{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/hq3rv0fw17/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Charles Watts"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["1989-12-01 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Interview"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Society of Teachers of Family Medicine","family medicine","Dr. Charles Watts","family physician"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Dr. Charles Watts (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["english (primary)"]}},{"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"]}}],"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/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 2 - Watts_Charles_1989.12.01_-_Side_1.mp3"]},"duration":3739.568,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/278/326/original/Watts_Charles_1989.12.01_-_Side_1.mp3?1750863690","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":3739.568,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326/transcript/81404","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Charles Watts interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326/transcript/81404/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Side 1: The whole idea of what influences young people to go into medicine, I think is a part of this. Somewhere along the way it seemed to me, there’s a difference between the motivations of young people today and when I decided to go into medicine 50 years ago. At that point, I think there was a greater emphasis on the idea of being a unique way to render service. At least I like to think that in a way. It’s hard to document. I don’t know what I said back then. I don’t recall this idea of making a whole lot of money. The reason it’s so appropriate is because I was renting a space of a doctor of OB, he was just moving out, saying, I’m depressed because I think he just made such a poor effort to make a success of what he was doing. He’s not young either, he’s somebody about 50 but he’s got ideas. -- into not just family practice people but all kinds of practitioners. They have their sites set on $100,000 a year the first year they come out. Do you know the names Charles Drew?\n\nI do.\n\nHe was my mentor and one of the things he used to say and so often I find myself thinking of things he used to say. I worked with him about 9 years. He made the point that if you’re going into medicine for the money, you probably ought to select another field. You’d probably make more money with less work if that’s your… and if you make a mistake and get there and you spend all your time making money, say the first million, you have no goals after that, if that was your goal. Then you’ve got the rest of your life to wonder why you did. It just is an empty thing. We don’t have experience in… young black physicians are leaving. Samson -- and his brother have a large building down here. Coming in, you couldn’t give them any advice, they knew everything. Going out now they say, they wish they’d taken advice, two or four because there were two owners on the next block who just left and then this fellow never really got into it. So that’s five possible, potential practitioners in the community that we’ve just lost or are losing because their idea of what they were to make is not brought to fruition. Hines is a young fella, who I think never made it because he just didn’t want to work enough and he took a job at the college as a student physician thinking that would be $60,000, $70,000 a year and he wouldn’t have to work. He probably worked on that too. He left with their blessings this year and they got somebody else. He started out very high -- where he’s going to work and --. Harold, his brother, nice office, was big enough for 3 or 4 physicians but their overhead was so high that they can’t keep up with it and realized as much. So they’re working in the emergency rooms down in Jacksonville and spending 2 or 3 days here in practice. This fellow came back to Durham from Ohio somewhere and he had planned to slide into practice while working part time but he never could get it down to part time. He wasn’t here enough to justify an office. He’s been there two years. I’m retired so easing out and was looking forward to letting him pick up the slack. When he got through -- coming over here, I was going to close, going to leave, you give it to him. He resisted advice and I finally stopped giving advice. I was saying to him, there’s just no way you can build a practice unless you’re available. You have to be here when people need you so that they’ll come back.  -- to refer people to you, I can’t see you or I’m out of town or overflow because I don’t work with so many --. It was a great idea but when we tried to refer him, we never could find him. He gave us a phone number --. Even the ideal young person, the one I have in mind, said the present practice state with all the paperwork and all of the volumes of material you have to learn about making out coding and making out blanks for the government, they constantly change, he just found it obnoxious to keep up with all that and he was going to get somebody else’s advice. So he closed his office and he had a fairly good practice. He was disappointed in the money he was making too. Now when Medicare first came, around 1980, under the Medicare program then, they found that they could put old people in the hospital and fiddle around with them for 3 or 4 days, diagnostic workup and whatnot and collect $100 or so and Medicare paid a little bit of it. Harold at one time had as many as 12, 15 patients in, all the time they were complaining because he was hogging all the beds. He was frequently not aggressively pursuing diagnosis, giving fluids and… it wasn’t good medicine. But it cut off that. You can’t get them in now unless they’re too sick to treat. So now he’s been cut off at the pass. He was up here… he built a big office over here and I imagine they’ve got a mortgage note of $2,000 or $3,000 a month. He is -- there are 4 people in his office, well, they couldn’t get along so he’s just there by himself. What I’m saying is, it’s a problem now with the young people coming out and what their expectations are. I think a serious problem, what their expectations are, especially with those in family medicine apparently. The guys who go onto specialize, I guess are the ones I’ve encountered, are able to find a niche where they are comfortable with their practice -- Coleman and George Brothers. You know George Brothers?\n\nI know his name, yes.\n\nHe did a fellowship in Chapel Hill in rheumatoid disease and his wife, they have a very nice practice doing -- but they are well trained --. I think he did his residency in internal medicine up in Ohio somewhere. But George has his boards in internal medicine and so does his wife and they share an office. They’re fine young people and seemingly have their feet on the ground. I would make some different choices if I was in their shoes but they are not commercializing themselves as much as they might. They’re looking for comfortable income. She works for IBM part time and he’s working for Kaiser, part time. They like the  comfort of those… that’s cut down on their ability to be available to build a practice and although they’re still there, you have to look at what you’re doing and see whether it maximizes your efforts. I think one of them ought to be practicing full time. She has three babies too, when I say babies, one of them is 4, 6 and maybe 9, so she’s got another responsibility, which I can understand that maybe she wouldn’t want to get engrossed in a big internal medicine practice which could be very demanding. He ought to be out there, building a practice. He has, I think been disappointed because he doesn’t get enough referrals in his sub-specialty of rheumatology.\n\nThat will probably come over a period of time.