President's Message from Cheryl Houston

It has been a real treat for me to interview my mother-in-law, Tommie Houston, for some of my articles this year.  My January article was about D. John Hartman, her father; my March article was about her husband, Dr Robert Houston; and so now, you guessed it, my June article is about her son and my husband, Dr John Houston. John was born in 1949, just after Dr Bob had joined the Henry County Clinic [March article].  Bob was almost immediately sent to Camp LeJeune, NC, as a naval medical officer assigned to the Marine Corps.  Two years in NC, and back to Eminence, with a detour in Chicago for further training, and the Houston arrival in Eminence was complete.

The Houstons  “adopted” a foreign exchange student from Germany to live with them for a year (it was his senior year).  So this family grew from three to four boys.  Holger Schmidt arrived at the Louisville airport in August with wool pants and jacket.  The first thing they did was go shopping at Stewart’s for a new wardrobe.  Upon arriving at his new home, he was introduced to Bob (age 9), John (age 6) and BI (age 3).  One of his high school projects at Eminence High School was to write a paper in English class about the most interesting person he knew.  He selected my husband, John, as his topic and wrote that he was “the most energetic and interesting child he had ever encountered”!

Holger returned to Germany to complete his education.  He finished his training as a physician and actually returned to the United States in the late sixties to do a fellowship at Harvard.  John and I were on tour with the Transylvania Choir in Boston when I met Dr Schmidt for the first time and was introduced to his wife, Gisiela, and their five-year-old son, Oliver. Oliver spoke English with a classic Boston accent and (low) German and could carry on conversations with his mother and us, simultaneously, in both languages (not all that surprising since his father spoke five languages)! Holger was from a medical family in West Germany.  His father was an ophthalmologist, as was he. Holger later became one of the directors of the science wing of the German Health Care System.

Holger was certainly one of the most intelligent people John encountered in his young life, but I don’t know what effect that had on my husband’s choice of medicine as a profession, since his father and grandfather made such an impact on his life’s journey.

Interestingly, John had always been told he was to be the family lawyer.  Brother Bob was supposed to be a physician, and now he is an attorney, and John you know about.  Baby brother William (BI) didn’t have a family-selected vocation, so he decided he was “just going to make money”!  BI received an MBA at Vandy.

John and I got married while he was a Navy corpsman at Camp LeJeune (does history repeat itself?).  After the navy, he finished his undergraduate schooling at Transylvania, where Dr Monroe Moosnick played an important role in John’s future.  Medical School at UK was followed by Pediatrics at U of L, where Dr Billy Andrews was a wonderful mentor for John.  We moved to Owensboro in 1983, where John began his solo practice and we set up home with our two sons, John Thomas (8 yrs) and Nolan (1 yr).

Tommie’s assessment of the changes in the practice of medicine was now from a completely new perspective.  Instead of the minor surgery room at the Henry County Clinic, patients now are directed to the Emergency Department.  House calls, which were once common practice, are now rare to say the least.  Lab and x-ray studies have become increasingly more sophisticated.  Anesthesia doesn’t have the risks of years past.  And surgery is now able to repair and or remove problems with technology and skill that was only imagined in the time of Tommie’s father and husband.  There are subspecialties common now that hadn’t been envisioned when Tommie’s dad was practicing.

Medicine has also forced physicians to become businessmen and women.  You now have to deal with a variety of third-party payers, increases in overhead, malpractice insurance, and patients who are getting information off the Internet.  (We all know full well some of the pitfalls of that information.)  During Tommie’s time, it was not unusual for her to be the reporter for the “white papers.”  Those included the newspapers, Women’s Day and Redbook.  Nowadays, everyone seems to be a medical authority including Oprah, Tom Cruise, and others.  Information from magazines and the Internet are assumed to be entirely truthful.

John did not get to watch Tommie’s father, Daddy Doc, practice medicine, as he died when John was 12 years old.  He did, however, get the full Henry County Clinic experience.  John would go with his father to the clinic and watch him patch up people who had been in a variety of mishaps.  He also went with Bob to an emergency C-section where he observed Bob give anesthesia and Dr McKee perform the surgery. John was fortunate enough to do a senior rotation with his father during his fourth year of medical school that was a rewarding experience for both father and son.

Well, Tommie’s “trilogy” is nearing completion.  The time span of the three-part story covers 100 years, as her father graduated from Louisville Medical College in 1908.  From the true horse and buggy days of making house calls to John now able to read films on his office computer…wow, it is truly staggering to consider all the monumental changes in medicine.  But, you know, the things that have made this profession great through the years are still, thankfully, with us.  The attributes of discipline, hard work, and compassion were found in the physicians practicing in Daddy Doc’s time, and have extended through the generation of Dr Bob and into the present.  Thanks for continuing to “weave” this common thread of caring.

I am sure there are many of you who have multiple generations of physicians in your families.  Tommie’s unique position of watching medicine go through so many phases has made me even more appreciative of the membership of the KMA and KMAA.  I hope you have enjoyed reading this trilogy as much as I have enjoyed writing it!

Cheryl Houston , KMAA President 2007-2008

KMA Alliance
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