{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/bc3st7gz2w/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Michael Barnett"]},"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":["2016-07-27 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Sam Taggart (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["video file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["rural medicine","Arkansas","Family Medicine","Family Physician"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Michael Barnett, MD (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: \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/000/293/378/small/MichaelBarnettM.D.DVD.mp4_1759326466.jpg?1759326469","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Michael_Barnett_M.D._DVD.mp4"]},"duration":7373.8665,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/293/378/small/MichaelBarnettM.D.DVD.mp4_1759326466.jpg?1759326469","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/293/378/original/Michael_Barnett_M.D._DVD.mp4?1759326443","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":7373.8665,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378/transcript/84850","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Michael Barnett Interview Transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378/transcript/84850/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview with Dr. Michael Barnett  \n\nGood evening; it is 7/27/16.  My name is Sam Taggart and we are in the Cleburne County Historical Museum with Dr. Michael Barnett of Heber Springs.  Dr. Barnett, I think that you are probably the most prepared interviewee we have had so far.  Dr. Barnett said that he thought that he could probably go from start to finish with just one question.  \n\nSo let’s start out by asking you to tell us: Where, when, and what were the circumstances of your birth. \n\n“I was born here in Heber Springs on February 3, 1934 in the home of the parents of my mother, which is only five blocks from here right now.  My Barnett family came to Heber Springs in 1916 from a little community about ten miles east of here and although they were farmers; when they came to Heber Springs, they established and my dad was the manger of a big general store on Main Street in Heber Springs for many, many years.  My mother’s family, the Robbins family, also came to Heber Springs from Rosebud, Arkansas in 1916; the same year.  My dad’s family; my dad had eight siblings; two sisters and six brothers.  There were two MDs and two pharmacists in his family. ”\n\nReally?\n\n“My grandfather Robbins, where I was born, was a dentist himself and moved his practice from Rosebud, Arkansas to Heber Springs in 1916.  My mother had four brothers, which were three dentists and one MD.  So, I kind of came into this naturally.”\n\nHow far back did that go?\n\n“Prior to my grandfather Robbins, there were no doctors.  That’s not true, my grandmother Robbin’s father was a doctor; red medicine, he didn’t go to medical school from Rosebud who moved to Eureka Springs in the early 1900s when Eureka really was going strong.  He moved up there and practiced medicine.  He was my great grandfather Martin.”\n\nSo that would have been in about what time frame?\n\n“The end of the century.”   \n\nSo 100+ years there has been somebody in your family practicing medicine.\n\nSo how did your family come to live in this part of the foothills of the Ozarks?  \n\n“Well both families go back to homestead land, one in White County near Rosebud and the other homestead land in what became Cleburne County later over near Pangburn near Searcy and sprouted from there.”\n\n\nWhat is your heritage?\n\n“Scotch-Irish and a lot of English.  I have a younger brother who is 18 months younger than I am.  After my birth and my brother’s birth; we were living in a house just across the street from my mother’s parents where I had been born and my mother died when I was six years old. She had a hysterectomy and laid in bed, like they did back then, for a couple of weeks and then got up putting her clothes on for my daddy to take her home and had an ___________ and dropped dead in the floor.”\n\nHow old was she at that time?\n\n“She was 28; very young.  After that, my dad, younger brother and I moved into the house of my mother’s parents.  Apparently she had been pretty ill and apparently she and her mother had negotiated some deals that she wanted the Robbins family involved in her two boys and so we actually moved in and took my Barnett dad with us.  We moved into the Robbins’ house and lived there for the next several years.  I grew up in the Robbins family house until my dad remarried my music teacher, by the way, seven years later.  In 1947, he married a lady that we all knew as Ms. Edmond.  I and my brother had been taking piano lessons from her before we started school.  Our dad married her in ’47 and we moved into her house.  We lived there the rest of the way through high school and college; both of us lived there until later we married.”\n\nWhat was your teacher’s name?\n\n“That was the music teacher; Ms. Edna is what we all knew her as, Edna Miller was her previous married name before my dad married her.   Heber was a musical, musical town in the barring section.”\n\nReally?\n\n“Oh yeah; that’s part of the history of this whole building, it revolved a lot around the music here.  Early on the Frauenthals, founders of the town, were musicians. She was a musician and they built a huge theater for the gym, which now stands, that had opera seats and would sit 300 people in there.  Musical shows came through Heber in the 1880s and ‘90s.  It has always been a big time musical town.  Growing up here in Heber, my brother and I both took piano and voice lessons from who later became our stepmother as did probably 25-40% of the young people growing up in the city limits.”\n\nHow big a town was Heber Springs when you were growing up?\n\n“Less than 2000.”\n\nSo was it the Frauenthals?\n\n\n\n“The Frauenthals; that man is the same Frauenthal family that is very well known in Conway; that’s the founder of the town.  It all revolves around the springs over here Spring Park; those waters have been felt to have medicinal benefits, just like what’s happening at Eureka Springs.  Mr. Frauenthal, Max Frauenthal, bought 600 acres of land and formed the town of originally Sugar Loaf; it was called later Heber springs.  It all had to do with the Spring Park; without that park there wouldn’t be a town here.  You couldn’t get here; you couldn’t get up the mountain like you all came in.  You couldn’t get up the mountain anywhere; you never would have been a town here except for the spring’s people.”\n\nWere they healing springs?\n\n“Oh yeah; my dad’s story and you can take this for what it’s worth; but he said when they moved here from _____ he was 8-9 years old and the first job he ever had was picking up crutches in the park and carrying them across the road and burning them.”\n\nWas there a medical industry here based on that?\n\n“They tried to.  It’s not a medical industry, but the fact that the springs had medicinal qualities was widely advertised and believed thoroughly.  This town was founded in 1883; the railroad came here in 1906 and by 1910, there were a dozen hotels in this town.  It would stay full from March to October of people coming here to drink the water.”\n\nThey drank the water; they didn’t just bath in it?\n\n“No baths.”\n\nIt was a cold spring not a hot spring?\n\n“It was a cold spring.”    \n\nAs late as the 1950s and ‘60s, you could come to down from the delta and you’d smell the park before you got here because of the sulfa.  You could smell the hydrogen sulfate.\n\n“Yeah, it’s referred to as sulfa water and that’s because of the gas, the hydrogen sulfide that’s in there.  It has nothing to do with the minerality qualities of the water at all; that’s just incidental.  If you leave the lid off the jug at all, the hydrogen sulfide goes away just like the chlorine does at your water at home.”\n\nIs the sulfur still there?\n\n“Oh yeah, I go up there and drink it every day.”\n\nYou do?\n\n“Yeah, I still do.”\n\n\nTalk to us a little bit about what it was like growing up in Heber Springs.\n\n“Ok for my brother and I growing up, my dad was running that store and my brother and I lived just two blocks from the school in Ms. Edna’s, our step mothers, house. We were involved in all the activities; all the music.  My grandfather Robbins who lived with us and all; it was a wealthy family, he made money.   He bought Sugar Loaf Mountain in 1922 and accumulated within the next several years about 2000 acres around it.  So, my brother and I grew up down there on a 2000 acre farm on horses chasing cows and pigs all of our growing up years.  My brother still does that; he’s been to the finals for the world’s championship rodeo in Oklahoma City, no telling how many time.”\n\nDo you do rodeo as well?\n\n“I do not.  I moved on to other things.  I quit and moved on the basketball and my brother kept riding hogs and still does.”\n\nTalk about sports in Heber Springs.\n\n“I played football and basketball; those were the main two sports here.  I was quarterback for the Heber Spring Panthers for three years; my sophomore, junior, and senior year.\n\nWhat years was that?\n\n“1949, 50, and 51.   I graduated at Christmas halfway through my senior year; that would have been ’52, so it was 49-51.”\n\nSo did you do well academically in school?\n\n“Yeah, alright; I was interested in a whole lot of different things.  I did pretty well here in Heber Springs.  I did as well as most coming out of a small school, but I wasn’t the best in the world.  I went to Fayetteville a semester my senior year; I started there the second half of my senior year and I had to take remedial English.  That was not uncommon at all coming out of our school system in Heber Springs.  That’s my story; I went through high school involved in everything, glee club.  Methodist church, we had an outstanding youth choir at the First United Methodist Church here at Hebe when I was a boy growing up.  Ms. Edna, my step mother was the director of it for a number of years and we performed at lots of different places, that choir did.  We went to Little Rock and sang part of the Messiah on the radio one year; our youth choir from the Methodist Church.”        \n\nAt what point did you start to think about “I want to do something more than just live in Heber Springs the rest my life. I want to go back and get an education.”  What informed your decision about going to Fayetteville?\n\n\n\n“Very early on; I was already thinking about medicine.  My grandfather wanted me; he was pressuring me actually, to go to med school.  Three of his boys were dentists and one son an MD and he wanted me to go to dental school, but I didn’t.  I knew too much about dentistry and decided while I was still in high school to go to medical school and already was planning on joining Dr. Paul Barnett, who is my dad’s younger brother.  His brother had come back here before WWII and they were both drafted or went into the Navy in WWII.  He came back to Heber Springs to where Dr. Claude Barnett practiced medicine until his retirement in the late ‘70s.”\n\nWhat about the other brother?\n\n“The other brother went back to complete his residency and then practiced orthopedic surgery in Jonesboro until his retirement.  