{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/kw57d2s419/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Rose Pully"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["1990-08-14 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Society of Teachers of Family Medicine","Dr. Rose Pully","family medicine","family physician"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Dr. Rose Pully (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/150672/file/277883","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 3 - Pully_Rose_1990.08.14_-_Side_1.mp3"]},"duration":1902.152,"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/150672/file/277883/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150672/file/277883/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/277/883/original/Pully_Rose_1990.08.14_-_Side_1.mp3?1750280493","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":1902.152,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150672/file/277883","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150672/file/277883/transcript/81269","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Rose Pully interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150672/file/277883/transcript/81269/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Side 1: I wonder if you could start out just by telling a little bit about what led you into medicine, into medical school, what brought you to UNC.\n\nI was a laboratory technician for 7 years, finished UNC Greensboro, which was WC at that time. I did not serve any service in the war, I was marginally employed during the time of the war, WWII at Caberas County Hospital in Concord. That’s a lady said I should go get a Masters in Bacteriology because I was doing general laboratory work. And then I said, well I’ll see if I can get into medical school. So that prompted me. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I knew a physician that everyone thought, if he got through medical school I knew I could. I won’t say I was a scholar, I was no AOA [Alpha Omega Alpha, honors medical society], I tell you that. but anyway, so I applied at UNC, at that time, Paul Wittico (?) was aligned with the… he was going up what’s called oncology groups on Saturday morning and Paul had been our family physician. I’m from Kinston, I was born in LaGrange that you all bypassed coming down and we moved here when I was 3 years old, moved to Kinston so this was home. I’d been doing that 7 years as lab technician, I worked out of Kinston, in Wilmington, that old James Walker Hospital that’s no longer existing and Concord. I had a short stint in Johnston County Hospital in Smithfield where I did lab and X-ray too. But anyway, that’s where I was, in Concord at the time. I had to go to summer school. I’d taken Latin in college instead of a modern foreign language so I had to take Spanish in summer school and Trig and Calculus. So for 12 weeks of summer school because I knew I was getting in at that time. They’d just started the hospital at that time. -- Jensen in the Department of Anatomy was one of the fellows that interviewed me, said, what do you want to go to medical school for? We’re going to need lots of lab technicians up here. You can imagine in ‘47 and the planning that was going on. They’d already been through the battle whether UNC was going to be at Chapel Hill for the medical school or Charlotte or Ashville or wherever they were vying for it. -- to have it at Chapel Hill. So I really didn’t apply anywhere else. Now people were coming back after the war, fellows and some gals too that had been in service and maybe had not finished college or had not gotten pre-med courses behind them so this class was, the average age was… the 21-year-old was a rarity in our class, which I guess is about standard now, 21 or 22 straight out of college. That’s the place I applied, that’s the place I got in after a few hair-raising moments. Then got through the summer school program.\n\nWas there anyone in medicine in your family? You mentioned the one doctor that made you think you could do it. But was there anyone you admired? A physician…\n\nNot really, no relatives that were physicians so I didn’t have that heritage to have to carry on. No, not at all. My father died when I was 10 years old so naturally we were kind of close to the family doctor because of that. My mother was left with 6 children. I was 10 and there were two younger than I. He was the kind of person when you needed a recommendation we called Dr. Paul. Couldn’t remember the last name. He continued to be a friend and after I started practicing, of course he was retired, he’d call and tell me to do something for somebody. Go see some patient. And I do that to the fellows that are practicing now. Don’t you think so-and-so… I try to stay out of… See, I closed my office in 1976 but I transferred to the University of Pennsylvania for the last two years and migrated back south by interning in Richmond in Virginia and then came down to Watts for a year of internal medicine. Went to Baptist Hospital for 6 months pediatric. I wanted general practice and there was no program for general practitioners at that time, you just picked and chose what you wanted, what you needed. And I came home and the docs were very supportive, locally, the physicians. We had two hospitals here. There was some competition but it was not really a real thing like it has been in other eastern North Carolina towns. In the private hospital, the man who owned it said well… I went to see him, he said, well, we’ll think about it. So I think it was, this may not speak well either, at the direction of the local funeral director who was a friend and was going to be my patient, he talked a private doctor into giving me privileges in 6 months because the county hospital was available, I had no trouble getting privileges at the county hospital. So in about 6 months I’d been practicing they called and said, you can come over any time. This was how formal it was in those days. Limited. Older hospitals. So I had no problem. I was about 27 when I started medical school. I really think that was an advantage, rather than straight out of college, for various reasons. We had a fairly closely knit class. I had very esteemed people. Chris Fordham was my classmate and Dewie Dorsett that you might know from Charlotte. Then Ed Monroe, who was your adversary over in East Carolina was a classmate. We had people that have gone far and wide and done well in that class of ’50.\n\nYou said there were 5 or 6 women in your class?\n\nYes. One girl dropped out, she married one of the boys in the class, Ed McKinzie from Salisbury, you might know him. He does surgery over there. Nan was from up in the mountains, they got married between freshman and sophomore year. The story was, his father didn’t approve of women doctors so Nan dropped out of med school. Bright gal. Had always wanted to study medicine but she raised babies instead. Out of the group, because they’re all retired now, of gals, Jean McGavern, her uncle was the Dean of the Public Health. You may see Edwin McGavern’s name around the Public Health building. Jean’s parents were missionaries so she came to live with her uncle and aunt in Chapel Hill and was in medical school. She’s married and Maxine Darr… when I got to Carolina, I found out that a couple gals had been in college with me 7 years before. That was another thing, some of the gals went into the WAVEs or the WACs or some military service and med school after that. It was a different climate than the 22-year-old. Maxine waited until she was 50 years old t o get married but she’s a widow now, lives on the West Coast. Louise Ulman went up to Hopkins. She married but Ray Lumpkin is practicing… or she may be retired now, around Seven Corners, Virginia near Falls Church.\n\nBut you’ve kept in touch with people.\n\nYes. At least where they are. Maxine and I she was at WC when I was there. Marian Fisher was in the class ahead of us and she was a WC classmate. She was at Carolina Med School a year ahead of us. I looked around other places, talking about coming where you went to practice. I had the groove that if you worked, you could make a living anywhere. I tell students, you can go to the desert and make a living if it’s not too dangerous if you’re willing to work at it. If you approach it with a 40-hour week idea, it’s had to make a living in private practice unless you join groups. I think one of the reasons doctors may have trouble in rural communities is that’s where your Medicare and Medicare recipients are and with the reimbursement percentages they’re getting, they have an independent income otherwise but… and a lot of places in rural communities, it’s not so much now as it was 40 years ago, the school system’s doctor’s have children and they want the schools to be the best and prepare their kids for college, for the most part. Every doctor’s child doesn’t go to college… I think that’s one of the things I’ve dipped into at Infant Mortality Task Force meetings, which I’m really more of an observer, I’m not really working on it but they were talking about Medicaid patients that are pregnant and deliver under the Medicaid umbrella. The physicians are getting 54% of their fee for taking care of the Medicaid patient and delivering them. So when you cut that much from what their standard fee is, assuming of course we all think the fees are too high now because it’s so different from what it was, everything’s different from what it was 40 years ago.