\n\nThat’s right. The whole idea of the business of medicine has escaped this generation. I guess maybe… I knew a little bit about the idea of running a business before I went to medical school and I think this has helped me a great deal. My father run a grocery store, a corner grocery store where all of the family worked in the store and helped make it profitable. From the time I can remember --. In my childhood, I was exposed to business and what it means and my father’s father before him ran a grocery store. In fact, they had a union in the area of Atlanta and it was the oldest continuous business enterprise by any black family in that area, going back to 1872. So I guess I had his stock on business matters. And then I lived with a physician who gave me a room for four years when I was in medical school and had his office in the house. I assisted him in his practice my last two years, and we talked about it. So I began to understand something about putting those business ideas into practice, I guess.\n\nA lot of the physicians I talk to have mentioned that one of the things that they enjoy about their practices is the ability to, in a sense, be your own boss. Is that something that you felt strongly about when you started in medicine?\n\nRight. I think one of the things I wanted to do, rather than be an institutional person was to be my own boss, have some idea of control. I have been employed. I worked for -- in their student health program for 10 years, part time because they couldn’t find anybody, they said. I found out they weren’t even looking. And I also was Vice President of -- For Life, which was part time. I continue the surgical practice through the year. And this office, they wanted me to close this office and move in up there but I found a sense of independence and all, that I liked. I have grief with people who want to be institutional people and I can see some advantages to that, to take your children out on Sundays, not have to work. But I think you can survive in this other if you… one of the things I discovered since I retired is how much fun it is to have weekends free. I didn’t know about that before. I never had weekends free. I’d get some weekends off but to have every Friday, like today, I’m free until Monday and I’m going to Washington, actually until till Tuesday. It’s a different style. It allows for more fun. I guess my children would know me better if this had been the case through the years.\n\nHow did you come to Durham? What was the story behind that?\n\nWell, I came to Durham because this is my wife’s home.\n\nDid you meet in medical school?\n\nNo, I met her the day I finished college. She and her sister were passing through Atlanta, coming to Durham from a little school called Talladega College.\n\nSure.\n\nWhat did you hear about Talladega?\n\nIt’s a long story, but I have a friend who works at the University of Mississippi and we were talking about oral history and collecting stories and he was saying he wrote a long letter about Talladega and some of the projects they’ve had on oral history projects with people in the 1920’s and 30’s who were former slaves and they had a repository of oral history projects in black…\n\nThe school has a distinguished history. It was started by people from New England right after the Civil War.  -- they’re white, a lot of the -- my wife’s family was well to do. Her grandfather was a founder of North Carolina Mutual, so her father wanted to send her to a school and they chose Talladega. They had to go over a full day in Atlanta, traveling by train then. The train would come up from Talladega about 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning and the first train they could get to Durham was late afternoon. The waiting room for black people in that station was not sanitary or comfortable or safe. -- how black people coped… Mr. Merrick, who was Treasurer of North Carolina Mutual had a friend in Atlanta who… in fact, this young lady’s father was an officer of the company. She went down at their request and picked him up. My wife had a sister. Were trying to entertain them. I was graduating from Morehouse College that day and as I walked out in my cap and gown, Ruth Wheeler brought -- and met me and a friend, a boy named Joe Santam, who later came to Durham to work. But they met the two of us and we carried them around and showed them some of the sights of Atlanta and took them to a movie. The stayed overnight and came the next morning. That’s when I first met them. Nothing happened then but she came to Durham to work for Mechanics -- Bank as a teller, invited by John Wheeler. I don’t know whether you know John Wheeler.\n\nNo.\n\nJohn Wheeler was cashier of the bank, but a graduate of Morehouse. Joe went back to the university and got his Masters in Business Administration the next year and then was offered a permanent job and came back to work here. This was around 1940. In 1941 I came down to be in his --. The young lady was no longer 16, she’s 19 now. She looks a little better. I got interested. We began to correspond and in 1945 I came back and married her. So that’s how I got to Durham. I was -- my residency in 1945, when we got married. I had finished graduate school in ’43. So we moved to Washington and I got a job in -- during the war. We moved around from room to room. Then when the children started to come and the budgetary problems developed and I had a viral illness, we took a hiatus from my residency and came here just to stay 9 months while some things transpired there. I got interested in the health care problems here. Lincoln Hospital was here, they didn’t have a board certified black physician here in any specialty. It just looked like an excellent opportunity for somebody to do some good if he’s well trained. I went back to Howard in 1947 and stayed 3 years. I came back here in ’50 and been here ever since. By then, we had two children and were pretty much indoctrinated to living here. Lincoln Hospital became very close to me, it was created -- by necessity. Another thing, Charles Drew, one of his dreams was that he would develop a training center where young people would be trained so well that they would stand out across the country, they would break down barriers, which -- black people getting equal terms. That was his dream and if you look at it, he succeeded far beyond what he might have expected to do. Incidentally I’m pretty much steeped in this right now, but I’m going to tell the Duke surgical staff about Charles Drew in February, on the 13th.\n\nHave you been to the Drew Center in Los Angeles? I know there’s a graduate center.\n\nNever been there. The director was a friend of mine and I’m very familiar with it. They invited me out to speak once and I don’t know what happened but about a month before that, they were celebrating some anniversary with him, they cancelled so I didn’t get to.\n\nIt’s a nice place.\n\nYou’re familiar with it?\n\nBeen there once. It’s very nice.\n\nThat’s how I got to Durham.\n\nWhen you moved here you said you had some interest in trying to work with medical care in more than just the practice.\n\nI was really concerned about the whole picture of medical services, especially for the poor people at that stage. I naturally wanted to make a living but I felt you could do both. You could develop a practice and I see now, that’s one of the problems. People don’t seem to see the relationship between building a practice by rendering service and security it generates. You build a practice, and it takes time, I don’t care how good you are, it takes time, which by 101, by doing something for you, you’re feeling good about it. Going out and telling somebody else and two people come. If you’ve got somebody referring patients, it goes faster. But in the final analysis, self-referrals are the things that bring you security. I can tell you, I’d been here a short while. This was before I went back and took my boards and we had an ice storm one weekend. I think about 17 inches of snow and ice fell. And I had just bought the second Ford to come into Durham after the war. I got it home and the snow fell on it. I got it out after a couple of days and I got this call from a young lady that I’d met through another, she said her mother was very sick and she wished she could find a doctor. Durham at that point was a mud hole, a few paved streets but when you got off Central Street, it was mud. And then after a few days of that kind of weather, the mud was all --. But it was over in East Durham. She described where it was and I found it and I got in my little Ford and went over there to see her mother. Her mother had a ruptured peptic ulcer. I then had the problem of what am I going to do for her. I had walked down through the mud to the house but after I got so engrossed, I got back in my car and drove down there and she and I helped her mother get in my little one seat Ford and we went down and I went to turn around and when I backed up the car, the transmission got caught in a sewer and the wheels were just lying there I wasn’t stuck, I just was high and dry. I had walked downtown in kind of a sleety rain and found a fellow with a little car that had 4-wheel drive. They were common then because the weather was so bad. I think he was -- but he went out and pulled me off of that little tail cob pipe and we got her to the hospital, gave her some fluid and got her stabilized on and operated on by 5:00 in the morning and she survived and got along pretty good. She never paid me a penny. But after a year or two, I felt like finding her and telling her, don’t pay me a penny. She sent me so many patients. Her mouth was wagging all over the south and I got all kinds of patients, some that I regret having, but I can screen them. But that’s my idea of how you build a practice, you have to give something and make somebody believe you. Of course, the basis of it is giving good service. I think we’ve lost sight of that.