I had planned by the time I was a junior and senior in high school; or thought that I was going to come back here and practice medicine with Dr. Paul Barnett.”   \n\nSo what informed your decision about going to Fayetteville? \n\n“The University; that’s where my Robbins uncles had gone and that’s just where you went to school.  Lamar Macannus played quarterback up there and I liked that idea.  I was a razorback my whole life, so Fayetteville was my destination and that’s why I went there.  I only stayed there a year and a half.  A year and a half later, my brother graduated from high school in love and wanted to be within driving distance from his sweetheart here in Heber, so he talked me into transferring into the Arkansas State Teachers College, what’s now ASU, in Conway.  I transferred down there and he and I lived together his first year in college. I stayed at the Teachers College and that’s where I graduated considerably later.”\n\nYou mean UCA?\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nDid you have any particular academic interests in school that you really enjoyed doing or just really caught your attention?  You already said music.            \n\n“Yeah, I didn’t do that.  I didn’t pursue that any further; what I was interested in from the get go was Sciences. I got interested in physics and then found myself being “the doctor idea” of bringing me back to the biological sciences and those are what I was principally interested in throughout all my college years.  I actually wound up a Math major because I didn’t want to take graduate record exams, so I switched to math my last year.  I actually had a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics before going on to med school.”\n\n\n\nSo you were talking about making the decision to go to medical school; did you ever have any questions about that; any second thoughts about that or crisis that made you think, “maybe I don’t want to do this?”\n\n“Not really; I had shaky moments, I think.  I would go with Dr. Claude while I was still in high school to see patients with him and if he had to do something to that patient to cause them to bleed; I would get faintly and might even fall on the floor.  That kind of worried me if I would do that at the med school later on, but that went away pretty fast.”\n\nDid you ever pass out, out of a house call with him? \n\n“I passed out in the operating room; not when I was a physician, but before.  He was actually doing a hemorrhoidectomy and I just hit the floor.”\n\nDid you work when you were in high school or college either one?\n\n“I didn’t work in high school, but in college…. well, I worked as a kid; yeah.  The two Barnett pharmacists had a drug store in Heber Springs and for six or seven years, I worked in that drug store after school and on Saturdays.  Part of the time in that big department store, the Barnett’s; all of us worked in there from time to time.” \n\nBefore we started the interview, you talked about that you had spent many a day on that telephone apparatus over in the corner; talk about that a little bit.\n\n“The AM Barnett and Son big store burned in 1958; I was back in school in Conway at the time; that was the Barnett store.  They decided not to rebuild that and so my dad built what was known back then as the Barnett Motel just as you pull into Heber Springs on 25-B, what’s now I think called Budget Inn.  It was originally built as the Barnett Motel by my dad.  My brother and I both sat at that switchboard there and connected guests in the motel to the outside line many, many, many nights.”\n\nSo that was for the motel?\n\n“Yeah, that came from the motel.  After leaving Fayetteville and joining my brother at Teachers, we lived off campus that first year and then I moved on campus.  The next year, he came home and never went back.  He married and went to that Robbins farm.  He got on his horse and worked there and in the Cleburne County Bank here in Heber Springs.  My grandfather also owned the Cleburne County Bank.  My brother worked there and on the farm and then followed my father into the retail business and stayed in that and still is in a store in Conway.  He bought a men’s store here in Heber Springs in the late 1950s and has been running a men’s store and western store ever since.  It’s JR’s Hobby Horse just as you go up the hill into Conway from here; that’s my brother’s store.”\n\nWas your grandfather’s store on this street?\n\n\n“That was my father’s store on Main Street.  It was on the corner of third and Main.”\n\nWhat is there now; do you know?\n\n“It’s annexed; it was built back as a Ben Franklin’s store and is now annexed to the Court House where the assessor’s office and collectors office is in there now.”\n\nWhere did you live in Fayetteville?\n\n“In the dorms.”\n\nAnd the same in Conway?\n\n“The same in Conway.”       \n\nWhat motivated you to become a doctor?  Why did you want to join your uncle?  You saw he must have had a busy life. \n\n“My mother’s brother, Tom Robbins, was married while I was living in the Robbins’ house.  He was a hero of mine; a really classy guy.  His picture is here on the wall.  He was killed in Normandy.  The storey we got back from over there was that he was killed on the 22nd of June after the Normandy invasion.  He had walked out from the pit and over to a jeep where he was treating a soldier.  He walked over to the jeep washing his hands and a Germans sniper shot him.  Tom Robbins, my mother’s MD brother, had already become a hero of mine by the time I was school age; even starting to school.  Then my father’s youngest two brothers graduated from med school, as I mentioned, came back here and practiced medicine.  All that did was reinforce what I already thought I wanted to do.”      \n\nAre you any kin to the Dr. Robbins in Camden?  It would have been about the time you’re talking about.\n\n“No, I’ve got a Dr. Robbins, Ken Robbins, who is an evasive radiologist at Baptist in Little Rock and another one Mark, who is an evasive radiologist in Hot Springs.”  \n\nLet’s back up just a little bit; were there any people, outside of your music teacher obviously, who had in high school or college an important impact on your life and how you do things or how you viewed academics or medicine?\n\n“Yes; one the Ms. Edna that I’ve already talked about who became my step mother.  She took two little savages at age 13 and started trying to civilize us.  She became a heck of an influence.  Ms. E., Elizabeth Chesswood, known here by everybody as Ms. E. was an outstanding teacher in high school and the lady in so many little schools that takes charge of everything. She directed the junior play, she directed the senior play, she played piano for the glee club; she did \n\n\n\neverything.  We’d go to her house at night, groups of kids, and sing and have little parties.  She was just the whole life bud of Heber Springs High School for 25-30 years.”\n\nWhat did she teach?\n\n“She taught everything; government is the one that everybody remembers; History, Civics, French.  We all learned to sing the French national anthem.”\n\nIs her picture in this book over here?\n\n“No; her picture is not in this one.”\n\nAny of your relatives in Disfarmer?\n\n“No, I don’t remember a single one.  There aren’t many town’s people pictures in Disfarmer.  Disfarmer was the country folks coming in; they were attracted to that.  Many of the people in town, particularly us younger ones thought he was a little spooky and we didn’t fool with him.”  \n\n  Explain who Mr. Disfarmer was.\n\n“Disfarmer is a now famous photographer who moved to Heber Springs from Stuttgart, Arkansas in about 1912 or1913; we’re not certain about that.  He was involved in studio on Main Street by 1914; there is the sign that is clearly visible in pictures.  He did portrait photograph all of his life here in Heber.  Glass plate negatives; he never did quit doing it, glass pate, because that’s what he liked to do.  His studio was just right across the street from this building right here that he had built so that his lightening for all his photography was natural sunlight coming in.  A great big northern facing huge window is on the whole side of the building.  His photography was almost all portrait photography, various farm country families, for many, many years.  After his death, he was discovered by Peter Miller, which is a long story that we don’t have time for.  But, Peter Miller, the attorney that everybody knows about in Little Rock, was a member of what’s called a “Group Incorporated” up here at Greers Ferry and an amateur photography.  He found some of those pictures and sent them to Julia Skully, an editor of National Photography Magazine and to make a long story short, Disfarmers portrait photographs became worldwide known and you will hear it said by experts today that he was one of the handful of geniuses of photography in the history of the world.”\n\nNow this was after his death?\n\n“This all took place after his death.”\n\nLet’s talk more about influential people in your life; how about in college?\n\n“Let me just mention one other person here just because I owe it to this guy; Henry Clay Kelly.  Hi dad had the Exxon Oil Company here for years, and years, and years and the Chrysler-\n\n\nPlymouth place. Henry Clay grew up in Heber Springs and worked for his dad and coached basketball and football teams for no pay for years and years.  Henry Clay Kelly was the one who picked me out of a group; Heber didn’t have a football team for 2-3 years at the end of WWII for money reasons.  Before the new coach reported and took over his coaching duties; Henry Clay and a couple of his buddies took the boys who were going to go out for football down to our local ballpark and started working us out and getting us ready.  It was he who during that couple of months of fooling with us decided to try me out as quarterback and there I was a 14 year-old kid, but by the end of that year, all my old seniors in high school that I looked up to and admired and wanted to be like someday was having to do what I told them to because I was picked a quarterback.  It changed my whole life and I aint been the same since.”\n\nYou say that with a grin on your face; did sports change your life?\n\n“That even changed my life yeah.  It focused me that you can do things if you’ll learn how and try.  I learned that on the football field.  I learned that; I don’t play ping pong, I play table tennis.  I learned to play table tennis after I moved to Fayetteville.  I had played here in Heber Springs, but I learned how to play up there.  The first time I walked into the student union at Fayetteville; I didn’t know to go to the easy table instead of the tougher and I got chewed up and spit out by a pretty good ping pong player.  I came home that summer and worked hard on my game and then went back up there.  In 1953, I lost in the finals of the University of Arkansas table tennis championship to Ray Ohokwi from Okinawa.”\n\nHad you continued to play?\n\n“I did until my knees stopped me from playing.  I played for many years; love the game.”           \n\nBy the time of WWII, you were 8 years old.\n\n“I was seven when it broke out.”\n\nWhat are your memories of either WWII or the Korean War; that ere.\n\n“What I remember of WWII was all those uncles of mine going to it.  I had two of my daddy’s brothers in the Army and two of my daddy’s brothers in the Navy.  All four of my mother’s brothers were in the military; two in the Army and two in the Navy.  