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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels August 14, 2004 The value of the simple house call still remembered by some Scott Dalgarno I was fascinated with his bag. It was black and had twin handles, and held a million secrets, I was sure. I also knew it held a syringe, one with my name on it. My mother believed penicillin could cure anything. After checking my ears and throat Dr. Devine (I still remember his name) told me to roll over on my stomach. He put a shiny Roosevelt dime on my pillow and said it was mine if I'd just lay quiet for the shot. He turned the injection into a meditation. The house call. Doctors seldom make them anymore. Medical liability and the quantitative constraints of Medicare and HMOs have nearly killed it. But at what cost? The last three months I have been on a sabbatical thanks to the generosity of my church. I haven't been just sitting around. A grant from the Louisville Institute allowed me to do some travel and research. I've been working with Dr. Robert Coles on a project having to do with the poet/physician William Carlos Williams. In the middle of my research on Williams' dual career, I shared with Dr. Coles my observation that a lot has been lost with the demise of the house call. He agreed completely saying that the neurological clues made available in such visits were worth all the effort necessary. Talking about the amazing license he received to be present to people at their most vulnerable moments Dr. Williams observed: "Whole lives are spent in the tremendous affairs of daily events without even approaching the great sights I see every day." It has been left to today's home health professionals, hospice workers, and, yes, clergy, to continue the practice. But the clergy house call may be endangered. The esteem so many ministers feel for the new mega-church tells me that the importance of the individual in our profession is shrinking. One-on-one ministry is very much alive, to be sure - but done by someone else. Clergy themselves are becoming increasingly specialized and, as a result, they are also becoming increasingly insulated; program has become more important than person. And it's not just our parishioners who are losing. "I don't know what I'd do without those patients!" Dr. Williams said once to Coles. "Everyone thinks doctors are good people because they help other people who are sick. But if you ask me, the people who are sick are helping us all the time - if we'll let them help us. How many times I've gotten up and felt lousy; I've felt lousy driving over there, and then I'll knock on the door, and someone opens it, and it's a mother or a father, and they want me to go right to their kid, or they have 'pains' themselves, and you know what, the next thing with me is that I've forgotten myself - isn't that an achievement! Because I'm all tied up with someone else." Williams' wife, Floss, went further: seeing his patients, she asserted, actually "healed" her husband. My own former general practitioner, Dr. Bill Sager, now retired, told me recently about his years making house calls here in Ashland. "You know," he said, "I remember every one of them. And now when I drive around town and see those houses, those visits come back to me." It was the intimate contact with people, the friendly contact that turns doctoring from a science into an art that attracted him to the profession in the first place. It works the same way for a lot of ministers. A colleague once related to me an especially meaningful moment for her. She visited a family upon the death of their beloved patriarch. She walked in to find the daughter, once a flower-child, rubbing baby oil into the soles of her father's feet. It was a ritual she had come up with on the spot, and she was delighted with it. "Don't you want to rub Daddy's feet with oil?" she asked her mother. "No." said the mother. "Why not?" asked the daughter. "Because Daddy's dead," answered the mother matter-of-factly. They went back and forth in this manner for an hour, the new widow steeling herself as best she could, the daughter a little loopy in the wake of her loss. When the hearse arrived, mother and daughter met the sight of it with equal horror. "O God," said the daughter, "it's a Ford!" My colleague wondered for an instant what on earth she meant. "Daddy," said the daughter without prompting, "was strictly a GM man." Home calls. We stand in people's midst. We are there and at the same time not there. And what do we see? Ultimately, if we are lucky, we see ourselves. We witness in others, as Dr. Williams many times insisted, the essence of our own humanity. Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Ashland's First Presbyterian Church DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams