Now & Then | Going for the doctor; how times have changed

Lately we have been spending a lot of time going to doctors. There have many years in which I almost never saw a doctor.

Now it seems that a medical appointment comes up every other week. I had two appointments this morning. It’s not that we are so sick or anything, but when you add together checkup appointments, lab tests, dental work, eye exams, plus a cataract surgery and a heart stress test, you wind up going for some kind of medical appointment every other week.

These days, we have several great hospitals and many fine medical clinics in northwest Arkansas. Heart bypass surgeries, which once were unheard of or involved a trip to Oklahoma City or Dallas, are now common in Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville. I find myself routinely using expressions such as “going for a doctor’s appointment,” “going for lab work” or “going for a CT scan.” Thinking back on my life as a child in the 1940s, those expressions would have been strange and even unknown to us.

Pea Ridge did have a hospital years ago, but I don’t remember ever having any of our family in that hospital,and I was never acquainted with any of the doctors who practiced there. I would be interested in learning more about the Pea Ridge hospital. I do remember the old hospital as being located where the telephone company now stands, next to today’s Historical Society Museum.

The first doctor I remember in Pea Ridge was Dr. Greene, whose office was upstairs in the building which today is Pea Ridge City Hall. In the 1940s it was still very common for doctors to see people at home.

Rather than our thinking of going to the doctor when we became ill, we tended to think in terms of “going for the doctor,” and having the doctor come out to the house to “doctor” us. We didn’t think in terms of appointments, we just thought of bringing the doctor in when we needed him. Appointments can be vexatious. It is hard to schedule your illnesses to fit appointment times. A few yearsago, my wife had been seeing a doctor in Bella Vista.

I hadn’t been to a doctor in years, but one day I really needed a doctor. So I called my wife’s doctor’s clinic.

They first set up a time for me, then they called back and said they couldn’t find my name in their patient database, except as the husband of a patient, and that they didn’t have any openings for new patients. They referred me to another clinic. When I called that clinic, they said the first new patient appointment they had was about three weeks out.

Here I was, needing to see the doctor today, if possible. I had never heard of things like special times for new patient appointments.

Of course not all was well in the old days when we needed the doctor. We couldn’t call the doctor;

since we had no phone. We couldn’t go to the hospital emergency room, because there was no hospital.

Someone had to go find the doctor and get him to come out. I hear that in his early days, Dr. Greene made his calls by horse and buggy.

He later had a car, but he didn’t always use the car to go on calls; sometimes the family drove him out to their home and broughthim back after he had doctored the patient. When I was born in 1940, Dad went for Dr. Greene, but he had Dad go for the nurse and take her out to our house.

Then soon, the nurse sent Dad back to town to get the doctor. Dad drove back to Pea Ridge, picked up Dr.

Greene, brought him out to the farm and after I was safely delivered and in my mother’s arms, Dad drove Dr. Greene back to town. I don’t remember ever going to see Dr. Greene at his office, we always got him out to the house.

Things were changing by the time my sister Donna was born in 1948. I think by then Dr. R.M. Atkinson and others had opened Bates Memorial Hospital in Bentonville and a new medicalera was begun. Dr. Atkinson was our family doctor then.

His office was upstairs in a building on the south side of West Central Avenue in Bentonville, just west of the square. At the time, I had the boyish impression that all doctors’ offices were upstairs. Many dentists had upstairs offices in those days, as did many lawyers.

It seems a bit strange now to think of climbing thoselong stairs to see the doctor. I guess if you were too sick to climb, your daddy just had to carry you up.

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Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.