The one MD in the Army who was killed at Normandy.  I remember vividly getting home and watching the news and all the reports about what’s going on in Europe, what’s going on in the Pacific.  I don’t remember any of the details of course; but I remember all of us, including the kids, were worried about that and worried about our kin folks overseas.”\n\nPenicillin came along in ’46, 47, or 48, somewhere along there, about the time you were growing up.  Do you remember the first time you ever went to the doctor’s office and he said, “Lean over, I’m going to give you a Penicillin shot.”\n\n\n“The first time I ever had Penicillin shot; Dr. Claude, my uncle, gave it to me at home at the Robbins house where I spent those seven years.  Yeah, the first Penicillin shot I ever got he said, “This is new.”  I asked, “Will it hurt?” and said, “No.” but it did.”\n\nWhat did you get it for?\n\n“What he called strep throat.  Back then, Penicillin was indicated for everything; no matter what you had, you got a shot.”\n\nWhat year was that?\n\n“That would have been around ’45 or ‘46.  My Uncle Claude was back home from WWII.”\n\nIt may be hypocriful; but there is a statement somewhere that Penicillin was introduced in ‘46 to the general population and by 1950, 60% of all office visits resulted in a shot of Penicillin.\n\nWere you a religious family?\n\n“Yes; both sides of my family were Methodist.  I grew up in the First United Methodist Church here in Heber Springs active in all the things; President of the MYF my senior year in high school.  MYF is the Methodist Youth Fellowship; that was the young people’s group in the Methodist church back then. It’s not called that anymore.  But, yeah; we were active.  After med school and we came back to Heber; my wife and I with our family moved back to Heber Springs and went back to the same Methodist Church and were active there for a number of years.  I’m no longer active there.”         \n\nAgain for people who might not know this; MYF in that time frame in that state was also an entry for a lot of people into politics.  A lot of people began their political career through something like MYF.\n\n“MYF; in fact, the whole Methodist movement had tendencies towards politics.” \n\n So at this point, you knew since you were a kid that you were going to be a doctor.   \n\n“And, now I’m in Conway.\n\nAnd you’re in Conway; when did you decide that you were going to go to medical school and   you’re getting real serious about it and start saying, “I’ve got to take the test to get into medical school.”  I assume you had a test to get into medical school.\n\n“We did; in 1956, I got married.  I decided and I don’t remember why I decided this, but I decided that I wanted the military behind me.  This was in the days of the draft and I had decided that I wanted to military behind me before I went into medical school.  I can’t remember know what my rationality was, but that’s what I wanted to do.  So, my wife and I \n\n\ndropped out of school and went to Dallas because I could get a job there from a friend.  The whole idea was just to work and get by until the local draft board drafted me.  They did that and in late 1956, they drafted me into the US Army.”\n\nWhere were you in college when you dropped out or had you finished?\n\n“I had not finished; I was a junior.  I had hurt my knee playing football my senior year in high school.  I didn’t think that I would be actually drafted.  I thought that I would fail the physical and they would turn me down, but they did not.  I went on into the Army and was sent to Chappe in Fort Smith and went through boot camp up there.  Following boot camp and at a specialist school out there; while out on the outside basketball court, me and a couple of buddies who I met from Memphis, Tennessee were out there just horsing around on the basketball court and it turned out the Field First Sergeant where I was in specialist school coached one the basketball teams.  He came over to me and said, “Hey, would you like to play some basketball?” I said, “Sure.”  He made me a uniform and put me on one of the basketball teams in Fayetteville and we got into a tournament 2-3 weeks later and I reinjured my knee.  He made me _______in the daytime so I could lay out there with ice on my knee and then play basketball that night.  By the end of the week, I had it swollen and wound up going on sick call and discharged with a medical discharge from the US Army.”\n\nSo you were in the service for how long?\n\n“A few months; I don’t even know how long, 3-4 months.  But that’s not the whole story.  I will get back to that in a minute.  I left the Army then in early ’57 and came back to Heber to work for my dad.  I went to summer school and applied for medical school and got turned down. I had taken the test to go to med school and after I got turned down, I went to see Dr. Jim Dennie at UAMS.  I asked, “Why did you turn me down?”  He said, “You didn’t do well on the test.”  I said, “Will you let me see it?” and he said, “No; well, let me see.”  He came back in a minute and said, “Yeah, you did alright; but son, your last year in college you made 12 hours of health.”  I said, “Well, I fell in love and got married that year.”  He said, “You go back to school and show us that you didn’t go completely crazy and we’ll let you in med school.  So, my wife and I went back after staying here a year and working, as we knew that we were going to do that; we went back to State Teachers College for another year and that’s when I graduated with a Degree in Math. Then we went from there and in ’59, we went on to Little Rock to UAMS and started medical school in September of ‘59.”           \n\nIf you feel comfortable about it, let’s talk about your relationship with your wife; when did you guys met and how long did you date.\n\n“We dated about a year and a half.  We met at the State Teachers College.  She came in as a freshman after I had moved on campus.  I had joined a fraternity and was involved in all that kind of stuff; enjoying campus life.  I was having a good time.  She came along just a raving \n\n\nbeauty and over a period of about a year and a half, we worked out a relationship and got in the married of the summer of 1956 at her home in Marianna, Arkansas.”    \n\nLet’s talk about her a little bit; her name, where she’s from, when she was born. \n\n“Betty Williams was born in Marianna, Arkansas; grew up in Marianna, Arkansas and was a good basketball player.  A mother; she was raised by a single mother, her father having left when she was still just a small child.  Her mother raised her alone and was the Secretary and Chief Bottle Washer of Dooley’s Department Store, a very big well known store in Marianna back in the early days; back before the collapse of the Delta Country, Dooley’s big star department store.  My wife’s mother ran the book keeping department in other parts of that store for many, many, years.”\n\nDoes Morgan Collins mean anything to you? \n\n“Yeah, that does mean something to me; I can’t see a face, but I know the name.”\n\nHe was a physician in Forrest City and his father ran a large mercantile store; something to do with the West Mercantile Stores in Marianna.\n\n“Yes; West, in Marianna.”\n\nYes, same connection and Morgan is about your age.\n\n“Yeah, I remember that name.  So, we went back to the State Teachers College and graduated, then moved on to med school.  Now in the interim, we had a son while we were living here in Heber Springs before going back for that last year.  We were in between out of the Army and back to college.  We had a son, our first child, and we then got to Little Rock as freshman in med school, Betty and I, my wife and I and our one year old boy on tow and started medical school. “     \n\nI’d like to go back and ask you a question about something that was such a big important part of the 1950s, especially in Arkansas and that’s Polio.  What do you remember about that? \n\n“I remember us being scare to death of it.  In Spring Park, right here, and we were talking about it earlier; there was a little wading pool that was about thigh deep to a 10 year-old boy, I believe, and in that very time era right there, it was filled in.  They were afraid you’d catch Polio by wading in that pool where other people had been.  I remember that we started being careful with watermelon at that time.  There was some rumor at least around this part of the country that old watermelon rinds may have something to do with the cultivation of the bug that caused Polio and I remember people worrying about how to dispose watermelon rinds out here.”\n\nDo you remember your grandfather giving you immunizations; typhoid, the first polio sugar cubes?\n\n\n“Oh yeah; that all took place while I was a med student.  Before that, we got our tetanus shots;  the Robbins farm that I told you we grew up on, the foreman of that farm, who was a self proclaimed veterinarian and everything else you could think of, actually came to our house and gave all of us at  the Robbins house one summer our tetanus shots; the foreman of the ranch.”\n\nDid you ever know of anyone to die of tetanus?\n\n“No, I‘ve seen one case of tetanus my whole life.  Dr. Claude said, “Come in here and look at this patient” one day; it was a long time after I had been in practice.   I went in a saw a guy sitting on his exam table.  I pecked around on him and I said, “Claude, I think this guy has tetanus, don’t you?” and he said, “I think it is.”  I said, “Where did he get it?” and he said, “He’s got a splinter under his fingernail from his barn door; live stock, splinter, tetanus.  It’s classic and there he was sitting there and Dr. Claude said, “What are we going to do with him?” and I said, “Send him to Little Rock; more people die of tetanus than they do of cancer” and away to Little Rock he went to the infectious disease people.”             \n\nSo you’re right here on the river; any mosquitoes?\n\n“Oh yeah.”\n\nSo was Malaria a problem around here?\n\n“Now the river is not a bad mosquito place, the fish keep the larvae down; it’s the standing water that doesn’t have fish in it where you get mosquitoes.  Malaria was never an issue up here.  Early in the history of Heber, one of the big, big ads of Mr. Frauenthal and his partners in the development of Heber Springs was “Free from those bad vapors that are down in the Delta and from those bad mosquitoes and all that awful stuff;”  that was part of the marketing.”  \n\nTell me about Heber Springs Main Street growing up here.\n\n“It was almost just like it is right now.”\n\nWas it paved?\n\n“No, no; it was a dirt road when I was a little boy.  They paved it not until WWII.  It wasn’t even graveled a lot of it from here out of town until WWII.  That’s a little story to tell maybe; I told you we grew up on horses.  We, my brother and I about nine or ten years old, were part of the last cattle driver in Cleburne County.  We rounded up cattle down around Sugar Loaf Mountain, on the Robbins farm, for a week and drove those suckers right through Heber Springs, up part of Main Street, over by the creek, up the road, up the mountain, and all the way; there was a Robbins farm also at Rosebud where they had moved from, we had drove those things that day all the way to the other side of Rosebud to the Robbins farm down there.” \n\nDid anybody get pictures of it?\n\n\n“No, there are no pictures of it.  