\n\nWhat did happen with reimbursement and things like that when you first started in practice?\n\nWe didn’t have. People had a little insurance but you didn’t have… you had welfare recipients… when I first started, office visits were $2, that sounds ridiculous now. I tell you where I worked first and this will come home to you because you know these people. I just took 6 months of pediatrics at -- Gray and I was going to start off in January practice rather than the usual July or August. The… oh gosh, I can’t think of it and that’s one of the problems now. Pattison, Fred Pattison had his heart attack so Dr. Fleming, who was in Durham where I had some training at Watts, called me and said that Kemp Jones needed somebody to come over and help him and they were in that little frame building, right across from the planetarium and it’s all covered with things now, but anyway, still sitting there last time I was on Franklin Street. So I went down and worked with Kemp Jones for 6 months. Jonah (?) had not finished his training and Jonah’s already retired I understand.\n\nGetting close.\n\nHe had not finished his training so he was scheduled to join them in private practice. So I lived in Chapel Hill and in Glenland for 6 months, practiced with Kemp. Of course their office visits were $2 in those days too so that’s where I learned office management.\n\nI’ll tell him when I see him, his principles have stayed with you.\n\nBecause Kemp’s still practicing I think. He had been there a little while, I few years, maybe not more than 2 or 3 with Fred Patterson at the time. Of course Fred came back after awhile. In fact, Fred came back before I left. So I learned a lot about rural Orange County. I was thinking about it the other day, when we had the flu season, I made 3 house calls one Sunday.\n\nOne day.\n\nYes. I was on call that weekend but it was a wonderful experience for me and everybody at the university had to have a physical too so when spring came alone, they went through that office 100 per day. You can imagine the depths of the physicals they had. But the townspeople used the swimming pool in those days Or that’s my impression or maybe they were faculty families, which of course is largely what was there anyway, in 1954. They gave me a lot of good experience. They did not have hospital practice, you were confined to the office so you can turn out a lot more work if you don’t have to go to the hospital. They had professional management, that fellow that initiated professional management in this state who’s now dead. He was advising them. Of course, Fred had been in practice a number of years and his mama still lived around the corner.\n\nI talked to Kemp, I spent an afternoon with him talking about his story and I was real interested because I’ve been in Chapel Hill about 11 years now. He was one of the few… he was actually one of the only community practicing physicians when I moved there, which now it’s quite different.\n\nBecause Lemon (?) had already retired.\n\nThat’s right. And Fred Patterson died about 6 years ago, I think.\n\nYes, been at least that long.\n\nAnyway, I talked to Kemp and it was a delightful conversation, learned a lot more about Chapel Hill than I’d ever heard before.\n\nYes. I made a house call in the country and a man had a strangulated hernia. We had to call an ambulance to carry him to Watts because Chapel Hillians went to Watts before they had a hospital in Chapel Hill. It was open at that time, in ’54, the hospital was functioning. I don’t think Kemp or Fred, neither one went to any clinics later. I think they attended some clinics. I’ve always wanted to go back to this place where I made a house call where the man had a strangulated hernia, an elderly man because you went out like you were going towards Greensboro and then turned off on the dirt road and clay roads that you know now and you crossed a little stream and a rock popped a hole in my gas tank. Then later, a few weeks later, several weeks later they called me to see a tenant that’s on this farm. Popped a hole in my gas tank again. Made the same mistake twice. But it was interesting because sometimes they had snow and wet roads. You didn’t make a whole lot of calls but one time my brother called me about","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150672/file/277883#t=0.0,660.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3180/collection_resources/150672/file/277883/transcript/81269/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"at night, disguised his voice, he made out like he was somewhere out on Pittsboro Road and it was a deserted road in those days and he thought he had pneumonia. I didn’t really catch his voice for awhile. Because the police were very nice, they’d said if we got called out at night to let them know, particularly in a rural area. I was thinking, how am I going to get out of this? Then finally he said, let me talk to mama. My mother came up and lived with me. She of course lived in -- but she came up to keep house for me. In ’54 I came home and opened an office in August. I did some others, I did some in Burlington, I went to Battleboro outside of Rocky Mound. I believe those were about the only two communities I went and just talked to doctors. At that time in Burlington, a lot of the doctors had obstetrical clinics in their office and they would keep people overnight and deliver. I know there were 2 or 3 doctors in Burlington that were doing that in ’54.\n\nWas that a cost issue or didn’t have privileges at the hospital?\n\nNo, it’s just that the hospitals weren’t that well developed. -- down at Mets County now and you have to talk to a real old-timer. Ed Sutton, of course is up there. He was not an old timer, he hadn’t even started then, he was in my class too, Ed Sutton from Burlington. He was doing general practice down near Rockingham and then he went back to do an OB/GYN residency and went to Burlington. I don’t know the doctor’s name but I just made a call on him, he was looking for a partner. But I think there were at least 2 or 3 doctors that were delivering, with offices right there in town and keeping… and it may have been calls -- when you talk -- calls today, it’s not even in the same ballpark. I came home… I told them I came over, I’d be short room and board because I lived with my mother. I was trying to think, women physicians, I knew 2 or 3, Pennsylvania classmates, that had family responsibilities at home. Not necessarily responsibilities but they lived with their mother while they practiced. In fact, the gal I had an apartment with in Philadelphia, she’s from Lewistown, Pennsylvania, she had that situation too. I started in ’54 and continued until ’76. My plan was to try to retire at 55 years of age so people would say, that old fool don’t know what she’s doing, she ought to retire. But I didn’t make it until 57. I didn’t hear it. Then it turned out they were getting that ECU Medical School started about that time and Jim Jones was chairman of the department and I had known Jim down from private practice since he was of course, just getting started with the department over there. The hospital had not been completed and the family medicine department was in a module type building, not a trailer but a module building. He and a nurse practitioner were running it and he needed… they were trying to build up the patient load before the new residents came. So in about ’77, I went over there one or two afternoons a week and he had recruited other doctors to come in, into this clinic setting. Of course the family medicine department was being built at that time. -- Wilkerson that you might know UNC graduate, gave up an afternoon of his office and there was a doctor from here that went over and then he recruited that fellow for the evening that’s no longer in the state. I’m trying to think who else, that would go over. Of course Jim was running around to meetings all day. This was when they were getting the organization means of the ECU school. And then he did employ a full-time faculty person, one other person and Jim and about that time residents started coming in. This fellow left, he was there a couple years. Then he got a fellow from Duke. By that time they were in the new family practice department, or in the clinic, rather. The Brody Building had not been completed. I wound up being over there about 5 years, went to full time and then cut back 4 days a week. From about ’77, ’78 until in the early ‘80s.