THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512190084
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LINDA McNATT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ISLE OF WIGHT LENGTH: Long : 187 lines
FOR RICHER, FOR POORER, in sickness and in health, Dr. Bernard Jamison has cared for the people of this rural county.
He loves to go fishing but never catches anything. It's his job to decorate the Christmas tree at the office each year. He wonders what his son, Sean, does - and what others do as well - at Newport News Shipbuilding.
He chuckles mischievously when he returns patients' phone calls early in the morning, before many of them get out of bed.
With a hint of love and laughter in his voice, he accuses his wife, Estelle, of always being out for blood or money in her work with the American Red Cross and the local YMCA. And it's to the credit of his nurse of 20 years, Sam Patrick, he says, that he keeps going at the pace he does.
He's a doctor, a philanthropist, a friend, a homespun version of Robert Young's longtime TV character, Dr. Marcus Welby - as caring, as giving, as compassionate a man as any script for life could ever create.
And now, after all these years of keeping the vow he made to this rural area more than 30 years ago, when he left his native Ireland and settled on Smithfield to call home, Jamison, a youthful 66, is the county's Citizen of the Year.
``I knew something was going on,'' he says, sitting at his desk early on the morning after the award presentation, a dinner held in his honor a week ago Tuesday. ``My wife, you see, was born disadvantaged. She has never been on time for anything in her life. But she was determined this time - she managed to get us there a week early. It was well within her usual range of error.''
He is a humble man, his working partners at the Smithfield Medical Clinic say. He'd rather crack a joke or talk about somebody else than to talk about himself. But nowhere, they agree, has there ever been a doctor or a man more married to a community.
Jamison, however, protests.
``Lots of folks do a whole lot more in this community than I do. I'm a little embarrassed.''
Estelle does more than he does. Sam is the one who cracks the whip. Mary keeps the office straight. Other doctors on the staff work just as hard or even harder. Jamison, however . . .
``Is the kindest, most compassionate man,'' says Daisy Hughes, a woman who travels to Smithfield from Churchland in Portsmouth to see the good doctor.
``As a doctor, I wouldn't want anybody else,'' says Jane Lehr. ``As a friend, we don't have a nicer one.''
``He's a real special man, but he won't toot his own horn,'' Hilda Hearn says.
``He probably possesses the most unique bedside manner of any physician I've ever dealt with,'' says Al McPherson, safety and security manager for a Norfolk-based company that selected Jamison as its chief physician years ago. ``He has the most calming effect on everybody. You know in an instant that you, and your health, is paramount to this gentle man.''
This calming effect, McPherson thinks, may have something to do with the hint of an Irish accent Jamison still retains after so many years. The rolling of the r's and stretching of the a's is still evident, even though he has spent more time in this country than he did in his native land.
Traces of Ireland also are found in a bright-green, shamrock-shaped sun catcher that dangles in his office window and in a calendar his daughter, Gail, had made for him from photos he shot while vacationing there. She recently moved back to Smithfield and is working at Hampton University under a NASA grant.
Jamison grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where his father was a family practitioner. He remembers that he always assumed he would follow in those medical footsteps. He graduated from the Queen's University Medical School at Belfast and did his internship at Belfast City Hospital and The Royal Maternity Hospital. In 1956, he got his diploma in obstetrics from the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology in London.
Jamison practiced with his father, Dr. John Nelson Jamison, for two years. But Belfast was ``confining'' from a professional standpoint, he said. And besides . . .
``Have you ever been to Ireland? It rains all the time.''
Jamison became acquainted with America when he visited a friend here in 1958. He returned home with the idea of marrying the girl he loved and moving here.
``I showed her pictures of South Florida. She thought all of the U.S. was sunshine and palm trees. When we arrived in Richmond on the train, she turned to me and said, `What have we done?' ''
So the Jamisons settled first in Petersburg, then moved on to Newport News.
And then, he heard about Smithfield.