An old fellow that I bumped in to maybe four or five years ago actually working at the Cleburne County ______, volunteered at a group here at Heber and he told me that day, “Aren’t you Dr. Robbins’ grandson?” and I said, “Yeah,” he said, “Yeah, I remember the day that y’all came through Rosebud with them cows.”  He was sitting on the porch on Main Street in Rosebud. I said, “How many were there?” and he said, “I counted 88 in the herd.” \n\nSo what year did you start medical school?\n\n“1959 and graduated in 1963.”\n\nNow by that time, it had moved out to the new school.\n\n“It was at the new school.”\n\nWhat were your first impressions of medical school?\n\n“Oh that cadaver; that’s the first thing that everyone remembers, Gross Anatomy for goodness sakes.  We got lucky, my wife and I and that young son, had an apartment about six or seven blocks from the campus for a few months and then a doc, a resident who had completed his residency, had moved; I can’t remember his name.  He moved out of a little bitty house a half of a block from the med school campus and we were able to rent that house, move in, and live there the rest of our Little Rock experience.”\n\nWhere was that house?\n\n“A half a block due east of the original parking lot of the med center.”\n\nOn Pine or Spruce or something like that?\n\n“Yeah; well no, that was on the north side of Markham, this was on the south side of Markham; just a half a block from the campus.”  \n\nWho was your teacher in Gross Anatomy?\n\n“Suzuki.”\n\nSo, Dr. Banks had retired by that time?\n\n“Dr. Banks was gone.  Suzuki was the instructor in the Gross lab, Doris.  Jeff Banks was gone; I can’t recall the doctor’s name who was the head of that department in 1959.  Moss Hera was; Suzuki was, isn’t it Suzuki and Moss?  I’m getting the two of those oriental names mixed up.  Moss Hera who was that?”      \n\nSo, how did you do that first year?\n\n\n“Alright; I did alright.  I was never; I’m not studious and I was never up there with those smart ones all the way through med school.  I was friends with them and still am with all those big shots, but I had a lot of other interests.  Tommy, that name is escaping me too; he is an ENT doctor here in Heber and was a couple of years behind me in school and if he walked in here right now, he would stop this session and say, “Fellows, I don’t know how Mike ever got through med school.  He was playing table tennis and pool all the time. ” So, I had a lot of other stuff going on.  I couldn’t read; I’m dyslexic, that’s another story.  I got involved in that program later on as a physician.  After I was back in practice in Heber Springs, I went to the Child Guidance Center at UAMS with that group over there that was doing some of the original work in what was called dyslexia back then and now called attention deficit disorder.  I did histories and physicals on little kids down here sorting out some of those dyslexic children and was instrumental in getting some of the very first tests done on third graders in Arkansas and found low and behold 14%, nearly all of our little boys were dyslexic.  My uncle; Joe Robbins, one of my mother’s dentist brothers who had moved back here practicing dentistry here, was President of  the School Board.  I badgered him to death for special education for children with dyslexia and other learning disabilities and he finally said, “if you get me a teacher, I will get the school board to start a special education” and the next year we did it.” \n\nWhat year was that?\n\n“I don’t remember.  The special education teacher was the lady who was in here when y’all came in her today.”     \n\nThat’s good.\n\n“That was her.  I don’t remember what year that was.”\n\nAny fond stories of that first year or any catastrophes?\n\n“The funniest story that anybody is going to tell you about being in med school is the dog gone human physiology lab.  The day we had to have gastric juices for examination and study and the way it was done when I was a med student is you flip a coin with whoever is working at your table and you went out in the hall with an NG tube and you leaned over and stuck it in your nose down into your throat and used a blub syringe and sucked out some gastric juice.  I didn’t have to do it, but I’m telling you the hall was lined with gagging med students. Did y’all not do that?”\n\nNo, we did not.  I don’t remember doing it.   \n\n“That’s the way we did it.”\n\nWe put them in each other.\n\n“You did it to each other?”\n\n\nWell maybe I just forgot.\n\n“You flipped a coin and did it your own self; that was that.  The fact that student after student walked away from that cadaver time and time and time again; that took a lot of getting used to for some people.”\n\n I think you confront death for the first time.\n\n“Well, I never; I didn’t. I didn’t see that as death.  That is a long time after death as far as I was concerned.”\n\nHow did you see it?\n\n“I was seeing a picture of the old surgeon studying gross anatomy and I saw that cadaver as nothing more than that.  I never thought of it as somebody.  We found in our, I think,  second cadaver; we had two in our course, but our second one we found a green bean in his esophagus and it was a long time before I could do that; not a green been but an English pea in his trachea.  It was a long time before I could eat English peas.”   \n\nDid you enjoy medical school?\n\n“Yeah, I couldn’t read and so all the way through school I struggled.  All the way; when you got to read it, I’m so; I can’t spell and I struggled with that part of med school.  But what the instructors said and the things that he pointed at, I got that.  The instructors that wanted to tell us things from time to time have said to me, George Ackerman included we mentioned him earlier, “You’re a lousy student, but you’re a good doctor.”  Because the stuff that if hands on, I understood and it was easy for me in some way.”\n\nWhat about your second two years of medical school; the clinical years?\n\n“Let me say this; we’ve got to address “did you spend any money?”  In med school, the first summer after my freshman year, a good friend of mine whose dad was with the highway department got me a job and I helped build the freeway bridge across the Arkansas River, the pretty bride; that’s what I did.  I poured concrete on that bridge most of that summer and that’s what I did.  When we went back to school my sophomore year, I started doing private duty nursing at St. Vincent’s.  A classmate of mine had gotten on the ground floor as a scrub nurse that freshman year, so I started doing private duty nursing at night my sophomore year in med school and did that a lot of nights the rest of my remaining three years.  It made a living.  Then in the summer after that first year, Bob Adams got me a job in surgery at St. Vincent’s for three summer months as a scrub nurse.  So, I had summer jobs two summers as a scrub nurse at St. Vincent’s and private duty nursing at night during the regular school year; all three of my sophomore, junior, and senior years.  I made; my total expenses to go to med school, Dr. Claude Barnett, my uncle who was in practice here in Heber, loaned us $300 a month for the four years \n\n\nI was in med school and when I got out of med school, that’s what I owed him; $300 a month, whatever that $3600 x 4 comes out to.  That was our expense; we had made our way through otherwise”       \n\nDo you remember anything about the surgeons that you worked with at St. Vincent’s?\n\n“Oh I’m not going to remember names, but I remember an awful lot; both good and bad.  Dean Wallace was the father of the gynecologists.  He had retired long before that from OB and was only doing GYN.  Anybody that had a question about GYN around St. Vincent’s; Dean Wallace was who you hollered for.  Watson, Adaments, and Porter in neurology; Clyde Rogers was OB; all those.  Dr. Church who was GP over in North Little Rock had the run of the house at St. Vincent’s and was a crackerjack general practitioner.  His son, Mickey Church, practiced with him in North Little Rock for many, many years.”\n\nWas Chairs and Wingert practicing?\n\n“Yes, they were practicing.  I didn’t have much contact with them; one my classmates married one of their daughters.  Mike Kelly, they live in Oklahoma City.”       \n\nSo you had decided many years ago when you were a kid, “I’m going to be a doctor.  I’m going to go to medical school, and I’m going back to Heber Springs.”\n\n“Yeah and I know where that goes, but I got to stick this in; while we were going through med school, I had one other little job to do. My son was born in 1958, the year before we started med school.  My first daughter was born in 1960 into the first year of med school. My third daughter was born in 1962 when we were seniors in med school.  My fourth daughter was born while I was an intern at St. Vincent’s in 1963.  So you see, I had some other jobs while I was a med student.  We got there with one son and finished our internship and came back to Heber Springs in the summer of 1964 with a son and three daughters and joined Dr. Claude who had built us a new office building one block off of Main Street, right across the street from the First Baptist Church, and only two blocks more from where I was born.”\n\nIs that office still there?\n\n“It’s still there and belongs to the Baptist Church and their youth.  It’s part of the Baptist Church.”\n\nDoes it have a sign?\n\n“It’s just a red brick building just right smack south up on the curb across from the Baptist Church there on Spring Street and Third.”\n\nLet’s talk about your internship and how you made the decision on where you were going to go and what you were going to do.\n\n\n“I had known all the time.  I thought a little bit; I’m going to forget their names too, you can tell I’m not good with names.  The pediatricians that had taken care of my children while we were going through med school and interning, as a student I had gotten interested in pediatrics and thought about doing a pediatrics residency off and on for a year or two.  I gave it some serious thought to doing a pediatrics residency, but I kept seeing Dr. Claude practicing general medicine and I wound up deciding, “No, I’m not going to do that.”  So, I went to St. Vincent’s as an intern; it was the only place I applied.  I wanted to go there because I had learned those physicians well working there for three years and I knew that was the people that I was going to be dealing with as my specialists when the time came in my general practice back here.  So, I went to St. Vincent’s and did that internship very specifically to further those professional contacts with all those docs.”\n\nWhat do you remember about your rotations at St. Vincent’s?\n\n“It was a piece of cake; I just loved it.  I was busy in OB.  First of all, the OB guys already knew us over there because we had babies over there all through med school and so I knew that whole department real well and who you know matters; I got to deliver a lot of babies, more than most interns there would have been able to do. I enjoyed that service and enjoyed the surgery service.  We had a good internship; I had two German boys there with us.”\n\nHow many of you were there?\n\n“Seven or eight.  Willard Burks, do you know about Willard Burks? You want to interview him; he’s been a full blooded GP.”\n\nTell us a little about your work schedule at St Vincent’s as an intern as best you remember.