Notes from Dr. Sam

Good Day,

I hope this note finds you well.

For those of you who don’t know, I was raised on a farm just east of the town of Augusta on the banks of the White River in East Arkansas. I was born in 1946, just after WWII. My father’s family raised rice for the Conner Company; he was a sharecropper farmer, and my mother (a trained hairdresser) was a stay-at-home mom. 

Dad had a 10th grade education and was probably the smartest man I have ever known. Mom was a quiet, little woman and a voracious reader who spent most of her life as a caregiver, especially for all the old people in the family. My mother and father’s generation had been raised on the farm, with all that implies. 

Dad had nine brothers and sisters who lived to adulthood and Mom had eight. In one generation, the families went down from eight or nine kids per family to two or three; we were surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Family reunions were large, raucous affairs and sometimes multi-day. 

And we had a sizable “extended family,” too. Because Augusta was a small town of 2,000, many of the non-blood related adults were identified as Aunt and Uncle. The church (in my case the Baptist church) and the school were an integral part of daily life, and the adults looked after all of us kids. 

Our formal health care was modest at best. Dr. Frank McGuire was a sour little man who was always there when he was needed. We had a Public Health nurse who administered shots and saved us from typhoid and polio. 

The schoolteachers and coaches of Augusta, headed by Coach Curtis King, were immensely important to each of us. Coach King had a nickname for each of us. It was a badge of courage when you earned that moniker. Mr. Lawrence was the FFA (Future Farmers of America) teacher in Augusta. Like Coach King, he took a personal interest in every student, always looking for some way each of us could excel. 

For most of my childhood, my maternal grandfather, Will McAlexander, was the janitor at the grade school. His workroom at the school was a confessional for many of the little kids going through times of crisis. He continued in that job until he was ninety-three years old. The police of Augusta—Jones Montague, the night-law, and Tip Jernigan, the day-law—worked to keep us between the fences.   

As we were laying down the layers of the onions that would become our personalities, these people pushed, prodded, and sometimes shoved us in the right direction. 

These days, academics talk about Social Determinates of Health. Most researchers agree that direct health care only provides an explanation for about 15-20 percent of health outcomes. The other eighty percent is partly genetics, but mostly social support systems, education, and resources. We kids, who were raised in Augusta, at that time, had the best that we could have hoped for. 

Here in this New Year, that is what I wish for you, your kids, and your grandkids. 

Have a good journey,

Sam

 Dr. Sam Taggart is a retired doctor/writer/marathon runner who practiced in Benton for 45 years. He recently released For Every Family, A Family Doctor: a history of the modern Family Medicine Movement in Arkansas. His other books include Country Doctors of Arkansas, The Public’s Health, With a Heavy Heart and We All Hear Voices.