My father, Ernest Vernon Smith, Jr., was ‘an old-time country doctor, as was his father, Ernest Vernon Smith, Sr. The ‘old time country doctor’ did everything from surgery to helping deliver babies, to making house calls and were, in reality, on-call seven days a week. My grandfather and father served folks in a city of about 18,000 and in the farmlands that surrounded this small mid-western community. In 1942 my grandfather wrote and published his autobiography (he was in his 35th year of practice). The title of his autobiography is ‘The Making of a Surgeon’ [A Midwestern Chronicle]. This morning, Gentle Reader, I am going to offer you excerpts from the last three pages of his autobiography.
My Grandfather writes: Fundamentally every good doctor’s first thought is for his patient… The relation of the doctor to his patient is a thing intangible and almost impossible of expression, but it is, nevertheless, experienced by every physician worthy of his name. It might be called an invisible bond that develops between the doctor and the patient he is trying to help… The great satisfaction of seeing [a] patient well and happy is a reward beyond price, and it gives the doctor fresh enthusiasm and courage to go on with his work.
Even more acute is the effect on a good doctor of the patients he could not help… There is the terrible gnawing sensation known to every [physician] when he believes and ponders the situation of a patient who could be helped…but who will not permit it. There is a feeling of bleakness which comes over the mind of a doctor who stands helplessly by and watches a patient waste away as a result of the influence of some incurable disease… There is, too, the genuinely pathetic case of the individual who has not been helped by one physician and so mistrusts all other doctors…
Modern medical practice demands both a well-trained hand and brain, et those two do not suffice. Every true physician should have, in addition, a sensitive conscience and a kind heart. It was so in the beginning; it is so now; and I hope that it will be so everlastingly.
Here, Gentle Reader, is a photo of my Grandfather, Ernest Vernon Smith, Sr. in 1942.
