You said you made time for them.\n\n“Yeah, but they probably realized there were a lot of times that I wasn’t there when I wished I was.  You miss out on a lot no matter how hard you try.”\n\nWhat interests do you have outside of medicine?\n\n\n\n“Right now, of course I do all my church work out at a small church in the community called Blue Bayou and I teach a bible class.  I still just do some music stuff and all.  I‘m an avid computer person in terms of just sitting around and looking stuff up, you know.  I guess that’s about it.  I used to play golf and I play sparingly now.  I had an episode where I developed some back and motor weakness of my left leg.  I actually had some bulging disks in my lumbar area.  I went to see Joe, he was my doctor, and he sent me to see a neurologist.  She said you could have surgery, but you’d have failed back syndrome.  So, I went to physical therapy.  We have one of those little short swimming pools, you know, and I got in there and worked, exercised, and exercised some more working on my flexibility some.  I got about 97% of my motor strength back in my left leg.  If you notice when I walk I kind of hobble around.  It doesn’t really hurt very much and if gets to hurting me very much, I just take a little round of steroids or mostly I just take some Tylenol.”\n\nWhat do you think the future of medicine holds?\n\n“For doctors, to be honest with you, I think about 20 years from now, you’ll have more nurse practitioners than doctors doing primary care.  You’ll still have all your specialists, but I think you’ll see the nurse practitioners because economically, the government can afford to pay them less.  So, I see the general practitioner and family practice doctors will become less common I think. “\n\nYou think family practice residencies will drop off?\n\n“I think they will; I really do.  When I did that one year, of course I didn’t do a residency, we did everything.  You can go down and see John Alexander in Magnolia.  You know, he was still delivering babies and surgery the last I talked to him.  But when you got out, you were expected to do everything.  Nobody does a family residency program now and goes out and delivers babies, nobody, and you’re not going to be able to get privileges to do that anywhere.”          \n\nSo what are the other changes that have occurred; technologies, computers, and things that changed actually related to the emergency room? \n\n“All of that.  Listen, I don’t know what you’d do without a CT.  I can’t even remember how I used to practice medicine, really.  You know, I got good enough through the years to look at a cervical spine, or LC-spine, and swimmers views and all that kind of stuff to clear somebody’s C-Spine, but now you don’t do that; you CT everything.  Of course, lab work; there weren’t any traponents.  You do a CK, SGOT, and LDH; one went up the first day and one went up the second day and one the third day.  If somebody got a shot of IN injection and made the CK go up, you didn’t know what was going on and you had to solve that lab wise.”\n\nWhat about EMRs?\n\n\n\n“Well, you know, we’re still not into EMRs here yet.  We’re still using T-sheets.  We are in the process and looked at some things.  The computer company that QHR put us into was CPSI.  QHR used to manage us here.  We fired them here about 4-5 years.”\n\nWho manages the hospital now?\n\n“We are locally managed and have a local board who is in charge of that.  We hired Deborah basically from Texarkana.  She was some sort of Vice President over there and is a nurse.  She has an RN degree as well as a Masters in Business.  She’s real sharp and moved us to where we are here in terms of expanding out here.  She is pretty good about figuring out what is going on and where we are going.  The computer system that we bought here is just not amendable to EMR yet.  Down in the emergency room, they use EMR on PCU; the patient care unit, but they don’t have one here.  I’ll be ready to do it when we are ready to do it, you know; but they don’t have a system that will talk to this computer system that we have for the whole hospital.”    \n\nIs that going to work against you with Medicare and all?\n\n“Right now, it hasn’t yet; it will eventually is what Deborah tells me.  We will have to go to that because they will start reimbursing us less.  They keep putting it off for critical access hospitals and I’m not sure what the deal is on that.”\n\nLet’s talk a little bit about your family; specifically your daughter Amy who passed away.\n\n“Yeah, she was forty years old.  She died on 9-11.  She went from being about 105 lbs and a contestant in Miss Arkansas pageant to about 260-270 lbs.  She was a heavy smoker and about a year before she died, she had an episode where she became unresponsive and was diagnosed as a diabetic.  She just would not take care of herself.  She wouldn’t stop smoking and kept eating.  She just went downhill and her daughter, she had a daughter who was just sitting there with her and said, “Momma just quit breathing.”  It was probably something vascular, but I just don’t know.  That’s a heavy trip and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.  This thing with my granddaughter kind of brought all that back.”\n\nLet’s talk about your granddaughter if you don’t mind and that’s ok.\n\n“That’s fine.  Let me just say this again about my daughter, that is…..the Lord does not want you to lose one of your children and I always say that to everybody.  I went around for a long time after that and sometimes still today where it really hits you upside the head.  Amy and I were close.  We did all that music stuff together and we talked a lot.  We got along real well.  Anyway, my granddaughter was a cheerleader and real active.  She kept getting a pain in her hip and we went along there and I’d say, “Take some ibuprofen and put some heat on it” and she’d get better.  It got to where it didn’t get better and she went to Clay Ferguson who said, “Keep doing that and it’d get better.”  It got better and he finally sent her for an X-ray and it was normal.  He sent her to physical therapy and it’d get better, but kept coming back.  One of \n\n\nthe orthopedics in Texarkana, a real good guy, said, “Oh yeah, you have a Pneubula or something another, I didn’t know what he was talking about, and said to do this and keep going to physical therapy and take ibuprofen.”  Finally she goes back and he says, “Well, you might have to have surgery.”  They did an MRI and she had a big Ewings sarcoma the size of an egg, which is interesting.  So, she went to Children’s and they treated her with chemo and radiation and like I said it cleared up.  She started out at 16 when this all started and then she went for her check up and it was fine and she went back for this last one, which was around August or September and the viewings were gone, but she was just real weak and had some blood work done and she had leukemia.  We have been through the treatment for the leukemia and got the fungus infection and now we’re in Nashville, Tennessee trying to get a transplant.  Nobody in my family matched the bone marrow.  Her younger brother, he was close but he wasn’t close enough.  They have found three people in the US that are a match for her and they are already in contact with one or two of them to see if they will donate.  They will go there when it gets time for this to collect the bone marrow from this person and get on a jet and freeze it until they get back to Nashville, Tennessee.   She has a port that they will do it through that.”\n\nThis is your son’s daughter?\n\n“Yes, my oldest son’s daughter.  He is a part time construction worker and farmer.”                                                                                          \n\nNow my last question; I want you to pretend we’re not here and you are talking to your great, great grandchildren.  You are just a picture on the wall to them as you won’t be here; what would you like for them to know about you and what would you wish for them to have in their lives?\n\n“That is kind of difficult; what I want for them.  You know, the movers and the shakers of this world are a few.  There are very few people who change the world if you really think about it; not many people do and I’m one of those people who didn’t change the world.  But hopefully, I was the kind of person who is basically like a boob in autumn, I help my fellow man.  If there was anything I’d want you to remember is that I cared about people and I loved my fellow man.  I loved my family and I hope that you will know that was what your great grandfather did.  I don’t care for giving too much advice. When the kids were in high school and they’d go out on dates, I’d say, “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t have sex and above all have fun.  That’s what I would say, “Enjoy life as there is so much to enjoy.  Every day you can find something to enjoy.  Some days, all you might get is a good shower and your bowels to move, but that’s alright too.  Really life is to be enjoyed and I hope that what you will have in your life is enjoyment.”       \n\nI think clearly your family members will know that you have a really wonderful sense of humor.  Thank you and that concludes our interview.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/159743/file/291679#t=0.0,3499.62947"}]}]}]}