\n\nSome people talk about medicine being more of a job rather than a profession or something in which… I think in many cases it’s true. People want to do something for the patients but on the other hand, there’s a sense of service that isn’t as strong as it was.\n\nIf the sense of service is not there, the patient discovers it. They lose confidence in what you’re trying to do. I’m not all that smarter than everybody else, you’re going to have to work at it to accomplish that and take seriously what you’re doing. I think we get into kind of getting enough people through to make more money, or getting in a hurry. These schedules… I’ve enjoyed… I’ve done primary care, more or less and I’ve enjoyed it. But one thing I have yet to do and I’m not rushed (?), is for the first time in years, I’m not due somewhere else. Most of the time on Friday, before last year, was my main operating day so I couldn’t have talked to you on Friday. Or if I talked to you, I’d be watching my watch because they’re going to call me in a little while to operate. Usually I would post my cases in the morning but if I ran too long and got into somebody else’s time, then I had to come back in the evening. So I didn’t see many patients here on Friday because I was in the hospital all day. Then you try to plan stuff in. After awhile you know if you start at 7:30 and you’re running back and forth all day and about 5:30, maybe you’ve gotten caught up and you can go home and eat dinner. I’m not bothered with that anymore so now if I want to do something like this on Friday afternoon, I can. I’m really enjoying it.\n\nI’m glad you can, for my sake. One of the things I was curious about, in 1945 was the first time you moved to Durham you moved back here in ’50 for the last time. Staying in the same community, even though the community has obviously changed a lot over that period of time, but staying with a group of people that you get to know and get to know in a variety of different ways, the sense of having a personal life and a professional life, a lot of younger physicians want to have this personal life over here and their professional life over here. Certainly in smaller communities…\n\nWhy is that undesirable?\n\nI’m not saying it is, I think they talk about it a lot. One of the questions is, did you ever find that to be… how did that help you or how did that…\n\nI’m glad to serve the people I know and have the people I know, want my services Some people don’t want your services because they know you and that’s true. But you never expect to have everybody want your services. I’ve been here 40 years and I can guarantee you that I got a drawer full of names I tell people, that I have served one time or another, they need something or want something. A lady was here this morning I don’t imagine I’ve seen her in 10, 15 years. But she had a problem and she searched her mind as to where to go. I think the last time she was treated was at Duke Clinic or something and she came to talk to me about it. We talked. I think I helped her. But the backlog of people that I know, what’s happened is a lot of them died. When I started 40 years ago, a lot of them were either older than I was or as old and they’re getting pretty old. Buried a very good friend yesterday who I did an abdominal perineum combined for cancer of the rectum in 1961. He died from cancer of the lung. But he was a tobacco worker. He had 6, 7 children, 4 girls and 3 girls. I guess I operated on his wife. I went to the wake the other night and I looked across the room and I probably treated everybody in the room once. Gorgeous family. They’d been married 55 years. These girls are just terrific people. Three of them work at North Carolina Mutual. One of them’s granddaughter has been a patient of mine. She teaches in the public school system, a delightful young lady. Very intelligent, finished Western Salem State. To know families like that and to go to the wake when the patron father… he was 87 years old, passes and have them all seem to feel good that you came. There aren’t many experiences in life ended up like that.\n\nI agree with that.\n\nMy wife and I went to their 50th wedding anniversary and met all these people again. My relationship with that family has been very rewarding to me. Just to know them, they trust you.\n\nAnd to be of service, as you said, to a family over three decades is really remarkable.\n\nOne lady in the family has been one of my… you have some days that you feel that you did something very good. This young lady was about 27 years ago I think at the time, maybe 30 and she had abdominal pain and fever. I finally put her in the hospital because I wasn’t sure what the problem was. She was running a temperature of 101, 102 and pretty sick and had been sick 3 or 4 days when I saw her. It looked like appendicitis but she had a -- incision and alleged her appendix was removed when she was 3. After trying to assess it for about 12 hours and fooling with it, I finally decided that they must not have removed that appendix and she had an appendix abscess, in fact I thought I saw fecal in there. Operated on her, she had a big -- so in my little talks about appendicitis, -- she was one of my…she was there at the wake the other night. This was 20 years ago. She’s about 50 now, very mature. I finally realized that the medical state of the art as the time she was operated on, wasn’t the greatest. You have a ruptured appendix, you drain it. Sometimes you go back and get it but you couldn’t do much, so they would just drain it. They didn’t have antibiotics and all the things.\n\nIt heals back over?\n\nYou drain it and get the abscess out. Ideally you would wait for a length of time and then take it out. Her family thought -- all in one family. Her mother had a gallbladder full of stones and I operated on her for that. It got to be that no one in the family got a serious thing done unless they consulted me. She had a sister that died from cancer of the breast. When we saw it, we knew it was more advanced.\n\nEarly on, you said you were interested in the whole idea of health services.\n\nYes.