\n\n“Well, I don’t remember working being a particular…..we worked the emergency room of course; took our rotation in the emergency room and sometimes that gets harry like emergency rooms do.  But, I don’t remember; I was so comfortable at St. Vincent’s.  I knew everybody so well.  I knew all the nurses and worked with them as a scrub nurse there and that whole surgery suite.  I just knew them so well it was just a piece of cake for me, I don’t remember sweating anything really. “\n\nDo you remember ever having any trouble with them making the transition of you being a scrub tech or scrub nurse to being a physician?\n\n“Oh yeah, I never will forget and maybe I will think of his name; it wasn’t Rogers, but the first day on the obstetrics service, they took all of us interns to one of the delivery rooms and they were going to show us, this MD and maybe I will think of his name, showing how they wanted us to go about draping.  They put me up in the stir-ups; I knew everybody, I knew him, I had scrubbed with him many times.  But, he put me up in the stir-ups and Flat, who was the surgery nurse in charge of surgery; everybody knows Flat at Sr. Vincent’s.  She came walking down the \n\n\nhall, I looked over, and she walked by and looked in the room.  Here she shows back up and comes running over there, “What are you doing?” They had me up in the stir-up; “What’s going on?” but that’s just a side.”\n\nThat sounds like something Clark Gillespie would have done.\n\n“Clark Gillespie is the one who delivered all my babies.  Clark Gillespie and Evert McClinick; I’m sorry.  Clark Gillespie and Evert McClinick were partners and Evert McClinck is from Maryanna, Arkansas where my wife is from and he delivered all three of those girls while we were in med school and internship.”   \n\nDid your wife have any qualms about coming back to Heber Springs?\n\n“Not a bit, no; she liked it to start with when we lived here.  I had lots of family here, both Robbins and Barnett; so she just blended right in.”\n\nSo you walked back into a ready-made practice with your uncle; how old a man was he when you came back?\n\n“Absolutely.  Claude was born in ’15 and I joined him in ’64, so he was…what does that make him; 50, yeah.  He was a WWII doc, that’s who my generation got to come back and join; WWII generation right there that had learned how to do some stuff.”\n\nTalk about the nature of his practice.  What was his daily, weekly schedule like?\n\n“From the time I joined him, we were there at 8:30am and we left at 5:00pm.  We took an hour and a half off for lunch and we’d see 30-40; I never saw that big 100 people and Dr. Claude didn’t either.  Every patient I saw; virtually every patient when we got through in the examining room walked into my little sit down office and we talked about it a little bit; that’s just the way we did it.  Dr. Claude said to me early on; I hadn’t been back in Heber very many months and one day we were prowling around in our office and helping me; he said to me and I will never forget it, “Mic, let’s you and I treat the patients and making a living will take care of itself.”  We never thought about it any other way.”\n\nHow many days a week did you work?\n\n“Six; six days a week starting in the beginning of 1964.  At the end of the week on Friday afternoon, one of us worked and sometimes two of us on Saturday.  We both worked on Saturday until we started letting each other off.  On Friday afternoon when we would see our last patients, I’d go to my office and he’d go to his and we’d take a pen and fill out all these insurance forms that needed to be filled out for that whole week. I don’t think it ever took me more than 15-20 minutes; that’s how many people were insured in 1964 in Heber Springs.  Of course, here comes Medicare right as I’m going into practice; I go into practice right with Medicare and that started the change of everything.”\n\nWhen you first came in, what kind of office staff did you have; numbers of people that worked for you?\n\n“There were four people in the office.  Dr. Claude had a nurse; there were two people in the office.  He had a nurse and I had a nurse and they were neither one real nurses, we trained them ourselves.  That was all the staff there was; it was a good deal later before we even….we just answered the phone; whoever was closest to the phone answered it.  So, it was two docs and two so called nurses and it was that way for a long time.”                   \n\nSo you didn’t have a billing clerk or typist?\n\n“We did it all ourselves for a year or two.” \n\nWhen did it start to change?\n\n“Medicare did it to us.  Paper started showing up.  Let me give you…medical records in our office wasn’t; our medical record was a note you made so that the next time you saw that patient you’d sort of know what you did the last time; that was all a medical record was.”\n\nDid you use cards?\n\n“No, we just used; yeah, it was a card, a little long one.  A card, the patient’s name and a date; that was all that was on there.  I remember seeing a patient of Dr. Claude’s sometime 2, 3, or 4 years later and she came in.  He wasn’t there and I was seeing her and I looked back at his last note that said, “She’s fat, dam shame.”  That’s all that was written in her medical record; that’s all there was and there was no telling how long they talked about obesity, starches, too much gravy, and no telling what they talked about; but, the office note is there simply to tell you what did we do last time.”\n\nWhat was his treatment for her?\n\n”I don’t know; but I’ll tell you what, that lady knew.  When she left, there was a plan of something.”\n\nWhat did he charge for an office call?         \n\n“Three dollars; when I joined him in practice and for three years.  No, we went to four and then to five; but I’ll get to that in a minute.  When I joined him, an office visit was $3.00 no matter what it was and a shot, if you got a shot which we didn’t give very often, was $1.00 and it didn’t make any difference what kind of shot it was and that was it.  OB, we both did OB and an OB first visit initial work up, following up through the pregnancy, delivering the baby, and a six weeks check up for both was $60.00.”\n\nHow about general surgery? \n\n\n“We didn’t do it.  Dr. Claude had done, down through the years and particularly with his brother who was interested in surgery all along; he’s the one that went back and did the orthopedic residency, they did some surgery.   Dr. Claude and I did a little bit; but by the time I got back, we were about to get our first itinerate surgeon and we felt him to be far more competent than we. So, our surgery that we did after that was “Have to” kind of stuff.  You will probably want a story or two about that I’m sure.”\n\nAbsolutely.\n\nTalk a little bit about night calls and house calls.\n\n“We had a rinky-dink emergency room that didn’t have much to it; this was in the old hospital that was on Main Street and had been built as the third clinic, we mentioned that before.  It’s gone now, but that was what the hospital was when I came back.  We had a little ole ER, but people didn’t go to the ER back then.  If my patient was sick, they’d call me at home and I didn’t say, “Go to the ER.”  Either I told them what to do till morning or “meet me at the office”; that’s the way we did it back then.”\n\nDid you do house calls?\n\n“Oh goodness, yes; every day I made house calls.  During that same period of time, Dr. Claude and I introduced Cleburne County to the whole notion of assisted living; the very first nursing home ever built in this county was built during my first three years here. Lakeland Lodge, it was called and he was the medical director and I was his assistant.  We were the ones who went out here in the home and said, “Grandpa is just too frail now and you need to put him in the nursing home.” “No, I told him I never would put him in a nursing home,” I know you’ve all heard that story all the time.  We had to teach them that if you don’t do it, you’re going to wear out yourself and you will both be there, so we went through that whole introductory phase of medicine of introducing this population of this county to the idea of a nursing home.”\n\nYou came into the practice of medicine at a time when there were really dramatic changes in medicines and in technologies.  Talk a little bit about that.          \n\n“Well, the starting place for the change in technology for a GP in a town out here in Heber Springs back then is what you didn’t have.  You will hear this from everybody that didn’t.  What you didn’t have was transportation; there was no helicopter, there was no ambulance, there was no ENT, there was no such thing in Heber Springs.  Nobody knew what that was.  A patient who needed to go from Heber Springs to Little Rock for the first three years I was in practice did that in the hearse from Austin Funeral Home with Roy Wilson driving the hearse and whoever wanted to go with him, which was frequently us.  I might ride with them in the back end of that old hearse with my bag and whatever medicines I thought I might need and that’s the way we’d get to Little Rock.  If anything came into our office or to the emergency room that was bad enough that we couldn’t put him there and do that, you know what, all he gets is _______; that’s all there was.  The other thing that wasn’t around in so many of these little hospitals was \n\n\nanesthesia.  There is a nurse around who has learned; Ohammond used to do Ether back when that was it and she got moved up the ladder a little bit with some other inhalants.  She could, by us being real careful, keep a patient under enough for us to do an appendectomy, but I wouldn’t have done a gallbladder even if I knew how.  You just didn’t have that kind of anesthesia that you trusted.”\n\nDo you remember the first time you intubated somebody; was it in practice?\n\n“Oh, I had intubated people in med school.” \n\nDuring your internship?\n\n“Oh yeah, several.”\n\nWhat did you do with CPRs when they first came?\n\n“We did chest compression and mouth to mouth.  It wasn’t long until we had some little device that fit over their mouth, but that’s all it was, something to keep you clean or something.”\n\nSo that wasn’t something that you started after you came to Heber?\n\n“That all bloomed in another city.  When I came here in 1964 and joined D. Claude in that old hospital, we did OB and the minimum of surgery that you can do.  In 1967, I got notice from the draft board that I was being drafted in the US Navy.  I went down to the Selective Service in Little Rock and after banging around down there and cussing a lot was told  that I liked 7-8 days staying in the Army long enough that I did not qualify as a veteran and at age 33 with four kids, I was drafted into the US Navy in 1967.  Leading up to that date, Dr. Claude OD Barnett, the oldest brother and one of the pharmacists I’ve mentioned before, and other people in town had started to work on a new Cleburne County hospital; the old Hill-Burton house.  They were working on getting a new Hill-Burton Hospital here in Heber Springs and that project was just getting underway when I left and went to San Diego with the Navy in 1967.  That hospital opened while I was gone and we were now in that new hospital when I got back in 1969.  In that new hospital, we had a thing that you might roughly call an intensive care unit, but you’re stretching it, like calling my house a museum.  