Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 24, 1990 TAG: 9006250178
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SHAWSVILLE LENGTH: Long
There will be another open house July 8 in the Alleghany Family Practice Clinic to celebrate the 35th year.
The clinic is across U.S. 460-11 from the site of a two-storied, nicely porched house where Smith started. It was known always as the Marye house. The Meadowbrook Nursing Home was built on the site in the 1960s.
If there is an unfortunate fisherman at the 1990 open house, there will be a choice of physicians.
Smith has since been joined by Dr. Clarence Taylor Jr., who came in 1957, and Dr. Karen Quinn, who joined the clinic in 1981.
With nothing bothering me outside of a slight case of nostalgia, I came back to Shawsville recently.
I was shown an aging state Sunday section of the old Roanoke Times in which I had reported the arrival of Smith, his wife Mildred, and 9-month-old George III.
I was kind of glad that Mildred Smith was not there. I wrote she was "a satin-voiced Sandersville, Ga., girl."
The story was illustrated with some forgettable pictures I took that day - including one of the doctor peering intently at what the caption said was an X-ray machine.
I described the Marye house a bit disjointedly: "The rambling frame house with a wide porch, which is disappearing from American architecture, is cool, the Smiths say, even at the height of the current heat wave."
During my visit I found that everybody apparently had forgiven me for this kind of literary malpractice, however, and pretty soon we were getting down to the nostalgia.
When the Smiths came to Shawsville in 1955, the four-laned version of U.S. 11-460 was young; the Jonas Salk polio vaccine was not in use, and the future route for Interstate 81 was lost in the mountains.
Most of Shawsville's businesses were up the hill from the Marye house.
They stood along old two-laned U.S. 11-460 through the town. Most of them have now slipped down the hill.
There was no such thing as a subdivision.
The Bank of Shawsville - next door to the clinic - is still where it was in June of 1954, when the Smiths stopped there and asked if the community could use a full-time doctor.
As I overwrote in July of 1955: "The answer was a resounding and thankful yes."
The Shawsville section of Montgomery County hadn't had a doctor for 15 years - since Dr. W.H. Wood died.
The three doctors gathered during their lunch break recently, and Smith remembered that he leased the Marye house for $100 a month.
"A hundred dollars a month was right much then," Smith said. He charged one or two dollars for office visits.
Later he and Taylor would move into a new clinic, and Smith eventually bought the now-gone house.
He said the idea was to use the house as a nursing home after the clinic was built, but he was told "you don't want an old house as a nursing home."
The Marye house came down, and the modern nursing home went up.
For years Smith and Taylor, both 63, dispensed their own drugs.
"It was interesting," Taylor said.
Doctors worry a lot about "patient compliance" - as in taking the right medicine at the right time.
With the patient and the medicine present at the same time such compliance was easier, Smith said.
"If we thought they ought to take it, we gave it to them."
Their medical practice went on all day and even longer. There was once a non-pay phone on the outer wall of the clinic with the sign "For the doctor, call this number."
Smith and Taylor said nobody ever cheated and put in a call to India at their expense.
At one time, the two doctors delivered babies in three hospitals in Radford, Christiansburg and Roanoke.
Their workday is still not 9 to 5.
For years, there were no rescue squads, and if a patient got to a hospital emergency room, a doctor wouldn't necessarily be there.
And, Smith said, "I guess the practice of medicine may not be as interesting as it used to be. It may be more leisurely. It's not as stressful."
There may have been a little regret in the doctor's voice.
"As you get older," Smith said, "you're going to find your patients get older."
That is why, he said, it often appears he starts the day with an exceptional number of files.
Smith said this doesn't mean he is seeing more patients than anybody else. It just means the individual files have become thicker over the years.
When he started, Smith said, the financing of medical care was less complex than it is today.
A doctor treated a patient and, "You'd charge him $2. He'd hand you $2, and you'd put it in your pocket."
Now, trying "to cover everything with insurance is what mixed us up."
Today, he said, if patients are told of a test, "They don't ask what it costs, they want it."
Back in 1955, sounding somewhat like a chamber of commerce person, I had written: " . . . the Smiths agree that in contrast to Richmond in the summertime those Montgomery County mountains are all right."
The Smiths and the mountains are still here.
by CNB