\n\nI’m curious for myself, why come to Durum in 1945 and ’47 and the medical system…\n\nThe problem here was that we didn’t have Medicaid or Medicare. No way of supporting or financing care for indigent people. And we had a hospital here which was expected to provide these services and 5 to 40% of the people came, were medically indigent of some sort. The gap between what we were trying to do, or ideally what we would like to do or be able to do was always so great. Counties would send people, all the surrounding counties would send people here, certified as indigent but the only thing we’d get out of it at Lincoln would be a $1 and day or $2 a day that the Duke Foundation paid for indigent patients because the cost of care may have been $5 a day. But the opportunity to serve these people… I was talking to a lady just last night, the lady lived over here and is one of my favorite people -- because she just did so many nice things. She lived right across from Lincoln. We had an old gentleman, he must have been 70’s. I say that now, I’m 72. I was younger then. But he was much older --. They brought him up from Newberg, thinking that he would probably go back. He was very sick, vomiting, carrying on. Duke didn’t have a bed for him. At that time Duke had one ward for black patient, they never had a bed. So they referred him over here to Lincoln. We got him over here and he was very sick, couldn’t sit nowhere. So we had to take him to treat him. What he had was a ruptured appendix with a big appendix abscess. We got him in shape, drained it and in a few days, the old gentleman was looking pretty good. They didn’t expect him to come back so they didn’t bring any shoes. That’s part of this story. So we had him all ready to go home by bus with his hat on but no shoes. This lady went across to her house, her husband was about his size, and brought a pair of shoes. I can see that gentleman now, being wheeled out with a cigar in his mouth and his hat on the side of his head and these nice shoes. So many people in the community were very supportive of these efforts. Of course I didn’t get a penny for caring for him. We were very much concerned, not only by the fact that we weren’t paid, the hospital wasn’t paid but anything you get free, usually you get what you pay for. There was no way to --. And even when the county here would authorize you to admit some indigent patient, they didn’t pay the physician anything but they did pay whatever they decided to pay on a daily basis, for being in the hospital. But if -- they’d give you 5 days. It’s kind of like Medicare does it now, if you don’t get well in 5 days…  Afterwards, I used to say, I spent more time trying to finance people’s healthcare in some ways than I did try to find out what’s wrong with them. I can think of any number of instances where that was the case. And then there was just so much injustice with it. A young lady I see right here now who had a baby and no husband, developed a toxic goiter. She’s a girl about 20’s with very limited education, only finished high school. But she has a real toxic goiter. I was trying to get them to admit her so that I could get it under control. I could get vocational rehabilitation maybe, to pay the bill once she’s under control and I can operate on her. So I got an appointment with her… they wouldn’t give an appointment but I referred her to the --, she went down and sat on the bench all day after getting a babysitter to keep her baby and the person who was there, didn’t show up. Told her to come back tomorrow. This was the kind of treatment. I got so angry with that fellow, he invited me down to push me out. I talked to him roughly over the phone. A physician has to do that. We finally got it done though, we got her under control, got her goiter settled down and did a --ectomy on her and she went on and went back to work.\n\nPhysicians in many cases, I look at medical students and younger physicians, they seem to feel that practicing medicine somehow is only within this office or within the hospital or in a floor. How did you start to learn, that obviously the practice of medicine extended far beyond your office and your hospital?\n\nI guess that’s a part of my training as a resident. The ability to recognize what you’re doing and how it relates to the community, I think comes from Dr. Drew and Bert -- and the people I worked with at Howard. I guess I didn’t know it before then. But I’ve always had a concern of how effective you’re doing what you set out to do. We recognize in this community that if a decent hospital is going to survive, we have to get some support form this. I guess if that dual interest, interest in survival of the hospital because it was the only base of… it’s an important institution for the community. We were always on a marginal basis because no one paid for the service. This same situation exists at Howard right now. $16 million -- hospital. I’m on the board of trustees there and we were just discussing how we’re going to downsize the deficit for next \n\nyear. They’ve done very well and they have some reserve, we don’t want it to go fly away. And the big problem is, long term care of children and older patients. They have so many AIDs \n\nbabies there because there’s nowhere else to send them\n\nAnd low birth weight babies.\n\nLow birth weight babies and nobody’s paying for it. This lack of revenue has caused them… it’s interesting how the problem remains the same.\n\nUnfortunately. How many black doctors were in… you said you were the only board certified black physician in Durham at that point. How many black physicians…\n\nI was the only one board certified in the state when I came. Well, the opportunities to get board certified hadn’t been… that’s probably part of what I want to try to do privately. In 1940, there weren’t many places where you could get a residency if you were black. I don’t care how bright you were. In 1930 there weren’t any. In 1940 there were few. However, by 1955 or 1960, let’s say 1960, we had quite a few. Dr. Swift, who I found here and he had done post graduate work at Lincoln under the direction of Dr. Purvis and some of the people from Duke. After I came in with a specialty board, they, about two years after that, were able to persuade the OB/GYN people to let him take the board, although his training had not been what they prescribed and he took it and passed, first go around, so we had two. Dr. Dawson, who came to Durham the same month I did, I had known him in Atlanta before and we hadn’t been in contact, and when we got to talking, we had such a commonality of problems that we have had our offices in the same building ever since. But he had to go to the Army during the Korea campaign. While he had three years of training at home at Phillips, he had not met the requirements for the -- curriculum and he was able to meet it while he was in the Army, I think pathology. He was director of -- program at Minneapolis, Kentucky or somewhere. So he got his board while he was out there. Then he would have had his. In a little while we developed a program over at Lincoln where we were training internists. We were concerned that we didn’t have internists, nobody trained as an internist. And we had these specialist and I talked to Dr. J.B. Johnson, who was Chief of Medicine at Howard. Well really I didn’t, he suggested it. I told him about our dilemma. We looked around and around in the 60’s and we were no longer having interns and trainees there. All of the people who were here, except for Dawson and me got here because they came to do internships. So what was going to bring a black physician, well trained, to Durham? We figured we needed to do something. We weren’t big enough to qualify for training but we were big enough to --. When I laid this problem before Dr. Johnson, he said, if I can get Dr. Gene Stead to supervise it and take an interest in it, then he would rotate his residents down here. So I came back with this idea and he said, well let me think about it and made a time I would talk to him later, about 2 or 3 weeks. And he called me and said, come on over, I think I have a plan. You Dr. Stead?\n\nYeah, I met him once.\n\nHe’s a nice man.\n\nLegendary around here.\n\nOh yeah, he is. If you were here and deal with him for a little bit, you’ll see why. When I went back, he got $100,000 a year support for the program. He had appointed one of his senior residents or young professors to head the program and had it all worked out. All we had to do is take this program to J.B. and he assigned two residents to rotate then. And he did that for a couple of years. Well, at that time, J.B. stepped down as head of the department at Howard and another young whippersnapper became head and the first thing he did was pull this program out. I never understood why he did it because he admitted that the training they got here was better than they were getting at Howard. What they did was assign a fellow over here who was the brightest and most enthusiastic young guy I’ve ever known. He reminded me a lot of Dr. Drew’s personality. He was determined to make this work and he was over here every morning and lecturing and making rounds and of course the patients in the hospital were getting much better care, all of us were doing better work. Of course, he went on to become a professor of medicine at the University of Missouri, I think. That was my last contact with him. It so happens that I had a man to die in the hospital and he was the father of a young lady who worked with him at Duke, that he carried with him to the University of Missouri.