\n\nWere you in solo practice your whole time in Kinston?\n\nYes. I was in solo practice. There were 3 other solo practitioners in family medicine or general practice. I started out in general practice, see, they didn’t have boards for family medicine at that time and I love to tell this story. You have to have a sense of humor to practice medicine. When they were talking about the boards and getting board certified, I said to Rolf Folcom (?) who came here after I did in ’55, he was a Duke graduate and I said, Rolf, the reason I’m doing general practice is because I didn’t want to go to school any more and I didn’t want to be a resident anymore and I didn’t want to take any more exams. Then they come up with the board certification. We’d been practicing a few years, I’m not going to apply to take that thing. So we neither one took it the first year. And then he came calling one day and said, Rose, I read Sylvia Porter’s column and she said we’re going to have socialized medicine and if you’re not certified, you’re going to be out of luck when we have socialized medicine. So I said, well all right, Rolf, we’d better take that exam.\n\nTo prepare yourself for socialized medicine.\n\nThat’s right. So we both took it the second year. \n\nI have to take my fourth go-around this coming year and I kept saying, I don’t know how many more times I’m going to be able to do this.\n\nI retired when the third go around came around and I took it a third time but I did so poorly on the score that I said, no more. I’m not going to do it anymore.\n\nWas it hard to come back to your hometown in any way?\n\nNo. I think it’s really nice to be in your hometown. -- is about 25,000. Of course when I came back, it was probably about 19[,000] and probably about 12[,000] or 14,000] when I was living here. My father had been in business, my brothers were running it. We were raised and educated on a barbecue business. My father died when I was 10, my two older brothers were running this place. My sister taught school here, I finished high school here. I was just talking to the lady who worked for me the whole time I was in practice just before you all came. She’s in her eighties. She still does Pink Lady work on Tuesday mornings at the hospital, but she fell or fainted Saturday, at a yard sale. I’ve seen her 2 or 3 times. She said, I just don’t feel right in my head. I said, you’d better go in and call that doctor, go see a real doctor. I didn’t find it hard, I tell people when they retire the thing to do is leave your home community because you still get called on. But no, I feel very comfortable with my peers, as far as classmates are concerned. Miss Blow (?), the lady I was just talking to on the phone said, is there anybody you didn’t go to school with? Everybody calls in and said, I went to school with Rose, I know she’ll see me. We’ve had several local doctors, several local fellows come back.\n\nI had an experience in January, I was in Ohio. There’s a consortium of schools there called Northeast Ohio University College of Medicine. All these new schools that were put together to solve the problems of primary care. But I was sitting and talking to some senior residents from a community hospital program in Ohio and I said to this resident, I said, what are you going to do in July? He said, well I’m going to go to a community that’s about 8,000 people and it’s about 20 miles from my hometown, it’s just like my hometown but it’s not my hometown, that’s where I’m going to go practice. And I said, did you think about going to your hometown? And he said, oh yeah, I thought about it but I would never go to my hometown because I don’t want to tell all the people that I know, bad news. And this other guy that was sitting there said, that’s exactly why I’m going to my home town because I think I’m the best one to tell them that. So it was an interesting contrast. Both were going to small towns, one was going to his hometown, one was going to a duplicate but far enough away so he wouldn’t have to take care of…\n\nAnd sometimes you can tell them good news.\n\nDo you have any of that kind of sense, that it might be difficult for you to practice?\n\nNo. Not really. One of the first patients I had was an operating supervisor from the private hospital that I didn’t have privileges, 8 months pregnant and now a nurse, of course. She’d been told by the physician she’d been seeing that she should have a C-section, which he probably was right. I said, I’m not touching you, no sir. Now I will be with you but we’re going to have the obstetrician deliver you because she was going to a general practitioner who of course -- deliveries. But he would not have done a C-section, he would have sent her to the general surgeon, which would have been alright. Turned out she had a good 24 hours of labor so she probably should, it was going to be a breech. That child did well, he got married and had three children now. This reminds me, I was on the Board of Medical Examiners, I jump around a lot, I was on the Board of Medical Examiners at one time and this was down in the southeast part of the state and they were interrogating a man-. One of the Charlotte doctors that was on the board said, this chart is not complete, I don’t see any family history. And the man said, Lord, I can tell you all about him, he’s got a sister’s who’s an alcoholic, has got this and that. I can tell you all about him. But you don’t have it on the chart. I thought, oh God. I bet I’d already retired --. No, I tell you, a lot of the students and residents too, feel like that you’ve got to know everything and how to handle any situation. That’s the beauty of family medicine, you can refer. Not to tell somebody bad news but you’re there to support them. They don’t expect you to save everything. I think if you can get across to patients, I’m going to do everything I can and you’re not improved and I feel like there’s something that can be improved, I’m going to get you somewhere to get you another opinion. And I’ve tried to instill that in my patients because I really felt that way, that I did not know all the answers. When you had a death, some of the worst deaths are these 40- and 50-year-old women dying of ovarian cancer. Those are some of the saddest moments that I have and yet you’re there for the family, you’re there when they die, you’re there in that terminal stage, you make house calls to see them when it’s an inevitable thing That’s all the family can ask of you when you, knock on wood, I’ve never been…\n\nI’m almost curious how that’s changed over time. Did you feel that same way the first few years you were in practice, about kind of feeling comfortable with what you were able to do about providing care and not necessarily being able to cure folks?\n\nYes. There are one or two things that I can think back, now that I’m removed from it that I thought I had the answers and I didn’t. I see some of the errors I made. I saw the errors then too but I kept them to myself and there was an instance which a child had epilepsy and the child died. We were doing everything we knew to do and I was trying to get the child to the neurologist over in Greenville at the time. I’ve been retired since ’76 so this was 18 years ago, or more. We lost that kid and this was a son of a… it was the grandson that had been a tenant on a farm that my mother… this is a relationship, I used to -- on that farm so I knew the father of the child, growing up, from boyhood up. But they never questioned anything, continued to see them as patients. It was not a furor but there were things that you…\n\nSide 2: …the whole thing. She had had transient numbness on one side of her body and she was a farm wife, real nice person, pillar in that part of the county. I thought it was bizarre but she didn’t check out. The sensation was okay when I examined her. I was worried enough about her so Sunday I went to pay a visit to see her. That was in the fall and she wanted to go down to Florida to see some relatives in December and she did. She fell down there and it was about January before I got -- before the diagnosis was made, early 1955. She never complained of headache once. It was a duoblastoma (?) and I can’t remember how many months she lived, but even when before she died, she never had an aspirin for a headache. I made house calls to see her. The husband remarried, he had all his family. But the children and the grandchildren continued to come to the office, very nice relationship. Whenever they had a family affair, a wedding or anything papa would bring me some of the barbecue, her son, not her husband, her son and he’s dead now. He had a lot of cholesterol and that kind of problems. The family history, where you can trace things when I was working over at ECU with the medical students because my assignment in family medicine was undergrad with the medical students. We were trying to make the importance of family tree and all that stuff, teaching hog wash, they didn’t come to medical school to learn about family trees, the importance of that. Nutrition, oh God, they still give you that course? So I tried to carry and Chris Rimmers (?) tried to carry some of his families to show them how the patterns work. You don’t see that when a patient walks into the office as a single human being but it takes years to put that altogether. I’ll let you ask some questions now.