``I wanted my own practice. The man I was working for in Newport News, when I told him, said, `Are you crazy? You'll starve in Smithfield.' ''
Jamison paid no attention to that. In the summer of 1961, he and Estelle moved to Isle of Wight County. Later, they moved to Smithfield and bought the home and office of Dr. Hugh Frazer. It wasn't long before Bernard Jamison was involved in the community.
``He was a very dedicated young doctor. He is still a very dedicated doctor,'' says Dr. Al Rogers, a veterinarian who worked with Jamison in 1963 to administer the Sabin oral polio vaccine to more than 11,000 county residents. ``There was a great need for him in those years. He is a person who cares so much.
``He has given away multi, multi thousands of dollars worth of free medical examinations and free medicines. He has never been concerned about the money, always the individual. He is a member of so many families.''
Patrick, his nurse, knows that side of Jamison as well as anybody. She has seen him pounce on pharmaceutical reps as soon as they walk in the door to get sample medications for patients he knows can't afford to buy what they need.
``All these years, he has gone about, very quietly, doing what needs to be done,'' Patrick says. ``Whether it's going to somebody's house who has just died or in an emergency situation, he's always very calm. He knows his patients very well, and he's very caring about everybody around him. He puts nothing before his love for medicine and his love for his patients.
``Medicine, for him, has never been a business.''
That was one of the first things Mary Carawan, office manager at the Smithfield Medical Clinic for 11 years, noticed when she interviewed for her job.
Carawan was working for a neurosurgeon in Norfolk when she heard about the opening in Smithfield and decided to apply. Jamison offered her the job, at a salary less than she was making in Norfolk.
``The man called me at home four times,'' Carawan says, laughing. ``He kept pestering me. I finally told him, `Look, people just don't change jobs for less money.' I finally said yes. He is one of a kind.''
And Carawan was taken into Jamison's family fold.
``He is so compassionate. If he knows you have a problem, any kind of problem, he will do everything he can to help. Sometimes, he's almost naive about the world around him, but that's part of his charm.''
Jane Lehr was glad she's part of Jamison's family when she fell in her bathroom several years ago. Instead of calling the rescue squad, her husband, George, immediately called Jamison.
``He was here,'' says Lehr, 77. ``He came to the house, helped George get me up, put me in the car. And he took me to the clinic and stitched up my head. He came to my rescue.''
When Hughes, the Churchland patient, was admitted to a Portsmouth hospital in an emergency, Jamison showed up to hold her hand, even though he doesn't practice at that hospital.
He has become McPherson's personal physician as well as his corporate physician.
``He's been mighty good, mighty good,'' says another patient, Samuel Warren.
Hilda Hearn calls him ``straight-forward, direct.''
``He assured us, when we first started going to him, if we couldn't get to him, he would get to us,'' she says. ``He's so special. Isle of Wight is fortunate to have him.''
And, Dr. Jamison still makes house calls.
``If some old guy is bedridden with a stroke, and it takes him an hour to get out of bed and get dressed to come to the office - why not?'' he says. ``It makes sense.''
But as he sees himself, he does nothing out of the ordinary.
``It's a job. You do the best you can. And you try to hold it all together.''
Some say Jamison knows the deepest, darkest secrets of the county, family skeletons that lurk in closets.
``If I knew any secrets, I wouldn't tell anybody. That's patient confidentiality!''
And he is sometimes frustrated with the direction medicine is taking today.
``First, you have to know what insurance. Then, you have to ask what hospital accepts that insurance. You order medication, and it's not covered by the HMO. Some of the fun has gone out of it.''
But not enough to quit trying - not any time soon, anyway.
``You get attached to the patients,'' Dr. Bernard Jamison says. ``Some of them, I so respect their fortitude in the face of adversity. So many good people.
``I'm not finished yet.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo on cover
Dr. Bernard Jamison
Staff photos, including cover, by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Dr. Jamison's Citizen of the Year award, given him for 30 years of
service.
``You get attached to the patients,'' Dr. Bernard Jamison, 66, says
from his office.
Dr. Jamison and his wife, Estelle, in a photo he shot while the
couple was vacationing in Ireland. He grew up in Belfast and
practiced medicine for a time with his father.
by CNB