\n\nConnections go way back.\n\nShe called me to make arrangements for him.\n\nThe thing I’ve heard over the years and I think you’re probably a good example of that is the physician in a community, certainly can assume a very special role. You are a citizen but in most cases, you can be…\n\nYou should be. Best training, you had longer training than most folks in the community. I think it’s expected of you to be a leader. You have to run fast sometimes to stay in front of the crowd. It’s expected of you and in the black community where at that point, -- it’s you and the high school principal, probably, in most schools, the best trained people, have the best educational experience. When much is given, much is expected.\n\nAgain, I think that’s something that is probably not as clear to younger physicians.\n\nI think that’s a point that needs to be made to them. That you get this opportunity for all this -- training that you don’t think… the community, society furnishes you this opportunity and it’s expected that you’ll give it back in some way, leadership, and that someone will be able to build on it. Of course the thing that really, as I look back over the years, that means most to me is the Lincoln Community Health Center. My involvement with that is far removed from my training and what I was prepared to do on the basis of my training. I spent all my time trying to be a surgeon and -- the medical field. But I went to a meeting in Washington in 1967 called Heart, Cancer, Stroke, sponsored by the -- to the airport from this meeting, I heard a fellow from Detroit discussing the fact that they were funding health centers. We were struggling then with Lincoln Hospital dying gradually. Because we had an outpatient department there we had to run. We couldn’t -- and not run it and nobody paid for the services. We were losing about $30,000, $40,000 a month in unpaid receivables. And that just seemed like the answer. So I came back and talked with the board of trustees about this possibility. Mr. Wheeler I mentioned because he was chairman of the board. He was also president of Mechanic Farmers (?) Bank, also quite a politician, one of the smarter people that I’ve run across in my life. An excellent business man. He thought, as I did, that this would help us a lot so we decided to go for it. I also was chairman of the board of Operation Breakthrough at that time. You’re familiar with Operation Breakthrough? So that gave me the -- one of their deputies took interest in it and looked up the Federal Registry. I didn’t know anything about all this. And told us where it was and what the numbers were and what we had to do to apply. (Inaudible) talk to OEO, the Office of Economic Opportunity. But somehow or another by mistake, I ended up in HUD, not HUD, HEW. Met someone there that was sympathetic and helpful. We came back and wrote a proposal and sent it off to him and had a site visit and went through all this. This was in ’67 where we didn’t get funded at that time, but we learned a lot.\n\nThe usual case. They’re encouraging about trying again.\n\nOh yeah. The sent a man special trip down to tell us -- for us to try again, we just didn’t quite articulate what he wanted to do and they showed us some things. Well, Cecil Steppes (?), you know that name?\n\nOh, very well.\n\nCecil had been a friend of mine because his wife, Mendel, his first wife, had been in charge of student health at Central when I came to town. That’s how I got clued into this. She invited me to come and care for athletes because they didn’t have an N1 (?) with sprains and bumps and fractures. I didn’t have anything to do so I took the job. I think they paid me $100 a month and I’d go down there one day a week and see whatever outstanding problems they had. If I treated anything outside, they paid me for the treatment. But I had a retainer of $100 a month. Going to all the football games, sitting on the bench and I enjoyed it. I see people now, like say Sam Jones played with Boston Celtics, he was one of mine. He played at Central. He was terrific then. I was taking my daughter to UMCT, she went to college there and I saw that the Celtics were playing somebody, an exhibition up there. I said, I’m going to stop and see that on the way back. She said, let’s stop on the way going, so we stopped in, went in and got a ticket. It was just an exhibition game, about the time colleges were open. I always remember, when we walked in that gym and he was out there warming me, he looked over and said, “Doc!”. It created a lot of commotion.\n\nI get your daughter was impressed.\n\nEverybody was impressed. I was too. I knew him quite well because I also operated on his wife when she was a student at Central. She wasn’t his wife then but they -- she’s a very lovely person. That’s how I met Cecil. I ran into him at a cocktail party and he asked me what I’ve been up to lately and I told him, I’m kind of in low spirits because I tried twice to get a health center funded and I don’t quite know where we are now. He said, would you have lunch with me Monday? I said, great. So we had lunch and we talked, I guess for an hour and a half or two. That’s the first time I really understood all the dimensions of what I was trying to do. He sent a young fellow named Donald Madison…\n\nI know Don very well. I worked with him actually.\n\nDon came in and worked with us for the next go around and he actually wrote the proposal. That was my last real contact with Gene Stead. We wrote the proposal, got it sent off. I’m not hearing anything except from the correspondent, one of the young fellows in the department keeps me posted. Once a week he calls or writes to say, your proposal is moving along. But then along about May, it’s kind of gotten stalled now. We need to pull out all the political stops to get this thing approval before June 30th because the money we’ve got our eyes on… I was trying to see who I knew that had political influence and I thought of Gene Stead. I called him on a Wednesday morning and told him, we have until Friday really, to get this money and we can’t really pinpoint where it is, this is what the fellow told me. He said, he somebody has it on their desk up in Washington, wouldn’t turn it lose. And gave him the numbers and identifying material. This was about","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326#t=0.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326/transcript/81404/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in the morning. He called me about","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326#t=600.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150927/file/278326/transcript/81404/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that night. I remember it was on Wednesday because he said, either tomorrow or Friday you’ll get the word. He can go and talk with everybody on the list who would inspect it and he said, from their report, I haven’t seen the proposal, it must be a long read (?), so it was getting -- all down the line, so you will get the money. You’re not going to get as much as you want but nobody does. So -- called me Friday at noon to say that you’ve been awarded, I think, $300,000.\n\nThat’s a lot of money.\n\nWell, we worked with that for a year. At this point I’m a fulltime surgeon, I’m a fulltime Medical Director at the insurance company and I had to become a fulltime Director of the Health Center in order to get the money. I had three fulltime jobs. But I was so fortunate. I was able to recruit 3 or 4 very valuable people and in a little while, we had things going and we had a mandate to make the place aesthetically acceptable and comfortable and gave us $25,000 to do it and every estimate was $150, $200,000 so I said I want more. Wrote two letters. One to the Smith-Reynolds Foundation and one to the Duke Foundation. At the end of that week I got a response with $300,000.\n\nQuicker than the federal government.\n\nI’m telling you, I was standing tall. I’ve never earned that much. But the…\n\n(END OF RECORDING)\n\nSide 2: … and they qualified us for this program, which meant that we could have a dental hygienist go to school, they fed the children breakfast every morning, taught them how to clean teeth and we enrolled the children and their families in the center, which meant that instead of reaching 5,000 or 10,000, we were up to 20,000 in no time and got us off to a running start.