\n\nOne of the things that I’m very interested in because again, it comes form the kind of comments that residents are making and you were around students and residents and these things come up. It’s a whole sense of having a professional life and a personal life, as if there’s some kind of great distance between those two and clearly what happens, seems to me, when you come to a small town or a place where you know everybody like kids when you grew up, that that isn’t very easy to do.\n\nIt’s not that distinctive, no.\n\nBut if you could just talk a little bit about what that experience has been like for you and what it was like, say when you were younger and retiring…\n\nI have heard women physicians say this, that came back into their communities. One of the gals that was on the faculty there, she goes back to her home community, the gals she grew up with treat her differently, that she doesn’t get into the women’s group as a woman. And I can see why this might be true. However I’m sure that people who have wives and families or husbands and families is different than a single person. A single person can fit in pretty well. I still have friends that I had from elementary, grade school still living here and we still do things together. But I think it’s different for the single woman that comes back into her home community where she still has classmates that are living, even though they’re married and my age, they’ve all got grandchildren. But it’s a little different. I wish medical students felt a little more comfortable that your patients are your friend. For instance, this fellow I spoke of that is going into emergency room medicine. It’s not that he was unhappy with family medicine or the circumstances but for instance, he had a patient that was a good friend, a farm down in Jones County and it was a real outing. He and his wife would spend Saturday afternoon with this man on the farm, he had peacocks and all that kind of thing. They were friends, they did things together, went fishing together. He had, I know another family that when he was leaving they gave a party for him that lived out in the rural community. They just enjoyed things together so you don’t necessarily… you can be the doctor and be the friend too. I think so often, the spouse may make a difference in choosing those friends. In a small community you can do this, enjoy doing things together. I’ve taken trips with people who were patients that I didn’t grow up with.\n\nI guess my imagination is that residents or younger doctors, these are folks who actually think, that somehow may be awkward or difficult or uncomfortable.\n\nAs long as you don’t think that you have to be God almighty and some of them feel like they have to assume that role. I don’t know that they act like that. -- we’ve got a new internal medicine man here and my sister-in-law has just moved back here. She said, well, he just treated me like he had all the time in the world when she went into see him. I said, great because it’s so perfunctory. Of course, I blame a lot of this on specialists. Even you go to a doctor that does internal medicine and if he really has done a fellowship in cardiology, he look at you like a heart. We had to have help in my home because my mother’s health and my sister’s health for a number of years and one of these ladies has had her coronary arteries ballooned last week, 10 days ago. But her problem is, the weakness in my legs, Dr. Polly, it still bothers me. I said, I’d hoped that coronary -- and your legs would feel better too because I don’t know what’s wrong with your legs. I don’t know that anybody’s addressed her legs. I’m sure they -- but they don’t even listen to her when she complains of that. I don’t think she ought to hurt all that much in her legs and feel so weak in her legs because she’s got some arthritis in her knee joints. They’re not knees that you’re going to send to surgery, they’re not that kind of an arthritic process. I was talking to her last night, she called me Sunday, she had shortness of breath. I’m retired 15 years.\n\nYou sound like one of the busiest retired doctors I’ve heard.\n\nWell, I went up there to see her and she had a rate about 140, I thought she was in atrial fib. She just got back home about 5 days before and had been to the doctor 2 days before and he put her on the treadmill three days after hospital dismissal and she did well on the treadmill last Friday. And here it is Sunday and she was lying there… she was lying flat in bed and she wasn’t sweating but she did have some pressure in her chest. She’d been on -- before she went in, they took her off of it and had her on Procardia and Lopressor on Friday and hell, I don’t what those two things do. I didn’t prescribe Procardia and Lopressor. I had to come home and read the book. I still get the PDR every year. We called the doctor in Greenville that had done it and somebody else was taking his calls on Sunday at 1:00 in the afternoon. I told him she had some Lanoxin there, he said, why don’t you give her two Lanoxin and see. So she was better in 2 or 3 hours, enough that she could sit up and her daughter came in. I didn’t leave her by herself, her daughter was there. But they call you This woman helped me in my home for 7 years with my mother and my sister, she’s like a member of the family. And I said, you go see your internist this week. Don’t you tell him I saw you Sunday, you just call the doctor in Greenville. These are things I shouldn’t do. Of course my malpractice doesn’t cover that stuff. But anyway, she’s not going to sue me.\n\nHas the issue of privacy and you having some privacy in your life been a problem?\n\nI’m sure it would be in families, where you had… I didn’t have people knocking on my door, this kind of thing.\n\nSo there were some places you could go.\n\nYes. The only invasion of privacy that I can recall, in one instance I had a woman who had a psychiatric problem and she was seeing Eugene Hargrove, he was in private practice in those days in Raleigh and he was a psychiatrist in Raleigh. My car sat behind my office and one night when I came out, that woman was sitting in the front seat of my car. That made me mad. I told her not to ever do that again. I didn’t say too much to her but she was not out of it, she was not psychotic. Her husband says, why can’t I go talk to Dr. Hargrove? But Dr. Hargrove would only talk to the patient. We had to learn a lot about psychiatry.\n\nIn the fifties, there were a lot of family docs that were going back into psychiatry from general practice.\n\nYes.\n\nFrom the reading I’ve been doing there was actually a lot of financial support to create a whole cadre of psychiatrist, there were so many patients that had needs.\n\nWe don’t have a full time one here in Kinston now. We have one in the mental health clinic that’s available for private patients. He lives in New Bern so of course that restricts as far as his time is concerned. But we don’t have a full time private psychiatrist. I’m trying to think if we even had one for a limited period of time that wasn’t affiliated with the mental health clinic. I don’t think we have. We have a psychologist who sees certain problems but we don’t have a psychiatrist, except the one with the mental health clinic. Of course, Greenville has several, -- has several, Bryn Mawr Hospital in Jacksonville, a psychiatric hospital. They just added more beds at Pitt Memorial for psych because they have a psychiatric wing.\n\nOne of the things we’ve been talking about for a long time has been this whole question of different stages of someone’s career in a community. I’ve look at a lot of stories about physicians who have come and it seems there are certain times during the course of a 25- or 30-year career in a community that an issue gets raised about, do we want to stay here or not? Or that people in a sense, kind of go through the reassessment of their work and make some changes internally or something. Can you think of different points during your career here?