We had and I will tell a story about that in a minute; but we were beginning then, Medicare had come in and all those people were now swarming everywhere keeping record and all that stuff.  Now, we had people; my Uncle Claude and another doctor who had joined him from another practice while I was gone, now had people answering the phone and people filling out insurance forms; all of that stuff had come into play while I was in the Navy. So, I missed that whole step in that.”\n\nSo you got drafted.\n\n“I got drafted at 33 with four kids.”\n\n\nWhat did you do in the Navy?                 \n\n“I went to the naval training center and did pretty well nothing. We had a compliment on board while I was there of anywhere from 15-20 physicians on the empty sea and Marine Corp people right there across the fence, so we saw the Marine Corp too.  Dr. Claude and I could have done it easy by ourselves. But, there was anywhere from 15-20 docs hanging around there doing not much of anything; drinking beer and killing time.  There was just nothing.  I got the only good job; I was the only one there who had ever been in private practice.  One other doctor had been in private practice very briefly and then had gone back in to an ophthalmology residency; Dr. Yong, like Dr. Yong the psychiatrist.  He hadn’t stayed long before he’d gone into the ophthalmology residency and the rest were interns, residents, and all that kind of stuff.  The commander who was really in charge of things, the Captain that was the doctor there really didn’t do anything.  The Captain in the Navy doesn’t do anything, but he has a commander there that does all the work.  He figured out right quick that I was the only that if somebody was sick, I was the only one who really knew much about it.  So, I got assigned dependants; they were afraid of dependent patients, they didn’t want any criticism, so, I saw the dependants and I saw almost all the females as I was the only one who had ever done OB of any kind and there was an old Navy barrack from WWII that they had decided to call “Ward A”; I had about 40 beds and if any of those recruits in the Navy or Marines got something wrong with them, enough that they needed to be in bed for 2-3 days but weren’t sick enough to go to Balboa a Naval Hospital that was a huge, huge hospital; I got them.  I was in charge of Ward A, so if anybody was sick of the whole premises that needed lying down, I got them too.  So, I was the only doc that whole two years that really saw anybody with anything wrong with them and got to practice any resemblance of any sort of medicine.  The rest of them were mostly just sitting around twiddling their thumbs looking at stress fractures in recruits and they had podiatrists that did all that.”\n\nWas this is an accompanied tour?  Did you wife and children go with you?  \n\n“Yeah, I went for a while until we got into housing then they came with me.  Yeah, they went to school out there and stayed with me most of the two years.”\n\nSo was this your last tour of duty with the US Navy?\n\n“I haven’t been back since and I’m being as careful as I can.”    \n\nSo how did your family, wife and four children; and obviously you have a big extended family around here….”\n\n“Its plus size.”\n\nHow did your immediate family adapt to you being a physician?  Adapt to the life of being a wife and children of a physician?\n\n\n“On my family, both sides of my family, I was immediately accepted and as soon as Dr. Claude would say no to anyone of his distant kin folks, I was the next one they’d call.  So, I practiced medicine on all my family members; all my aunts, uncles, and cousins, I was their doctor.  That was true as soon as Dr. Claude started easing out, he and his brother, the orthopedic surgeon, retired in the mid ‘70’s; both of them, one here and one in Jonesboro and they were the original group of emergency room physicians in Jonesboro, Arkansas.”\n\nReally?\n\n“Yeah, they did emergency room medicine as retired physicians and that’s what the emergency room was manned by in Arkansas for that era for any hospital that was willing to pay a physician to work their emergency room; both of my uncles did that.” \n\nWhat do you remember about the technology that was available to you: when did you start doing pap smears and mammograms?    \n\n“From the get go; we did pap smears from the get go.”\n\nWhat about mammograms?\n\n “Mammograms, we didn’t know as much about.  We didn’t know; I think they were doing some something with an x-ray machine and squeezing them a little bit, but they weren’t worth a darn.  I didn’t order mammograms because I didn’t trust that technology and certainly, not before ’79.  J. Bell is still in Searcy; he’s retired, but he was a radiologist.  He came down there.  Cody Haynes was the founder of Carti there at St. Vincent’s; the original Carti.  Cody was a classmate of mine and he and that group started or was the beginning of really intense radiological diagnoses and treatment in Arkansas.  I used to go to that Timber Board meeting and had to go to Carti there attached to St. Vincent’s infirmary on about every second or third Wednesday, I did that for 15 years as matter of continuing education.” \n\nDo you remember the transition from brain scans to Cat scans?\n\n“No, I don’t really remember it.  All of that was fallen; J. Bell and my two radiologists would have been taking care of all that for me.  They would’ve said, “No, we don’t do that anymore Mike.  Here’s what we do now.”     \n\nDo they do CAT scans here at the hospital here now?\n\n“Now, they do; yeah.”\n\nDo you remember when they came in before you retired?\n\n“No, I don’t remember when they came; I do not remember that.”\n\nDid you use it; the CAT scans?\n\n\n“Yeah; I rarely ordered it myself.  I didn’t know how to read it, so I didn’t order it; until we moved through the process sand some specialist read me that.  But that was considerably later; see, there weren’t any specialists here.  Let me back up and tell you about an example of what happens in a small town that doesn’t have available facilities.  I walked in the hospital, now this is after I got back in the new hospital that did have some stuff in it.  I walked in there one morning and I had quit doing OB a year or two before and hold told my partner who was still doing OB that I had quit.  He was gone out town; my partner that was still doing BO.  When I walked in that back door to the hospital that morning to make my rounds, there was a psychiatrist standing in the hall; he did some sideline GP coverage and that was what he was doing for a couple of weeks at this particular point in time.  When I walked in the back door, he was standing in the hall and when I got to him; he said, “Dr. Barnett, I want you to come in here, there is somebody I want you to meet.”  He walked through the doctor’s lounge and into the labor room and introduced me to a lady lying in the bed.  He said, “This is Dr. Barnett, he will be taking care of you” and turned around and left the hospital.  She was lying there pregnant and in a gown. I don’t remember what I said first and second, but I turned to the nurse who knew there was something wrong here; she knew I wasn’t delivering babes anymore.  I said, “Well, we got to decide where we’re going to send her.”   There wasn’t anybody there who I could call to do it.  So, I was looking up a number when I said, “Well, let’s check her first and make sure where we are; I don’t want to jump the gun.” So, we did a pelvic exam and she was dilated to about 4, but there wasn’t any head there.  I couldn’t find anything but soft tissue and I didn’t try very hard because I thought I knew what I’d find.  I thought I had felt the placenta and I didn’t try very hard.  I just turned around and said to the lady, as she’d had a baby before it wasn’t her first baby, I said, “You’re about four; let me, it’s going to be a while and you just lay still.  We’re going to go back here and talk about you.”  I didn’t say anything to her; we left the room and I said to the nurse, “Get me so and so in Searcy; I’ve got to get her down there quick.”  We were in the process of doing that when another nurse came out of the room not more than 15 minutes later and said, “Dr. Barnett, she’s bleeding.”  I went back and it was too much flow.  I called Dr. Claude who was in our office and said, “Here’s what I got; Dr. So and So brought me in here and here is this lady.  Here’s the trouble, I think it’s a previa; get on up here.”  To make a long story short, 45 minutes later; we took 22 or 23 gauge an inch and a half needles and did a cesarean section on her with a local anesthetic.  I probably gave her a little bit of Demerol; just enough to make her a little goofy but not enough to hurt her baby.  We did her C-section under local anesthetics and sowed her up.  We had a good baby and a good momma and madder than hell at that doctor; but that’s the sort of thing, there wasn’t any other choice.  We had no choice but to do it and to do it that way; there was no anesthesia available and nobody there that we could say, “Come here…”   We had to do it the only way we knew how.” \n\nAny other scary stories?\n\n\n\n“Oh yeah; lots of scary stories.  Let me tell you a fun one that you will think is fun.  We had what we called an intensive care unit and what it consisted of was a cubical, a central nurses station so to speak, with four corners per cubicle; four patient rooms with see through glass; that’s where we took our coronary patients.  This is back before any evasive cardiology.  To treat a heart attack, you treat their pain; you get them some Heparin and get your ________ or your Ladocane, or whatever you’re going to need handy incase they’re going to try to fibulate on you.  You give them some oxygen and let them get well; that’s what the treatment was before.  So one morning I was on call; it was a long holiday weekend, but I don’t remember which one, and I was on call in the emergency room.  We used to catch it on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday when the holiday was on Monday and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday when the holiday was on Friday; that’s the way we the physicians here manned the emergency room and for whatever you could collect from the patient.  That was the way it was done; no fees, no hospital got involved.  One of my patients came in the emergency room that morning and I came out and saw her; she was having an MI and I put her back in our little new coronary care unit.  In the central room of this contraption is what’s called the crash cart and had a big ole buggy this high on wheels that you roll into whichever one of those cubicles, and we only had one, when you needed it.  We got this lady in the bed with her IVs going and she’s on the monitor.  I’m standing there talking to her and dam if she doesn’t fibulate.  The paddles weren’t there, but the gizmo was on the crash cart and I said to the nurse, “Beverly, she’s going into tach and she’s going to fibulate.  Bring me the crash cart.”  She gave me the grab and it fell on its face.  She had to go get help to pick it up.  The lady went on and fibulated and I started giving her chest compressions.  She never lost consciousness; about every 5th beat, I’d say, “Take a deep breath honey” and she’d take a deep breath.  I kept going and this went on until the nurses got down there; getting the crash cart off its face, got in there and got the paddles heated up.  