\n\nYou talked, obviously it was a lot of work, a lot of effort and as you said, you had 3 fulltime jobs, plus your practice. Why is it that you felt such a sense of responsibility for things that a lot of physicians and a lot of other people might have felt, that’s somebody else’s business?\n\nI don’t really know. I think I was so happy to see progress in this thing and I knew the need was so great and I was making a living. I was educating my children, I was getting along fine. I never set a goal to make $200,000 a year, it didn’t matter to me. I knew I wouldn’t be a millionaire practicing medicine and when I got a comfortable living, I guess that was part of it. Your expectations have a lot to do with it. I was making far more than I thought I’d ever make. And I had -- a fairly good situation at the insurance company. What they did was just allow me to do a job for them and if I got it done, they didn’t question my time. I didn’t have to stay there. I could have had a larger surgical practice but I really had cut it down some during that period. I couldn’t accept as many cases but that didn’t worry me because I was getting something else done. I think it’s unfortunate that these young people are -- I’m identifying as possibly are not having the fun involved in this sort of area. I look back on it, this meant more to me than running up a large surgical operation, collecting more money. I wanted to do what I did well but I never… I lost the yen for doing so much, shaking people up and down, getting all the money. That doesn’t appeal to me.\n\nIt kind of gets back to the word you used early on when we started talking about the sense of service and that being a big motivation for you, choosing medicine and obviously service didn’t just mean… you talked about it in reference to a service to your patients, as far as being available and being there when they need you and so on but obviously you feel more strongly that service extends to the community as a whole because certainly, some of your patients benefitted from all that you did but it was more the community as a whole.\n\nCecil told me, he said, Charlie, your trouble is you’re a slow learner. It took you 20 years to learn, when you’re in the operating room serving one patient, that at best, you’re helping one patient. But when you start a community center, you’re helping a couple thousand. I saw him the other night at a --. He’s been my friend… everything we were able to accomplish there, I owe a lot to him and the people he gave us, who gave us all kinds of help. I went out to speak to a group, simply because one of the fellows who was working on his doctorate, helped us. He flew boxes of things to the plane. He didn’t actually fly it but the university plane flew our proposal to -- because we were late getting it printed and having 30 copies and each copy this thick. It looks like… and I say this to my children, when you get ready to do something, a good key as to whether it’s worthwhile or not is whether people volunteer to help you. My life has been that way. My father died when I was a sophomore in college and I’ve been on my own, more or less, ever since. I said --, I made it with a lot of people’s help. Help that I never anticipated. One was, I mentioned, a physician in Washington, who lives about 5 blocks from the Capitol, because he knew a relative of mine. He gave me a room in his apartment. He had an apartment over his office and he and his wife had just divorced and I guess he was kind of lonesome up there, a little frightening coming in at night with nobody there. It was not in an elegant section of Washington, around 7th and M Street. And sight unseen, I moved in with him about a month after I entered medical school and I lived there for four years. I didn’t give the key back to him until I did my internship. Our friendship grew to the fact that in the summers, I got a job in the government and stayed in Washington. When I stopped work, he and I would go on vacation together. We’d drive down to the beach. We became very good friends. He didn’t have to do this. I guess I was of some help to him but I couldn’t have made it, I don’t think, through medical school, without that help. He helped other people, he was that kind of guy. But same thing with this health center, everywhere I turned, somebody was anxious to help and did help. I have to tell you this story. I was going to a convention in Detroit with my wife and we were at the airport and I saw them milling around here, a lot of them do and I didn’t know what it was about, yet I knew a lot of these people. So I stopped and asked, where are you all going? They were going to Portland, Oregon. Must have been about 20 people there. I think they were going at their own expense, Chamber of Commerce people and County Commission. They were going out to, I guess campaign, to make Durham an all American city. You know what the centerpiece of that is? Lincoln Health Center. I got angry because I didn’t know about it and also because 5 or 6 of the people who were going, were main obstacles to getting us funded. We had to fight them tooth and toenail to get funding. But then I thought better. One thing, it means they’re onboard and they’re supportive now. And they -- they got whatever they went to. This is one of Ted Sampras’(?) objectives, to make Durham an all American city. I think is a… if you see the building over there now, it represents, I’m sure, the nicest building built in this community since I’ve been here. It’s about a $4.5 million building. And it was built with local funds. No federal funds went into that building, it was money that was raised from support of local sources. And the county now puts in about half a million dollars a year into it. The people who opposed it knew this was going to happen if we got it started so they didn’t want to do it because it is -- people. But they now, recognize that in addition to the humanitarian aspects of it, it’s the cheapest way to care for people who need service. And the people they’re serving over there are the ones they should be serving. They help people who are unemployed or underemployed, have no insurance. Some of the doctors don’t feel as warmly toward it as I do, they look at it as compared to…\n\nEvery time I’ve been to a small town and I’m talking to the doctors about the demands of patients, they say, I’m working so hard I can barely stay ahead and then I hear a young physician wants to move into town, there’s a different story that comes out of the doctors.\n\nI remember hearing myself, telling a fellow who was thinking about coming here to practice surgery, that they didn’t have room for him. John Danger (?) who worked with me here, was -- practicing in Raleigh but he just came by to kind of pay tribute because he said, he saw me in an American College of Surgeon’s meeting in San Francisco in ’96 when he was a resident in New York. At that time there weren’t too many black Fellows of the college and he met me and that impressed him. He’s about 20 years younger. I recognized in him, a-- some help, along about the time when I was doing these three jobs. I put real cleave on him to stay here and he did. He was going to Raleigh mainly because his mother lives over there. He didn’t have any other ties, particularly, to Raleigh. He went to high school. He’s going to go into practice. He gets all my practice and all he’s built up and he’s just a delightful young man. So I welcomed him to come in because we were faced at Lincoln with the fact that after the -- Watts and the white physicians no longer needed to bring their black patients over there. They also didn’t help with anything else over there. We couldn’t close, they come from -- so we needed to do enough to keep it open. From ’65 until ’75 about 10 years, we were in the interim period and he was… I think I probably would have stopped practice sooner had he not been here because he would cover for me and take up the slack.\n\nShare the load with you.\n\nYes.\n\nIf I had to…this may sound like a strange question but if I was speaking with your wife and I was asking her what it is that you have done the things you’ve done, what’s kind of kept you doing this for as long as you’ve been doing it, what do you think her perception of why it is that you’ve practiced and worked as hard as you have and all that? What is it that’s kept you going?\n\nOh, I think her perception is the same as mine. I enjoy serving people and I got fun out of it. I was doing what I was happy doing and I think she has the same feelings. She has a background in town that lends herself… her grandfather was Dr. Mole (?) a black physician here, who founded -- and lived with us until she passed two years go, in ’96. Had always talked about service and her mother.. Dr. Mole was an old timer really, he was a graduate of Shaw (?) but a very bright man. I didn’t know him, he died before she was born. But his heritage is in the family so she is as much engrossed in this as I am. We didn’t know this when we got married but it evolved. In fact, she wasn’t anxious to come back to Durham. She didn’t mind but it wasn’t her… I saw an opportunity for service and kind of wanted to come. At the time that I finished my residency and passed the board, I couldn’t go to Atlanta and practice. That would have been the other natural option. There were no hospitals there of the caliber of Lincoln. The only thing they had there were little houses or little 2 x 4 hospitals that had no programs like we had here. Maybe 25, 30 beds, run by black physicians and of course, that wasn’t what I was trained to work in. As I look around, this was a better option for us so I was the one that decided. It was either going to be come here, stay at Howard or go to Detroit. Those were about the three options. I had a relative in Detroit that really did me a real service. After I finished college, I guess I had difficulty leaving home, I didn’t have money and I wasn’t anxious to step out and try to go to medical school with no money, so I lived in Atlanta for a year, working, making a little money but not getting me toward medical school, which I had applied to and been accepted. And this uncle, who was a physician and was in a partnership with three people who ran a hospital in Detroit -- about 200 bed hospital. And he had a manpower problem and he thought I could help him and he could help me. He gave me train fare to come to Detroit. Said if I didn’t like it, he’d give me train fare back. And I went there with the idea of going to medical school in Detroit but I couldn’t get in Wayne State. It wasn’t a state school then, it was a city school and you had to be a resident of Detroit to go there. I was accepted at the University of Michigan but I didn’t have the money to go there. I figured I couldn’t hustle… wherever I went I knew I was going to have to have some base of -- so I went on to Howard where I’d been accepted.\n\nAnd you may not have found that nice doctor to give you the room in his house if you’d gone up to Detroit.\n\nWell, I think I would have gotten that sort of help. I had two aunts there, this doctor’s wife and another one who I felt sure would have helped me some. They had two kids about my age, first cousins, we’re very good friends. One of them finished University of Michigan Medical School and it was Dr. Raven’s (?) idea that we could come and work together and run this hospital. His son, he felt, didn’t have enough aggressiveness. He felt I would be a better influence on his son who was very smart. He finished University of Michigan near the top of his class. He was about a year or two behind me. But I didn’t… after I got through medical school and got through with my residency, I didn’t really like the solo practice that went on in Detroit, that I’d seen firsthand when I was an attendant. I worked in the hospital as an attendant in the operating room and then as a night manager. I saw limitations of that kind of operation and Dr. Drew wanted me to go -- so he and I were talking about my staying on the faculty at Howard in the spring of 1950. He was on his way to Tuskegee to the Tuskegee Clinic and I was too. But we had a baby less than a year old so we were going to bring the baby and leave her here with my mother-in-law. We had put her in a little drawer and we were going to Tuskegee. In fact, we went down to Atlanta and got there and heard that he’d been in automobile accident out here on -- Road and killed that morning. So we came back. I didn’t have the same interest in staying there now. He’d said to me about a month before he was killed, I guess as a show and tell session, you know the insurance companies, the insurance foundation finally has a great deal of the laboratory exploration that lives up to open heart surgery. I think they spent some $6 million, they had a big fund, and a lot of it was used in doing research to develop ways of decreasing the heart and lung while you worked on the heart. A fellow named Gibbons in Philadelphia was one of the major investigators. In Washington, I think Georgetown University, a whole morning of people presenting how they were working on this problem. And this man Gibbons was there and he had a movie of his apparatus, almost as big as this room, to take care of the cardiovascular… and fellows showing things they’d perfected to keep blood from foaming. And all the way back he was saying that he wanted to get back into research because that’s where his heart really was. He felt he had to get this educational thing demonstrated and he said, I’ve got you trained now and about 27 other fellows and they’re all doing well and I -- take a run on this momentum. That’s what I meant by he succeeded far beyond, I think what he might have expected. But when he was killed, I think all but about 5 or 6 black fellows who were fellows of the college or advanced -- were trained in this department, in just 9 years. This was a big part of his life. He went through so much denial in trying to get trained himself. He wasn’t bitter about it. His expression was that if you do things well, you can break down a lot of barriers. He really set in the chair right there and told a fellow and myself, who were both in Atlanta, that I want the two of you to go to Atlanta and break up that mess down there. You’ll be so well trained and they won’t be able to deny you the right to practice in the major hospitals in Atlanta. He said, that’s better than sitting around griping about the opportunities you don’t have because you’re black. Be good, just jump right in, run fast. That was his view and his whole life perspective. It was poorly justice that at the end, -- who was the other fellow he was talking to, he’s a young fellow about two years ahead of me in training, who finished the University of Michigan Medical School near the top of his class but couldn’t get a residency anywhere until he came to Howard. And he finished his residence in training at Howard. Dr. Drew used to call us his Georgia team. We worked together. He was my chief resident when I was --. For the last 10 years before he retired, was the Medical Director of -- Hospital, the biggest hospital in Georgia. Some of the other examples of how he succeeded. We did it with baling wire… because Freedmen’s Hospital was not a well laid out institution. They got about $700,000 a year whether they needed it or not and they never looked at… but he attacked that problem in the most remarkable way. Freedmen’s was an outgrowth of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was organized to take care of displaced persons after the Civil War. That’s where that name comes from. General Howard recognized that all the people who were displaced there were either sick or ignorant or both so they started a hospital and a school, that’s Howard University and Freedmen’s Hospital. Well, it was always an object of politics, the South Carolina Senators would wail about not going to give it any money. They gave it some but they wouldn’t give it enough to make it outstanding. Dr. Drew was the Medical Director one year. They kind of rotated and when they got ready to go to -- their budget, he asked to go with Dr. Burbridge (?) who was the -- here of the hospital administrator. The hospital was not under the university, it was under a different agency of government, the Interior Department, in fact. But Howard University had an affiliation with it. Burbridge was soft spoken and they were having this hearing before the senators about the budget and the needs were just growing. He went down after Burbridge answered one or two questions, they asked him something and he tossed the ball to Dr. Drew and about 25 minutes later, the Senator from Connecticut or somewhere who chaired the committee said, doctor, I’m sorry