\n\nNot in my career. I was more or less tied down, as far as making any changes. My mother lived to be 99 so for almost 8 years we had help at home with her. She was not invalid, never had a stroke, broke hip, both hips, knee, that kind of thing. We had broken bones and I’m very careful about holding the rail. There was never…that you could really radically make a change. But Rolf -- came in, in ’55. He’s still doing family medicine or general practice. He’s made a career change, this other fellow did go into emergency medicine. He’s much younger than we were, he didn’t come until… I quit in ’76, he must have come around ’75. He went into emergency medicine but he changed wives too so that makes a difference. Rolf still had the same wife. Then Steve Soul (?) was a native and he continued and when I retired, before Cecil, although we were high school classmates. Rose, what in the world are you going to do? I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t practicing medicine, he’d probably be bored. Well he got married again too. But anyway, he’s retired now. I think he’s doing some part time work and I’m going to the health department now. I don’t tell many people that because --. They needed a doctor for the high-risk baby clinic and so it’s four hours a week. I’ve been doing it almost two years now. The gal that was in charge was the gal that had that 8-month pregnancy. She just retired last month. She was administrative help, she went onto other things, I believe -- operate rooms and having babies. So I’ve been in that a couple of years. The pediatric nurse practitioner needed a preceptor to sign those records so that they can have nurse practitioner help.\n\nFirst of all, were there any times, even though it sounds like there were some constraints that really make it difficult, if not impossible to think about changing and going somewhere else and doing something else, were there times that kind of crossed your mind, either doing something else or going somewhere else?\n\nDr... oh gosh, give me the name of the man that was in infirmary for so many years, the senior manager, it was probably before you came though.\n\nI’ve heard his name.\n\nHe called me and said, aren’t you ready to get out of this rut? This was not too long before I retired actually. I said, this rut is so deep down here, I can’t get out of it. He was looking for an infirmary physician. So that kind of thing. You read about mission work and it would be interesting to go to a foreign place and many doctors have done this. They certainly do have to have the support of their partners. It’s very difficult to break away. I notified my patients a year in advance that I was retiring. I notified them 12 months in advance for them to start looking and them of course it was hard to find a doctor too. It’s still, in many instances hard to find a doctor. I still was left with hundreds of charts that I eliminated after 11 years of holding them.\n\nAs you think back, the other part of it, what kept you here? What was the powerful…\n\nOh well, when you’re 10 years old when your father dies and you’re one of 6 children and your mother had sent you to school. When I was a senior in college I had two younger brothers who were freshmen in college and in 1929 the Depression hit. My sister was in college at that time because she was older than I. You knew your responsibility was at home to look after them and be available. That’s one reason I quit in ’77. I thought it was getting too much. We practiced medicine day and night, even if you had people taking calls. I tell them, after we moved to the new hospital, that was of course in operation before I quit, in ’76 -- that emergency room and of course we had ER doctors when I quit, we didn’t have that week on call after we moved out of the old hospital. In fact, we probably didn’t have before I left the old hospital. Because people didn’t go to the emergency room then.\n\nFor everything.\n\nNo, no. It’s a terrible habit that we have. But it’s because doctors have been available to call at home, their name’s in the telephone book. Now Jean Smith came here to do OB, it’s a woman, single. Her mother lived with her but her mother died just a few years after she came here in private practice. We thought it would be nice to have an answering service so she and I financed an answering service. We wound up continuing to finance it for a long time. Then we were paying state minimum wage for the operators and the Interstate Commerce got us so we wound up paying the Federal Government appointed lawyers for the employees. They didn’t strike, we didn’t know this was going on but apparently they were entitled to federal employee minimum wage, which was greater than state because of the telephone lines go across state line, telephone calls go across state line. Locally we had a few businesses fall into it, not fall into it but pay a fee a month. So it cost us a few hundreds of dollars but we got out of that business. She was living alone and someone was living with her part time but she didn’t have anybody to answer her phone when she was out, she was an obstetrician. We have an answering service now but we didn’t then. Now it goes through the hospital operators, as far as doctor phone calls. Didn’t have beepers either, didn’t have that facility.\n\nWhen you said you felt some sense of responsibility and duty, was that obviously more than to your family.\n\nYes, to your patients. It’s a mixed feeling, leaving… it was just as much trouble to go out of town three days as it was for a month. Because I did take vacations. I took anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 weeks. One year, I got a fellow who’s in practice in Durham now if he hasn’t retired, but he was a resident. He came down and I got so tickled. His wife’s name was Princess something but she’s not a princess, that was her first name. He put a note on one of my charts, “This child is getting half and half, half Pepsi and half water.” Ed Williams was his name. He came down and worked for me a month and Sara Lee Warren and my mother and I, went to California. Drove to California.\n\nSara Lee is one of the great vacation takers I’ve ever…\n\nYes, she’s a master at it.\n\nDid you meet Dr. Warren during the summer? \n\nShe’s retired a few years now.\n\nShe’s famous --. Sara Lee’s so funny but she’s always heading off to… she’s one of the happiest retired people I’ve ever seen. Africa. She’s off going to the opera, going to the rain forest.\n\nThey took tours of Italy for the opera, she and Betsy Parker. Sara Lee and I drove, though she did most of the driving until after last fall.\n\nYou went with her?\n\nYes, 6 week trip.\n\nI saw her after she got back, she said it was wonderful.\n\nShe drove down the highway back in the fifties when it was still a dirt road and a rocky road. She always wanted to say she drove up and down that highway, so she drove 90% of that trip and I sat there with a map and got lost in Fairfax. I don’t know anything that was really a hassle about maybe I should make a change. After all, I came home in ’54 and my mother died in ’87. Then my sister had Alzheimer’s and she was a widow with no children so that’s why moving here, the house we lived in for 60 odd years, was down College Street. But my sister had this home. She was a teacher and this was her home. So we said, we’ll just sell the home place after my mother died and we moved here, then my sister died about a year and a half ago. Of course we dreaded the Alzheimer’s end result but she developed cancer of the colon and died postoperatively. She died of perforation of the small intestine, not perforation of the resection. It was a resection and we were glad about that because we didn’t want a colostomy in an Alzheimer’s patient. Because she was ambulatory and fed herself. She was not as bad as she was going to get from that disease. Now I’m living by myself for the first time in 70 years. I adjust very well. I don’t worry about it. You do think, I’ll tell Francis about that, we went for a ride every afternoon. That kind of thing. And we had help all the time. I didn’t carry the whole burden the whole time, we had people working for us as long as 6 or 7 years. We were very lucky about that because you have a lot of turnover with problems, chronic problems, health problems, getting help. So I didn’t really make any career changes. I guess I didn’t have the pressure to make career changes as somebody who’s married. I don’t really have any positive answers about that.\n\nIt’s curious to me. I was just talking to a friend of mine before I came over, he’s in health service research, he’s a family doctor doing health service research work about the choices in a small towns, in rural underserved areas. He practiced in Maine for 4 years. He was telling me the story of some of the things that made him think about leaving and there’s this kind of… my bias is, people get through the first 6, 7 years with the community, that the family and the individual and everybody kind of gets settled in. And then you can get into something that’s the middle period where you kind of do your practice and you’re comfortable and people make internal arrangements in a lot of ways of maybe changing the practice a little bit, maybe getting a partner and so on but essentially there’s this long kind of plateau and then generally when people start thinking about… I’m not sure which comes first, thinking about retirement and the changes start to happen, or the changes start to happen that causes people to think about retirement. I’m not sure how that works.