The Country Doctor
The advertisement was typical of a score that appear every month in the bulletin of the Medical Association of Georgia: "Plains, Ga. Pop. 860, county 24,000. No physician in area. Hospital facilities ten miles. Community will build suitable office for doctor. One drugstore."
A recently spruced-up town in central Georgia's lush, goober-growing country, Plains had been without a physician since 1951, when Dr. Colquitt Logan virtually retired at 71 after having two operations for cataracts. Like 50-odd Georgia towns (and 1,450 now on record in the U.S.) listed as wanting a doctor, Plains might have gone doctorless for a long time.
But Mississippi-born, Tulane-educated Dr. Carl Edward Sills, 27, interning in Jackson, Miss., passed through Plains every time he drove along Highway 280 to visit his in-laws in Savannah. To both Carl and Elizabeth Hadden Sills, Plains looked like the kind of place where they wanted to settle. In the middle of an April night, they broke a Savannah-Jackson journey, talked to Dr. Logan and James Carter, 35, the town's biggest businessman. Assured that there was plenty of scope to build a practice and that the townspeople would cooperate, the Sillses soon made their decision.
No Time for Lunch. Last week Dr. Sills was in practice in Plains with his wife-nurse-receptionist-bookkeeper. They were as busy as they could ever want to be. Go-getting Jimmy Carter had been equally busy since April, getting set for them. With Lions Club support, he formed the Plains Development Corp., raised $6,000, bought a site opposite the railroad station and adjoining the drugstore. Town labor cleared it. Carter drew plans to Dr. Sills's sketched outlines. Result: a 30-ft.-by-30-ft. concrete-block building, ready for early August occupancy, with offices for the doctor and his wife, waiting rooms (separate for whites and Negroes), two 10-ft.-by-10-ft. examination and treatment rooms. Dr. Sills has a sterilizer, centrifuge, microscope, and instruments for minor surgery. He wants no fancy, expensive gadgets like an electrocardiograph or X-ray machine, because these are handy at the Americus and Sumter County Hospital (130 beds), ten miles away.
Each morning Dr. Sills is up at 6:45, visits his patients in the Americus hospital, is back for office hours in Plains by 9. Says he: "I average 15 to 20 patients a day, and have worked every day since I came here. We try to close for lunch at 12, but we never can--something always comes up. At night I go back to the hospital and make house calls. The big need around here is for house calls, and I make two or three a day.'' Dr. Sills charges $3 for an office visit, $1.50 for an injection, but cuts the fees for the poor. Negro patients make up one-third of his practice. About half the patients plunk down cash on Mrs. Sills's desk as they leave, and most who are billed pay promptly.
Midget Centers. Georgia is one of 44 states with centralized machinery for attracting general practitioners to rural areas. Many young doctors are reluctant to try it because they fear professional isolation, want to be near good hospitals. Virginia and Kansas pioneered with plans to have communities build midget medical centers and lease them (sometimes at $1 a year) to doctors in sectors remote from hospitals. The Sears, Roebuck Foundation works through the A.M.A. in offering communities help in planning, financing, building and equipping the centers. Last week Dr. Sills got his permanent license from the Georgia Board of Medical Examiners, was one of hundreds of doctors happily settled in country practices under such schemes in the last ten years.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.