I have to inform you that you’ve been out of order for about 10 minutes because we hadn’t asked you the proper question. But we like what you’re saying and now we need to use the proper question so you can talk on. And he went into the fact that this was the only hospital in the District of Columbia that black physicians could practice in. It was the only one that served predominately, mostly black people in an unsegregated manner. That it was a teaching hospital for the medical school and furnished over half the black physicians. It should be first class. He didn’t understand why the government wouldn’t be a party to it being anything but that. And he pointed out… he had facts to back up what he was saying. They had a diarrhea epidemic, which were kind of common in those days, on the pediatric ward and as a result of that, they had an inspection by the legal nurses and they came in and decided they needed 22 nurses, or whatever the number, on that ward and that was 5 more than they had in the whole hospital. They were running the hospital with students. All of this was laid out so well by him in the morning session that when they adjourned for lunch, they went up to see if what he was saying had any semblance of truth and did some other investigations. When they rejoined at 3:00 they told him they were going to do something unprecedented. They were going to scrap this budget, we want you to bring us a realistic budget next week Tuesday and the budget went from $700,000 or thereabouts, to $2 million. I feel it’s fortunate for me because I was becoming chief resident that year and where the residents had been making $35, $40 a month, my salary went to $200 a month and I could support my wife and kid.\n\nThat’s an amazing story.\n\nYes.\n\nI just think probably why it’s been such a pleasure for me to talk with people, there’s so much history I don’t know. So much history about places which I know. I know the name, Charles R. Drew almost since I started teaching because of the medical center out there and I know people in Southern California and I didn’t know anything about… I remember reading a piece in JAMA or some place like that about him, oh, that’s the name, and so on.\n\nThat’s why I’m speaking to the research staff, a whole generation has passed and we were very anxious to keep his name alive, not only I guess for sentimental reasons but it’s such an inspiring story. It’s not often that a guy comes along and sweeps across the horizon and does as much as he did in the short span of his life. He was killed at 46 and he did so much, he accomplished a lot.\n\nI think the thing that you keep saying, he accomplished a lot more than he had probably ever dreamed and inspired a whole generation of physicians to go out and serve their communities in ways that he’d want them to. I think that’s another reason to keep it alive, what you guys say to other physicians.\n\nAnd it’s important to me, even though I was interested in surgery, the whole student body of Howard got a bill (?). Now one thing he believed in was excellence and he didn’t have any truck with people who would… but it brings you up to his level. He was a football coach for two years and I’m sure he was an outstanding football coach. When he finished college, he didn’t have money to go to medical school and so he took a job coaching Morgan, which is an AV school in Baltimore, it’s a state school now, but it was a small -- school then. And in a little while, they played in the same league with Central and Howard -- and in a little while they were… the second year, they were whipping the pants off of everybody. That’s another thing, he was an outstanding athlete. He finished Dunbar High School in Washington with a letter in four sports, football, basketball, track and swimming. And he went to college on a more or less, athletic scholarship. The new Ivy League schools didn’t give athletic scholarships in those days like they do now. He went to Amherst College. His coach at Amherst ruled after his death that he was the most outstanding football player that he’s had in his whole time of coaching there. He sat on the bench his freshman year, they did not pressure him to play. And nearly half of his sophomore year until the fullback got hurt and they put him in, in his place and the fullback never got played no more. He was about 6’, maybe 6’1”, weighed about 200 pounds and could run. He won the national AEU (?) 110 and higher his senior year. But the first game he got in, I forgot who Amherst was playing but it was somebody they didn’t usually beat and he got in the game because that other fellow got hurt and he gained 100 yards and scored two touchdowns and they beat that team. And of course he had all the problems of that period, racial prejudice. He was often called names. He was of fair complexion, kind of red, ruddy. His wife said, rumor was that when they called him a bad name and he got angry, he gained 10 yards.\n\nThat’s called preservation.\n\nYeah. But he would just lower his head and hit it hard. That’s a whole story, outstanding athletic career in college. He didn’t do sports at McGill. He went to McGill for Medical School. At that time in Canada, you could play sports in graduate school but he was afraid he wouldn’t do well in his academic work so he gave it up and he was able to get a fellowship after his second year there, so his financial worries were not too bad. And he finished up at the top of his class. He’s not the sort of fellow that I recall, that I think of as being brilliant, he had a good mind, but so much drive and so much determination and really, such a decent attitude toward the world. He wanted to compete (?) and he wanted to teach. He could have made a lot of money after the blood bank episode. He could have stayed in New York and one of the drug firms would have paid him three times what he was doing at Howard but that wasn’t what he wanted to do.\n\nService.\n\nAnd the other story that I like to tell, and I first heard it, when I was taking my specialty board in surgery, I had an exam in pathology, Dr. Stewart Rodman, he’s Secretary of the Board, kind of an old gentleman. Pathology was something I hadn’t been close to in a while, I was a little worried about it. I went into the room and he was trying to put me at ease and he asked me where I trained and I mentioned I trained under Drew. This was maybe 6 months after he was killed. He said, you know, I bet you never heard this story and I’m going to take 10 minutes of your time and tell it. He took 10 minutes to tell me that he was one of these -- Dr. Drew came to Hopkins to take his oars. One of the people asked him a question related to what about blood… it must have been close enough anyhow because his answer became so detailed and so comprehensive that this fellow told him to hold it just a minute. Went out and got another examiner. Before this process was over, all of the examiners that were free were in the room listening to him tell the answer to that question.\n\nGetting a little post graduate education.\n\nAnd they were so impressed that they invited him up in Hopkins wards to make rounds --. He said that never happened before and probably will never happen again. As you look through his life, there’s so many junctures of outstanding performance like this --.\n\nMust have been wonderful to know him.\n\nOh yes, and unfortunately, looking back on it, it takes on a horror, It was an event, thinking back on it, I was a little country boy up in Georgia, going to medical school and I had the hindsight to finish medical school and go back home and pass out some pills. But he changed the tea leaves in my sights and a whole lot of others too. He meant for you to do it. You had to impress him that you were going to --.\n\nHe made good choices obviously, as far as the people he chose as students of his.\n\nRight. He inspired me. I think he was like some coaches. They get more out of the team than they expect to. He made us think we could do things that we probably would have never thought we could do before. He was extremely proud of his residents too. He was just enough older to have a good rapport. .He was about 15 years older. If he was living, he was born in 1904, he’d be 85.\n\nThis has been really delightful to hear. I had no idea…\n\nYou can see I can talk.\n\nAnd I enjoyed listening. 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