\n\nHistorically, doctors worked until they dropped but I think, certainly doctors are going to retire early so that’s going to take care of the new doctors coming along, doctors that aren’t going to work until they’re 85 years of age, or I don’t think they are. Dr. -- did general practice here, he had a stroke or something, a heart attack or something, takes them away. People are living longer too. I said, if you’re going to have more doctors or too many doctors, it’s be good. If we’re going to have too many doctors, they’re going to be in cardiology or dermatology or neonatology or… they’re not going to be in primary care. Or I feel like they’re not. Of course I’m very disappointed, working at ECU, got 3 people, 4 people that were students when I was there, freshman, sophomore medical students and now they’re faculty, people over there in these subspecialties. You know that’s not what you were supposed to do with it.\n\nIn Carolina, we’re a lot worse. We finally had a good year last year, above the national average for the first time in the 10 years I’ve been here.\n\nWell now, ECU was better this year, better than when I was working on the program, I was getting a little paranoid about not enough of them going into it. Jim Jones told me to go talk to Bob Braim, I don’t know if you know Dr. Braim or not. Braim was OB/GYN head then, it was before he made so many changes and he’s back down as -- director now, doing other things too. Jim said, Rose, you go down there and talk to Bob and find out why so many students are interested in OB/GYN. So I’ve known Bob for a number of years so it was not like a new thing. Rose, you know, historically the bottom of the class goes into OB/GYN, which I really didn’t know. But now that we’ve got machines that measure labor pains and contractions, you see, and tell you when something happens, you’d better stop and do a C-section, the students like that because they can see changes on a picture and they don’t have to go by the seat of their pants, so to speak, make a decision by the seat of their pants. So that was the message I came away with --. And the gastroenterologists were getting more scopes. A woman called me the other day, she’s bordering on depression. She calls me about twice a year just to talk and she had been -- she’s on the allergy kick about -- she says. She had been to see an allergist out of town. He had told her that her gut was not working right, which is a good general approach. He remembered one time she went on a house party somewhere, this was when she was a teenager and they were probably horsing around, a bunch of boys and gals and she got kicked in the stomach and she had wondered if that was what was wrong with her gut, 30 years later. So I’m picturing the difference between the anatomy of the gut and the physiology of the gut the best I could on the telephone and told her. She said, well I certainly to feel relieved. She just recently had this message from the allergist. I think she was relieved too, didn’t have anything to do with her being kicked in the gut.\n\nYou don’t need a full-time psychiatrist here, you’re doing all the work for them.\n\nThat’s telephone, that’s not --. No, I feel very uncomfortable with psychiatric problems. The doctors say, Rose, you spoiled all these patients and this is because it was my life. I was running out steam. I didn’t know what stress was until I went over to Greenwood and they talked about stress related things for the students, we were teaching the students how to avoid stress. I said, I wonder if that’s what was wrong with me?\n\nI don’t know if it’s easier when you put a name to it or not.\n\nI trudged down that hall and there was a little sleeping room between the emergency room and getting to the elevators and go to the beds at this hospital and the little sleeping room is a couple of cots in there that the lab technicians or X-ray technicians use when they’re on call. I would meander in there and stretch out for 15 minutes, walking to the elevator. It was time to quit when you have to do that.\n\nOne more thing I wanted to…\n\nI’m not answering you very directly on that.\n\nSomething comes up, and again, I grew up in Wisconsin, I’ve been down here 11 years now so I’m getting to know North Carolina a little bit. Part of this came out when we talked to Kemp Jones, is that the doctor in a culture where segregation, black and white patients and all that kind of thing was still in existence when you started practice.\n\nYes, we had segregated waiting rooms when I started.\n\nCan you tell me a little bit about what it was like to practice in that kind of…\n\nSomebody from Wisconsin would not have --. The lady who was here is a cleaning woman today, was a patient of mine and also cleaned my office. She comes and helps me a day a week now. Having grown up here, they were part of our lives, so far as the black population is concerned. Of course, we saw black patients and we had separate waiting rooms. Then the Civil Rights or whatever prompted that, so then we made our black waiting room our file cabinet room and took the chairs out and moved them all over together. I had a small waiting room. I really had a dinky little office, in fact one or two patients -- linoleum on the floor, there was no carpet on the floor and there was no leather chairs. It’s true, but I never went in through the waiting room, I went in through the back door. I’m sure I would have had to do something if I’d continued to practice, to upgrade my facility. I rented, I didn’t buy a building because when I quit I wanted to quit without something making me to continue to have to work.\n\nI’m shocked by how many of the doctors, different things I’ve read, stories about people, really served in a community where there were a lot of…\n\nSide 3: …people get placed.\n\nYou’re the third unmarried female doctor I’ve talked to and I wonder what you think about that. You said that most of the women in your class got married.\n\nYes. Rae Lumkin is the only one that has remained single. It’s interesting, several years ago I was up in that area and went to spend the afternoon with Rae. Since she started practicing, she had all people about her age coming in. I had a lot of old folks at first -- I’m not going to take anybody over 65 so I don’t have to mess with Medicare. We went through the whole Medicare, the hassle, whether we were going to have Medicare or not and -- Medical Society meetings, back and forth and we had some right wingers here and you had that hassle. And you thought, well, somebody’s got to do this. Actually, we talked about fees and charges. My collection was very good. My fees were a little low. But anyway, Rae started out with people her age and then here she’d been practicing 18, 19, 20 years so they were getting old and she was having to go to the hospital more as she got older than she did in the early stages. A lot of people would stop, I stopped doing OB after two years. I didn’t want to do it in the first place and -- said, Rose, you got to do it. Well I have to admit, he and Sam Parker were very helpful. If I got in a bind, they were there. That’s another thing, the attitude of the other doctors in the town toward each other. That is your best support. If you’ve got somebody you don’t hesitate to pick up the phone. That depends on the rapport there. Besides that, we had two hospitals. Most of the docs that went to County Hospital did not go to the other hospital anyway.\n\nDo you think it would have been difficult or impossible to practice the kind of medicine you did if you had been married?\n\nI think it would have been the hours but that is part of my makeup. I’m slow and I’m a procrastinator. It would have been very difficult unless… depending on the unusual spouse and the children would have suffered, as far as what I think mamas ought to be able to do. But you see other people pass it off. Joan Perry is here now. You probably knew Joan when she was coming through residency in pediatrics. She’s got 4 kids. She’s working part time with Kaiter (?) and Reese, the two pediatricians that are partners here. She’s so efficient, kids underfoot. I’ve been in her presence a few times, around the house for dinner once and we did an unusual thing. Don’t do these kinds of things. Somebody came in with two tickets for that Duke/Carolina basketball game that Carolina won this year, at Smith Center. \n\nI was there. I went to Duke, undergraduate. I had a tough year.\n\nAt 7 we were eating dinner at Joan’s house and somebody came with two tickets, the game was at 9, we got in the car, she and I and drove to Chapel Hill. She knew how to find the King Dome and had the parking space. So we got there before the first half was over. But we were in the next to the last row. I said, before I came to this Joan, I had really seriously thought about getting an EKG. I hadn’t had one done in 30 years but after I climbed up to the top of the King Dome, I don’t need an EKG, if I can climb up here. It’s a big, big place. But Carolina won and of course she was a Carolina fan and I guess I am too. It would be very difficult. I can see why gals go into specialties, dermatology… You get a lot of satisfaction out of those specialties too. My roommate when I was an intern in Richmond, she went into pediatric allergy and of course, rarely had a hospital patient, up in Virginia. Some asthmatics, they can do so much more for asthma now. A girl that worked for me had her baby, had to stop practicing. The kid turned out to have asthma so we confer from time to time.\n\nWhat do you think is going to happen when 50% of the doctors coming out of Carolina are women and there’s a training -- 10 years from now?\n\nThey’re going to find a lot of 40 hour a week jobs. If they get married and you can’t blame them, but we think they’ll be more in tuned with their patients. I hope they will. I think they will. Listen a little bitter.\n\nWhat will happen in towns like Kinston? Will the community adapt to that kind of thing?\n\nYes, I think so. We had three women and four women doctors here in town while I was practicing. Rachel Davis was our first woman doctor here, you haven’t been living in this state long enough to have heard of her, unfortunately she died in ’79, as a matter of fact. We went over to Bettonville Battlefield at Newton Grove yesterday and she’s buried in -- Springs so we drove up to the cemetery where she’s buried, to the church. Had this young girl with me who was a history graduate student. I said, we’ll just run by. I knew where Rachel was buried, so we’ll just go by and check that date. That’s the reason I remember, it was yesterday. Rachel came here as a family physician. She did OB/GYN and had training in that. She was a native of this county and I finished high school in ’36 and she was already practicing here prior to that. She was a woman ahead of her time. She was in the legislature for about three terms and coordinated her practice with going to Raleigh because they didn’t stay as long as they do now. Trying to get legislation past that would have sterilized any person that had two illegitimate children and it didn’t go through. Saved us a lot of money if it had. This was several years ago. Now that I’m working in a high-risk clinic I can really appreciate how much it would have saved us because we see a lot of multiple pregnancies, multiple family members. She was here and was still here when I came back in ’54 and was in practice until about the time she died in ’79. And then Jean Smith came here after I did, she did OB/GYN and Dr. Kim came, she was a pediatrician about the time I stopped. Since then we’ve had a pathologist but while I was here, Jean and Rachel and I were here several years at the same time.\n\nWhere did Jean go after she left?\n\nShe is in Washington DC now. She’s retired. She gave up OB and did some GYN but she’s been retired I would say 7 or 8 years now, at least that long. She’s in Washington and is still involved with mission work. Did you know Jean?\n\nNo, I think I’ve heard her name somewhere though.\n\nShe’s from Tennessee originally and didn’t go to school in this state. Practiced in Wilson for awhile and then came over here in solo practice. She was with a partner over there, she joined --. She got involved with a mission in Washington and I’m not going to tell you but she went up there and she did do outpatient clinic work for a lot of Hispanic. A prenatal clinic they had up there but she’s not involved with that at all now. She has a problem with arthritis, she’s not doing anything medical, but involved with some of the work that the mission is doing in DC. Talked to her about three weeks ago. So in the ‘50s, we had three women doctors.\n\nFor a town this size that’s unusual, I would think.\n\nYes. They had less in Greenwood until the medical school hit there. They had -- because Rachel Davis being a native and then came here. Rachel had a woman doctor partner but it was a short-lived time, just a few years, if that long, before I came.\n\nDid you ever think of a group?\n\nYes, the Kinston Clinic group was…\n\nThat’s right down the street here, isn’t it?\n\nYes. And they’re still retaining… the building is occupied with other offices now because they built a new suite of offices near the hospital. If you all go on Harry Street, the hospital, facing Airport Road, Harry runs into across the road, in that area. Most of them have moved out there with the new hospital. I was invited, of course to join the clinic group. It was a financial arrangement and the advantage was, if somebody had a family or dependents, they had some equity there, that if something happened to you, the family would have some equity in that investment. It was not necessarily an alternating call type thing, it wasn’t like they consider a group now.\n\nSo it didn’t mean the same thing?\n\nNo. I really say a solo private is the way to go if you’ve got a compatible somebody to swap calls with nights and weekends. The two or three that I have done this with, pretty compatible group. You know what to depend on. You know if he was dependable or she was dependable and would be there when you weren’t there. Because you don’t have those hassles in the office and you don’t need them. You don’t need that, you’ve got enough worries as it is without having personality problems within the office. Of course people get business managers and doctors -- get all those differences work out.\n\nIt’s just a different kind of hassle, it’s not the solution. The more I’ve been doing this, the more I talk with people, the more I start to long for being a solo doctor. Somebody said to me one time, I had this idea I wanted to have a health risk appraisal form on all my charts so I sat down and I made out this form and I had it printed on the local print shop and I said to my secretary, tomorrow morning we start putting this on everybody’s chart that comes in. That was that. He said, would you be able to do that in your place? I said, right, with 12 faculty physicians and 28 residents and everything else, it would take 15 committees and 5 years to get something like that. So I get real envious of how much flexibility there is in your own practice. It’s really amazing.\n\nWe put so much emphasis on this type of thing now, trying to avoid the problems but you know, many of our problems are brought about by habit, one way or the other. This is the trouble you see in solo practice, you get out and you say, I go to an Infant Mortality Task Force and you just go bulldozing through, you want to do your own thing but when you’ve got to go through committees, it moves too slowly for somebody that’s been in solo practice, too slow.\n\nYou start to worry about people who are able to tolerate committees. Start to think, what’s wrong with those folks?\n\nIt gets done eventually but you didn’t take an eventual process when you’re solo practice, it was spontaneous. It may not have been well guided and thought through but you’d initiate something. I didn’t have a waiting room for well babies, so there was an upstairs over this drugstore and I was on the first floor right next to it. I said, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to have all the well babies go to this little office upstairs. Of course that meant the mamas had to climb stairs to get upstairs with their babies. But there weren’t many steps. It allowed part of my practice, I just put an examining table, a few instruments up there and if they came in for a well baby check, they just went straight up there. We had a certain time of day we did that because it was just one of me and maybe I’d have to come back down some time but you didn’t see but a few. And talking about changes, you do make changes in your practice. A lot of people who did your own practice, turned out to see adults all the time, stop doing newborns and of course the pediatricians come in. Dr. Keiter (?) Sr., was very helpful. When I came he said, Rose, you’re a woman, maybe you’ll understand mothers. I have trouble understanding mothers. He’d been practicing for 25 years then. After about a year I said, I don’t understand mothers either. But he and his partner -- at that time, if you’re in a bind, they came. That’s what you need if you’re in solo practice, is that you can call on them. We never had the feeling that somebody was vying for patients or bidding for patients.\n\nStealing patients.\n\nYes.