We shocked her and she went into sinus rhythm and everything was alright.  That was when evasive cardiology was just; Sexton Lewis was just introducing that whole idea at Baptist.  I called Sexton and told him what I had and he said, “You need to bring her on down here” because he was going to cath her and here we go.  It was early, early, evasive cardiology.  I said, “OK” but all we had was that little ole ambulance.  In the emergency room, we have a little tiny portable monitor defibulator outfit that we carry around to two or three different rooms that we have in our emergency room; so we can pull this little defibulator.  I said, “Go ahead and load that thing up in the back, out of the emergency room, in the ambulance.”\n\nSo you were past using hearses?\n\n“Oh yeah, we were passed the hearses.  This was a little bitty ole ambulance, but no equipment and nobody who could start an IV, but me or the nurse.  So they got that that portable defibulator in the ambulance and we were going to take this lady; I was going to go with them.  I called one of my buddies and said, “You’ve got to cover the emergency room for me while I’m gone.  I’m going to be back in 4-5 hours” and he said, “ok.”  We were coming down the hall with \n\n\nthe patient and a man walks in the back door and when I get down there close enough; I recognized him.  He had his hand over his chest and he was having a dam MI.  I said, “Lay him down in the emergency room, put the monitor on him, and he was having an acute MI right there.  While I’m standing there making his ______, looking at his EKG, and looking at the monitor; he fibulates.  We don’t have a defibulator in here; it’s out in the ambulance.  They had to go to the ICU, bring that cart to me, and me and a nurse pumped and breathed for him until they went plume down to the other end of the hospital, brought that cart up there, and heated up the paddles and shocked him.  Sinus; he’s alright and I put him in the bed and started his Lidocaine and his Heparin and la de da.  I called my buddy back and said, “You’ve got an acute MI in here that you’ve got to watch while I’m gone to Little Rock” and I went on to Little Rock.  That was a tough day.”       \n\n“I went to the College of Cardiology Science Section every year.  I went to Kansas City, San Diego, Los Vegas; all over to that week long session; year after year after year.  I listened to them; I had not been back from the Navy very long until I listened to the English docs argue.  “They always have a blood clot” and the Americans say, “No, it’s the plaque that breaks off.”  I remember those agreements back and forth.  Yeah, by the time I came back here even in ’64, I was already treating an MI; I treated it.  The first MI I treated in private practice was a patient of Dr. Claude’s, probably in ’64, and Claude said; we looked at the patient and we looked at the EKGs and he said, “Is that a heart attack?” and I said, “Yes sir; that’s an inferior wall MI.”   I said, “Claude, you ought to go ahead and put him on a blood thinner.”  He said, “What do you mean?” and I explained Heparin.  He said, “Oh, I know what that is, but I didn’t know you did that” and that would have been in ’64.  I Heparinzed the first patient in my area.”\n\nYou were ahead of the game than a lot of places.\n\n“I had learned to do that I guess at St. Vincent’s with somebody; Sexton and ……What we didn’t have was transportation and anesthesia and at first nothing evasive; so cardiology, to put a heart attack patient when I started in an ambulance and carry them somewhere; was putting their life in danger.  I treated them here in my hospital as well as anybody else could back then. It just depends on what they do.  I had one heart attack patient ever who died; a 47 year-old female who came to my office in terrible pain.  Her EKG in my office, she had every SD segment change in every lead in her whole EKG.  She has left main disease is what she had.  I stuck her in the hospital and went through the same routine and she lived about 4-5 hours before she just went on into failure.  Her myocardial was gone and she just went on into failure and died.  I told the family a long time before it happened, “She’s not going to make it.”  That’s the only MI I ever had to die.”\n\nWhat about trauma; did you deal with a lot of surgical trauma?\n\n\n\n“We had trauma; our share of car wrecks or someone who would fall off of a horse.  A more common thing I’m going to see up here is a bad injury to a head where a limb or tree had fallen onto people.   The wealth of North Arkansas was its timber; that’s what the wealth of North Arkansas, or still country, was.  These ole hillsides are not going to raise cotton or corn very long; it’s going to wash away.  Our wealth was timber; everybody up here cuts wood, so I saw lots of people with the typical chainsaw wound just above the knee, that ain’t no fun to sow up.  It chews, it don’t cut.  And blows to the head that had to be sowed up.”        \n\nIs here anything peculiar about Cleburne County, or this region in the mountains; other than the tree stuff, any illnesses or infectious diseases, tuberculosis or typhoid, any of that kind of thing? \n\n‘No; not a lot of any one of those.”\n\nAny tick born disease?\n\n“The only one we knew about then was tularemia and we had, who is the medical director, the infectious disease, the medical director of the medical Society right now?  Joe Bates; he was the worlds expert on tularemia, so we all knew about tularemia and watched for it.  We thought about it because it was on our mind.”\n\nDid you have any epidemics in the summer of tularemia?\n\n“No, sporadic outbreaks only.  I never saw but two or three cases.”         \n\nWhat were the most gratifying parts of your practice?\n\n“Oh without any question, getting to know the patient and then the family personally and being one on one friends; not just doctor/patient.  When I retired, there was no question about it, that’s what I missed.  I didn’t miss practicing medicine so much as I missed that personal exchange.  Dick Ebbert said, “Listen to the patient.  You’re going to learn more there than you do anywhere else; a lot more than you will from the x-ray machine, lab, and all that stuff.”  We all believe that; we all believed in that philosophy.  What I did and I think this is what so many of us did; we sat, we learned to sit on a stool, in front of an examining table and see what’s wrong and pay close enough attention to that patient; how they acted, how they said it, and what they said to decide whether they are lying to us or not or whether they are lying to the family member sitting over here in this chair or not.  And to decide if there is something here wrong and is it something we can do something about and do it.  We had to learn to understand what that patient was trying hard to tell us because some of them are not good a telling.  A good doctor is somebody who learns to hear that story and get an idea.  Old Abernathy would say, “When you hear hoof beats; look for horses in Arkansas and not zebras and you’ll be right most of the time.”  Dr. Ebert would say, “You won’t diagnose it, if you don’t think of it.  So, get your little differential in there with this patient sitting up here and address this disease.”  What I was \n\n\ngetting around to saying in so many words is, the personal one on one dealing with that patient and that is what it was all about and I didn’t have to be able to read to get that.”          \n\nYou talked about something earlier that I want to go back to for just a little bit about community; ADD or ADHD in the school system.  Were you involved in the community; the church or the social groups?\n\n“I was involved with the church a lot for 10-12 years; I had lost my religion as a senior in high school and was going through the emotions.  I lost my religion even more intellectually while I was a college student and I’m not a Christian.  I stayed involved because of my kids and my wife.  I stated involved in fringes of the church in ways where I did not have to give anybody the false impression that I was misrepresenting in some way what my real beliefs were.  Now, it gets that part of it out of the way.  Other than that, yeah I was a coach in little league and my daughter played basketball.  My daughter was a cheerleader and one of my daughters was the home coming queen and all that kind of stuff; I was involved with all that kind of stuff.  But, my main thing was my practice and my patients; my wife raised my children.”\n\nIn the late 19th Century in Arkansas, there was a group of physicians who were called “Free Thinkers.”\n\n“I remember reading about that.”\n\nThat’s who you are describing.  You are describing yourself as what they would have called a “free thinker.”\n\n“I didn’t know what their definition was, but I remember hearing that term.”\n\nSo would you do it again?\n\n“Yeah, in a heartbeat.  Now today, I don’t know; I’d go back then and I’d do it that way.  Whether I would be a traffic cop today, I don’t think I would.  Claude and I had a man come in from Rosebud, an old man, that had spilled some gasoline on his britches and caught fire.  He had a third degree burn from his knee to the top of his shoe.  I had been involved with Jim Stuckey, who was a plastic surgeon in the early days at St. Vincent’s in Little Rock, and Harry Haze Jr. was a son and also a plastic surgeon.  I had gotten my experience at St. Vincent’s; I’d done some skin work with both of those plastic surgeons.  This old man had a pretty bad burn with no money and no insurance and he would not go to the hospital.  Dr. Claude was seeing him and he called me over and we looked him over and I said, “All of that is third, he’ll die if he goes home.  He’ll get something and at worst, he’ll get a pseudomonas and it will kill him if we don’t warp it. ” He says, “If I get you some skin, will you graft him?” I said, “You’re dam right, I know how to put it on there.”  I had me a sterilized wooden stick that I’d roll that skin up on. We had that guy come into the office, clean him up, and Dr. Claude used a straight razor, like you \n\n\nused to go to the barber shop and get shaved with, and he’d take it down to the local barber to sharpen it for him, we’d sterilize it, and he had would take a stripe of square thickness skin off of my thigh and I’d roll it up; I had to teach this to some of the plastic surgeons later.  You won’t use that with forceps’ you put forceps on two ends of the skin graft, you’ve got a mess.  If you roll it up on something and then unroll it where you want it, it saves you 3/4s of your time.  He’d cut me a graft; this old man’s leg where the seam of his overalls went down each side, it didn’t burn.  So, he had a strip of skin a half inch wide down each side of his leg that I could take that graft, unroll it from right here to right here, put a stitch in each end to hold it still enough, and so, we did four or five of those.  We sterilized him, bandaged him, with Adaptec; we had Adaptec at that time. We had that available at that time, and then sent him home.  He’d come back in about 4-5 days and each time I’d give him just a little bit of local anesthetic, I’d start an IV on him and give him just enough that when he’d drift off, Dr. Claude would get them grafts.  