Lincoln : Rural doctors’ stories examined

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Lincoln : Rural doctors’ stories examined

By Rachel Webb

Arkansas Democrat Gazette May 05, 2003

LINCOLN — Medicine bottles with yellowed labels, an aged birthing table and a working iron lung sit within the white, one story building where three doctors worked and lived over the span of 40 years.

Dr. Joe B. Hall, a retired Fayetteville physician, is spending his retirement making sure that the doctors who practiced in The Lincoln Clinic — and their colleagues throughout the state — are not forgotten.

The building now houses the Arkansas Country Doctor Museum and, besides aging medical implements, holds 72 video tapes of interviews with those who remember the state’s early rural physicians.

The collection is the beginning of the museum’s effort to archive the oral histories of those who traveled through small towns, farming communities and mountain roads to treat their patients.

Hall said some of the traditional rural doctors were still around when he came to work in the area, fresh out of medical school from St. Louis’ Washington University in 1950. He studied under four Nobel Prize winners, but his formal education was eclipsed by the practical knowledge gleaned when he encountered the classic country doctor. "Those people didn’t teach me nearly as much as these old doctors," Hall said from the museum on Starr Avenue in Lincoln.

Two years ago, Hall wrote letters to 450 Arkansas physicians asking if they knew any rural doctors who could be included in the museum’s Hall of Honor. After countless hours of interviews, Hall has obtained the stories of some of the state’s earliest rural doctors and hopes to get help editing and organizing the tapes.

Hall said Arkansas’ first country doctors came to the area from Tennessee when the community of Cane Hill was settled in the early 1800s. They often had little formal education and learned by apprenticing with older doctors. Some of them came from other countries and had eccentric habits. Dr. Karl Bergenstahl, who practiced in Lincoln in the 1940s, was a native of Finland and served on the czar’s medical team while living in Russia. He stowed away on a ship to come to the United States and worked as a swimming instructor until he obtained the proper credentials to practice medicine.

Bergenstahl also stood on his head every morning to improve his circulation and insisted on eating nothing but oatmeal for breakfast, Hall said.

Other doctors didn’t even have an office to work from, Hall said. One of his earliest projects was recording the history of Dr. Thomas Rhine, who practiced 66 years around Thornton in Calhoun County.

Rhine started working in the area for a lumber company. When the company’s mill burned down, he stayed in the area to work with the people he had gotten to know

Hall visited the area two years ago, hoping that a few people would be around to talk about the doctor, who had died about 30 years earlier. Hall ended up recording stories from 30 people and said nearly 100 more said they were willing to offer their memories. "They laughed and they cried, and they had more fun than I did," he said.

One story came from a 96-year-old man who had been sheriff when Rhine was practicing.

He told Hall that shortly after his house had burned 70 years earlier, a man appeared on his property offering to help rebuild the house.

The sheriff said he didn’t have any money to pay him, but the man said Dr. Rhine had sent him to work for two weeks as payment for delivering one of his children.

Doctors were commonly paid with produce, meat, quilts or services. This custom is not entirely gone from rural medical practices, said Dr. Mark Woods, one of four doctors practicing at a Stone County family practice clinic. Woods said some of his partners at Mountain View Family Medicine Clinic have been paid in food.

Woods said the goods are sometimes all his patients have to offer.

He joined the practice last July after completing his residency at Washington Regional Medical Center and estimates that 80 percent of his patients either lack insurance or are on Medicaid.

Woods and his colleagues are the modern day versions of Dr. Rhine.

They treat patients ranging from 2-week-olds to the elderly, often from the same family. Their community is so small, they often treat the same people who go to their children’s school, attend their church or who sit at the next table in a local restaurant. "A lot of times the person you see in the [examination] room might be the person you saw walking down the street yesterday," Woods said.

Recruiting doctors for the small-town lifestyle is a difficult task.

Woods said he wanted to be in an environment similar to that of his upbringing in rural Perry County. Most of today’s doctors leave medical school with an average debt $100,000, which is difficult to pay off working in a rural, low-income community.

Dr. Charles Cranford, vice chancellor for regional programs at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said rural doctors are vital to the health of Arkansans even in modern times. "They are, of course, the entry point into the health care system for many people who live in Arkansas in rural counties," Cranford said.

UAMS is encouraging its medical students to consider rural medicine through its family medicine residency programs. The university has six programs throughout the state and works to place doctors in small towns upon graduation, Cranford said.

He said today’s rural doctors should be inspired by the doctors Hall is working to honor. "They did everything that was done in that town, including delivering babies all the way to taking care of conditions that they probably didn’t have the resources available to care for," Cranford said. "They were a real part of the fabric of the community and usually loved by everybody.