\n\nDo you find that patients expect you to be a little more sympathetic because you’re a woman? You’re talking about mothers…\n\nI don’t know that they expect it. They probably do but I don’t think they come to you because you’re a woman, initially. I think people have been used to women doctors. I see patients now that say, I haven’t seen a doctor since you quit. It’s just a matter of they haven’t needed one. And children who saw a woman doctor, teenager girls, going to a man doctor for the first time, they’d be much more comfortable had they gone… and Ross--, we’d have 12- or 13-year-old kids, the boys didn’t want to go to me anymore and the girls didn’t want to go to him anymore and so we would change, get them through those teen years. No problems with that.\n\nPeople tell me they’re still mistaken for nurses in the hospital. Did you ever encounter any other discrimination in school or discouragement because you were a woman?\n\nNo. I think the fact that I was about 27 years old when I started out, I didn’t sense it. One time Jo Buel (?) and I were talking to a group of medical students. They have these family practice club meetings and Jo of course could tell hair raising tales of her experience. She finished University of Maryland. What we were so surprised at the questions, the students, they’re looking at careers. We both went into practice to do -- patients. We saw that one-on-one. That was the image you had of a doctor in 1950s. But these students asked questions about the academic world and I’m sure that’s where your competition is felt most. In private practice I didn’t feel it, that it was a competitive thing. Yes, you get… I came along at a good time. See, I came along when you had to have a token woman on things. The Board of Medical Examiners, I was Vice President of the State Medical Society when Ed Bettingfield was President. It’s nice to be a token, I didn’t have to do a bunch, just sit there. Women’s prison had the uprising in Raleigh so they named a black physician in Raleigh Dedham, Phillip Nelson, the psychiatrist from Greenville and the token woman, me, were on that committee to visit the women’s prison and evaluate the services there, do something about public health. But we went up there and interviewed people on Sunday. It was interesting -- most of it. The little things that just needed female involvement. It was good experience for me or anybody that gets involved in that kind of thing. Not that you’re doing anything earthshaking, but there were instances like that. As Vice President of the Medical Society, the President had the choice of naming who would be the Vice President from the West and one from the East and Ed Bettingfield called me. I said, Ed, why don’t you call Ann Louise Wilkerson in Raleigh. She’s a dynamo and she’s --.\n\nShe sure is. They’re moving their office, in fact, over --. I think they moved it by now.\n\nI knew it was in the process of being and of course Ann Louise was when I started She had more stamina than I had. She was single and she had family responsibilities. Her mother is dead now, but Ann Louise had good friends down here in Kinston so we kind of keep up with each other. She came over to the Country Doctor Museum, we have a little program called Honorary Curator and it’s doctors who have been practicing a number of years. Most of them have already retired that we ask to come and be the curator of the day on a Sunday afternoon. We had 350 people to come to see that woman that day, hours from 2 to 5.\n\nShe’s incredible. She was chairperson or whatever, of the Debutante Ball in Raleigh. It’s just unheard of if you haven’t had children but she had so many children that she’s delivered I guess.\n\nAnd the amazing thing, just as many men came to see her as women. It’s not the same number probably, but people came as far as Newton Grove to Bailey. We got good publicity out. They came simply for friendship. Not because she was seeing them as patients, because she’s just doing an office practice now. When I went over there, I got there about 1:30, the telephone was ringing and this woman was calling from Raleigh and said, where is Bailey? Sure enough, she got there about 4:00 to greet Ann Louise. Of course, growing up in Raleigh and having wide family connections, but it’s her personality that bright people there. The young docs should see that. They didn’t come because of her expertise in delivering babies or taking out a uterus,  but because they liked Ann Louise and what she had done for them. One man even brought her obstetrical bill to her for her to keep, about $40 for delivering babies then. He’s a grandfather now.\n\nWhat year did the museum start?\n\nIn 1968 it was dedicated.\n\nHow did that idea first get started?\n\nJosephine Newell, who was general practice in Bailey and Doria Graham, whose father practiced until he was in his 90s up in Pilot Mountain, Doria had come to Wilkson as a dermatologist, that’s her specialty and she is an outstanding dermatologist. Although Jo was in Nash County, Jo went to Wilkson County because she was in southern Nash so Wilkson is what she related to, she went to Wilkson Hospital for hospital practice and Bailey is about 12 miles apart. So they got the idea because they both had fathers and grandfathers who were doctors and they had a lot of stuff. I said you just were looking for a place to dump that old stuff. Jo, they were able to locate two rural physicians’ offices that were out in the county and no longer in use. One was in a pack house, just a single one-room dwelling and the other was part of a homestead that the doctor practiced in and his little office was sitting off of a breezeway off the house. So they moved those two offices together to a vacant lot in Bailey. Particularly Jo did all the work and spent a lot of money too. She got her friends to be on the board of directors and make it official. Judge Naomi Marsh, a woman who was a judge later who was on the original board and Ed Bettingfield, some of those people and later I got on the board, a few years later. She rallied all of her friends around. It operated with no full-time employees for a number of years. A few years back we started having a part time…\n\nIt’s still functioning.\n\nOh yes.\n\nI read about it in a number of different…\n\nWe try and get publicity out every once in awhile.\n\nWas it on the front page of the New York Times or something?\n\nOh yeah, someone came through. Jo tells the story, they had a feature article, not on the front page but on the feature article page of the New York Times, it was almost 20 years ago but we still reprint that. Jo tells the story. She tells so many stories, I don’t know if this is an embellished one or not. That somebody had some car trouble there in Bailey, somebody that does feature stories, I don’t think he was an employee of the New York times, smart people freelance for this for this kind of thing. He had gone over and said what could he do while he waited for his repairs. They said, we’ve got a museum. So he went over and talked to Jo. She was practicing them and she showed him the museum and the mechanic said, Jo, how long do you want me to put this man? So she said, oh, make it a long job. And the man spent the night at Jo’s house. I’d always heard it was somebody traveling through that did the feature article and New York Times published it. The funny part, a friend of mine from Indiana, a gal I roomed with one year in college that sends me some gifts from a store in New York, Christmas and birthday and that kind of thing. Somehow my name got in that New York Times article and that clerk that she dealt with in the New York store read it and got in touch with her in Indiana to tell her this article talked about this woman she’d been shipping gifts to over the years. And so I thought, that was an observant clerk.\n\nI see your name as one of the four founders of the museum.\n\nJo’s responsible. I really didn’t do all that work. I was 50 miles away. I was busy practicing medicine. Right now, I’m President of the board of directors, simply because they don’t have anybody else. We’re having a museum day on the 23rd of September, which is an annual affair. We were down at the Bentonville Battlefield yesterday, we’re trying to get a Civil War field hospital scene to be done out on the lawn of the museum that day.\n\nDo you have any oral history that’s part of that collection at the museum?\n\nYes. We just started this project. When Gloria gave up the presidency last year, we decided we’d start a Gloria Graham Oral History Collection. We solicited the funds for that on a separate fund, so we’ve got this graduate student doing that. She’s done 17, which all…\n\nWho has she talked to?\n\nShe’s talked to Todd Savage (?), a historian from ECU, he’s -- as you know. We’ve got Dr. Hannibal from here and Dr. Quigley is up in --, a couple of the black doctors. We have Dr. Harr (?) who practices pediatrics and still does office practice and been in Greenville since before my time, before I started practicing. Fred Irons and Moline Irons, Tom Irons parents were doctors in Greenville. Tom was…\n\nHe did his residency.\n\nPediatrics. We have done Dr. Rahm (?) --. 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