I’d let him wake back up and Dr. Claude might say, “I need another one” so I’d knock him down just a little bit again. We grafted that guys leg over about 2-2 ½ months and I’d get some little pinch grafts to fill up the cracks in between the split thickness grafts.  We cured that old man’s leg and he got up and walked home.  That’s the kind of stuff that we talk about above and beyond.  We didn’t because he wouldn’t go to the other doctor to get it done.  So, we did the best we could.”\n\nIt was the right thing to do.\n\n“We thought it was and he thanked us for it.  He probably paid us $25.00 a trip.”               \n\n At what point did you start thinking about retiring?\n\n“I wasn’t actually ready to retire personally.  Electronic stuff was showing up and I had three girls; I had a girl that ran the office, did the insurance, filled out the forms, and did the Medicare.  I had a nurse and I had a lady at the front desk who answered the phone, scheduled, and all that.  Three employees who all worked for me; all three of those that I’m thinking about right now worked for me for over 20 years a piece.  I had a half a dozen employees my whole life.  Along came all this electronic stuff and a young doctor was coming to Heber and was going to build a new clinic and have all that new stuff; the computers and all that.  The girls that worked for me are younger than me; one was my daughter, and all of them were younger than me and I thought, “I’m going to retire before too long and these girls needs experience because that’s the way it’s going to be after I’m gone.”   I’m the only one that can put up with my way of doing it and Uncle Sam is not going to put up with it much longer either we thought and we turned out to be right.  But anyhow, I joined this other doctor in his new building simply to get my girls exposure to this new kind of technology.”\n\nWhere was this office located?\n\n\n\n“It still exists right smack across this highway from where you turn to go into Wal-Mart.  It’s still one of these ARKIDS type things.  Who was that ole boy in South Arkansas that started the ARKIDS?”\n\nSteve Collier.\n\n“Yeah it’s one of those.  So, I moved in when this new doctor came to town.  I decided and talked with the girls about it.  I said, “Y’all need to learn this stuff” and they agreed that they did need to learn it and the new doc would come by and visit us; he seemed alright.  So, he built that fine handicapped building with all kinds of stuff.”\n\nWhat was his name?\n\n“Myers; Lawrence Myers and I joined him and stayed there 3-4 years.  He didn’t like to practice medicine.  He was a bow hunter and into sports.  He was not what I called a family doctor and I never was comfortable.  All the girls became more and more uncomfortable and he didn’t understand to leave people alone.  He’d come in and say, “You’d do better if you moved your computer over here six inches.” Now, how does he know anything about that? But, he’s that kind of meddler and if he was here, I’d say that.  He just drove me and the girls; but we just didn’t realize what we were getting into until it was too late.  They started saying that they wanted out and so I started hunting somebody to take my practice.  I was sure I didn’t want to turn it over to him because he didn’t care about those patients. I went out to a couple of different docs who moved in and practice with me and him; three of us at a time.  One young lady, I liked her pretty well.  So, I started easing out with her there; she was from Missouri and not married.  It wasn’t too awful long that homesickness got here and she left.  Then one other young physician, he was good doctor and he came in and took over my practice.  Dr. Myers quit and sold his clinic to that outfit, whatever it’s called, and he now works for them an x number of days a week.  The other young doctor ran his own clinic and saw a lot of my old patients.  He still does, but he has now joined; for all these fancy reasons that I don’t know the details of, part of one of the groups in Searcy.  Now, their patients have to drive all the way to Searcy to see him.  It all fell apart when I quit so to speak.  Retirement, I wasn’t really ready for but circumstances just got so rough and those girls working for me were so miserable having to put up with what they were having to put up with.”\n\nAt that point, you were 68 or 69?\n\n“I retired in ’02 and I was born in ’34, so I was…..I can’t do that math.”\n\nIf you were born in ’34; you’d been 70 or 71.\n\n“Yeah; that’s right, 70 or 71.”              \n\n\n\nSo, what have you done with your retirement?  What have you done over the last 15 years?\n\n“The very year I retired, our Governor got diabetes.  My wife had a stroke in 1987, a long time ago; dense, dense, aphasia; both expressive and receptive.  The longest sentence I’ve heard her say since then had only four words in it.  She was alright otherwise; socially, functional, active.  If she was in here with us, you all wouldn’t even had picked up for a long time; you’d just thought that she didn’t talk much.  But when that happened, I became the cook at my house to a significant degree.  I was seeing by 1990; I was aware since I’m already interested in cardiology, I was aware that diabetes, obesity, and coronary artery disease was really taking off good.  So, I had gotten particularly interested in that and had been redirecting my practice toward nutrition and diabetes my last 5, 6, or 7 years of practice.  When Huckabee got diabetes and talked that drug company or two into doing some studies in the state of Arkansas to see whether 9-10 hours of education to a diabetic and their family was cost effective; that was the question.  Baptist Health in Heber got picked as one of the 7-8 hospitals in Arkansas as part of that study; that came out of the big Baptist in Little Rock of course.  They asked me as I was just retiring to be the medical director of it and I said, “Yes.”  As compulsive as I am, I have been a diabetes educator now for 14 years.  In 14 years, I have missed three classes at our local hospital.  That’s what I am; that’s what I consider myself to be a diabetes educator.  I know a good deal about it and I have a string of dieticians and a couple of nurses who had honed our skill; it’s not how much you know about diabetes on whether you’re a good teacher or not.  I always wanted to teach school; all my life, I wanted to teach school.  More than I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to teach school and dog gone when I retired I wasn’t presented with the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do.  Ms. E, my old teacher and love of my life, and Ms. Edna, my step mother and music teacher; now for 14 years, I’ve got to do what I really wanted to do.”          \n\nHow much of your time do you spend doing that?\n\n“It’s a nine hour course and when we started, we’d have one on Wednesday and one on Friday; three hours from 9-12, three Wednesday’s in a row and three Fridays in a row.  As we used up our people or as the doctors had talked all the people who were willing to come, we’re down to just one session a month.  So, it’s a 9 hour; three, three hour sessions of self care.  We’re teaching you; your doctor can’t care for your diabetes.  For one, they don’t know how and two, they don’t have the tools to treat diabetes.  If you don’t do it with your life; if you don’t do it, it’s pill number one, pill number two, and then pill number one and two, and then insulin.   That’s what’s going to happen to you if you have Type II Diabetes and you don’t alter your way of living significantly and get rid of what this is behind your belt buckle.  If you don’t do that, I’ll tell you that you’re going to wind up on insulin.  We’ve learned how to talk them into doing that and about half of our people get off of insulin.”\n\nDid you encourage your children to go into medicine?\n\n\n“No.”\n\nDid you discourage them?\n\n“No.”         \n\nYou didn’t do it one way or the other.\n\n“No, I didn’t do it one way or the other.”\n\nWhat do your children do?\n\n“I have two deceased.  One worked from me for that 20 something years and now, she works in a plant here, because she has to; she and her newer husband.  My other daughter is a special education teacher in Springdale; she has been for 20 something years.  Special Education; she’s a spinoff of my old dyslexia and stuff back then.  My first cousins, the sons and daughters of this bunch of Robbins and Barnett uncles and aunts of that generation, four of us are doctors, three are dentists; there are 7-8 PHDs in the bunch and nearly all are educated.  There are 4-5 masters in Special Education.  It all went round and round and round in those families.”\n\nDid you ever think about teaching in medical school before you came back here?\n\n“No, I didn’t.  You can’t do how I did in med school and get hired as a teacher.”  \n\nOf all the things that have changed in your life: technologies, social networks, whatever; what’s changed life the most for you or the average person who would walk in your office?\n\n“What I think, the people that I still contact about medicine; not my diabetics.  What they, every day nearly, someone says to me, “Why can’t we have a doctor that sits down and talks to us one on one about what is wrong with us, spells out a plan, and tells us why we are to take this particular pill?”  That’s the same that you cannot find apparently anymore.  That’s what’s changed about medicine to me; my thought.  To me it’s the doctor himself that has undergone the change.  When I go see the doctor now, my personal physician, they spend more time looking at that screen than they do at me.  I’ll see a cardiologist, as I’m in atria fib; I may see my family physician and have the time, they may not even touch me; literally may not touch me.  I had an aortic aneurysm, a super renal aortic aneurysm of 8 cm; that’s give or take.  I’d probably been walking around 4-5 years with a 50-50 chance each year of dying with a sick wife.  It‘s a good thing and I’m thankful for that that I didn’t.  I had that fixed and after my surgery, about 3-4 hours after surgery, I started having rectus abdominous muscle spasms.  I could not get the nurse to come and bring me a little dab of Morphine.  I’d said, “I don’t need Morphine; give me a little bit of Valium or any other muscle relaxer and you’ll stop this spasm” and I ripped the dam stitches from my _______ to my _______out the 12 hrs following surgery.  I told her, “We’re tearing up the sutures in my abdomen.” The surgeon who did my surgery had not seen my belly since I left the OR; ever, since I left the OR.  That’s the state we’re in, believe it or not.”         \n\n\nI want you to just pretend we’re not here; you’re talking to your great, great, grandchildren.    What do you have to say to them?\n\n“I would say to them a version of what I’ve already said.  “I don’t care what you choose as your occupation, how you choose to make a living, or what field you want to go in.  But what I will say to you is this, “If it is a field that has anything to do with other people, you do what Dr. Claude asked me to do.  Let’s take care of the patient and making a living will take care of itself.”  Do your job and don’t worry about the pay.  Do it well enough that it takes care of itself.”  \n\nDo you have anything else you would like to say on this interview?\n\n“I’ve told enough.”\n\nThank you Sir; that was a wonderful interview.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161561/file/293378#t=0.0,7373.8665"}]}]}]}