Dr. Blanchard Hollins
Interview with: Dr. Blanchard Hollins
Interviewed by: Lauren Kerr
Date: March ,2005
Transcribed by: Lauren Kerr
BH: OK, I’m from Houston, I’m a native Houstonian.
LK: OK, So you were born and raised here?
BH: Right here in Houston, went to Jack Yates High School, the one that’s getting all that bad publicity now. And after Jack Yates High School I went to a little college down in Marshall, Texas, Wiley College.
LK: Wiley, OK.
BH: I got a B.S. degree in… and chemistry, and after that I went to Meharry Medical College in Tennessee. I began my medical school training in 1949 and finished in ’53. After finishing at Meharry in ’53 I went on to do an internship and residency in obstetrics and gynecology at City Hospital in St. Louis.
LK: So Meharry is in TN, is that correct?
BH: It’s in Nashville, TN, correct. And there were two city hospitals, the one I went to was called Homer G. Phillips, I spent five years there and finished my training in obstetrics and gynecology. I finished there in 1958 and of course I came back to Houston in 1958. I started my family while in St. Louis and had two little girls when I came back to Houston… And obviously a mother for them children. And so we’ve been back home since that time. I was interested in this community, things were very different.
LK: This is in the ‘50s, when you…
BH: 1958, yes. At that time, we had segregated hospital facilities. And African American physicians had to work in their own little community hospitals. And I was very much involved in Riverside Hospital and the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
LK: I actually just came across St. Elizabeth’s the other day.
BH: So at that time there were a few pioneer, what I call pioneer physicians, that were in practice here and since most of the older physicians, their usual routine was to do a year of internship in a facility and then come out and practice, become kind of an apprentice to one of the older doctors where you learn the practice and the skills of medicine. And of course at that time we had Dr. Walter Minor, Dr. Anthony Beal, Dr. William Parker… these are all doctors who are gone now, Dr. G. P. A. Forde, Dr. Hugh Lyman, I’m trying to think of some of the old timers. And so our little community was a pretty close-knit community, because we all practiced in our little community hospitals.
LK: So in the ‘50s, ’58 you start practicing, and there was Riverside and St. Elizabeth’s, were there any other hospitals?
BH: There were no other community hospitals. Well no, I take that back, why would I forget, there was Lockwood Hospital.
LK: Lockwood Hospital, OK, right in your neck of the woods.
BH: Yeah, right here, right down the street. Actually, I don’t know how I would forget them, that’s where I started my practice. They had just built a little community hospital, and they were trying to attract physicians to come and work principally at their hospital. They built a professional building next to the hospital so I kind of worked in the emergency room…
LK: In this building?
BH: No, it’s gone now. Well the building that’s the professional building that’s right down the street at 5101 Lockwood. No doctors have practiced there since Dr. Beal died about three years ago. So, what happened was, I combined with nine other doctors to build this facility [Lockwood…], pretty much all in this neighborhood, in Lockwood. And one of our illustrious physicians in that group was Dr. Herman A. Barnett, and Dr. Barnett was a general surgeon. The interesting thing about the story you read about Dr. Jones here [referring to a newspaper article in… ], and Dr. Barnett is that Dr. Barnett in the year that I went to Meharry Medical College became the first black at the University of Texas at Galveston.
LK: My sister is actually in nursing school there.
BH: OK, and he stayed on there to do his surgical residency, and we finished identically at the same time in 1958. So he came to Houston and to this community to practice. He was one of my early partners in the building that they built for us down on Lockwood. In addition to those guys was Dr. Clarence Higgins, a pediatrician, a classmate of mine at Meharry, who came to Houston probably about 1962, where he finished, he went to the service, he was training with me at Homer Phillips but he went to the service, then he came out of the service and finished his pediatric training as probably one of the first African American physicians at Baylor. And we continued all our associations all these years in practice. He just died a few months ago, but he practiced hand and glove with me, a pediatrician and obstetrician over the years. The other physician in the Lockwood…there was four of us, I mentioned Dr. Herman Barnett and Dr. Clarence Higgins, and there was Dr. Robert Baker, who was a urologist. Now remember the history that I’m telling about is the old pioneers that were here in practice were pretty much apprentice kind of doctors who learned from the old guys. What Dr. Baker and I felt, as probably a year before me Dr. Louis Robey, first general surgeon in Houston, and he trained with me at Homer Phillips in St. Louis and he was a native Houstonian so what we were doing in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s was we were the first doctors who had gone through approved residency programs. In other words, we stayed at the hospital, as I did an internship with four years to follow that as an Ob/GYN, and Higgins trained here at Baylor and Dr. Robey, Louis Robey, trained in surgery at Homer Phillips, he has a son who is also a general surgeon, Dr. Don Robey, Jr., so we were all pioneers and of course, and our initial, so what we were bringing as new trained physicians was a different kind of medical style, which we had been trained formally, Dr. Baker as a urologist, Higgins as a pediatrician, Barnett as a general surgeon, and Robey as a general surgeon, so we were the first of our breed. The other doctors had done a year, done a little post-graduate training, in small amounts and then had practiced on people, learning the practice, and so in a sense I suspect that what we were bringing was a new kind of skill… community and we had a very close-knit because we had the community hospitals that were small and we worked in a small community. The Sisters of, now Riverside Hospital is of course a significant story as it relates to the Houston Medical Forum in that the history of Riverside is that the Cullinan foundation gave the land for the development and it was called Houston Negro Hospital at that time. And of course the older doctors that I mentioned, Dr. Lee and Dr. Minor and Dr. Lyman and Dr. Bowles, J. P. Bowles, who had all been kind of apprentice-trained doctors. Dr. Lee was the dean of the surgeons, and as he became older Dr. Minor became kind of the dean of the surgeons because he had worked with and trained with and what not. So that’s sort of the history of the physicians involved, and of course what held us together was the Houston Medical Forum which was, you know, where we met and socialized and had post-graduate clinics and got to know one another quite well, and of course…
LK: And you became involved with HMF in the ‘60s, is that what you said?
BH: That’s correct. Well, right away, probably in ’59, yes, but part of the Houston Medical Forum is of course that we are a local branch of our Texas Association which is called the Lone Star State organization and that’s a part of our national medical association. And we’re kind of thrilled that two of our physicians have been national presidents, of course Dr. Jones and Dr. Natalie Carroll.
LK: She’s currently the president, right?
BH: She was the president last year, so she’s the past president. So these are, you know part of that physician development and continuing to learn aspect of… has extended into our state and then our national organization… initially physicians of the Houston Medical Forum were pretty much involved in trying to provide good and adequate and increasingly better care at St. Elizabeth’s and the old Houston Negro Hospital, Riverside now, and of course we had a new group of physicians who were involved in Lockwood Hospital, which was a for-profit hospital, the kind of hospital which the was forerunner of what’s happening in many communities.
LK: How large were these community hospitals?
BH: Let’s see, I think Riverside probably was about 60 beds, early on, it probably got up to about 100. St. Elizabeth’s was about the same, probably about 60 beds, they’ve had some development as we go along. Lockwood hospital was smaller, probably about 40 beds.
LK: And you mentioned that Riverside became for profit, does that mean… BH: No, Lockwood.
LK: OK, I’m sorry.
BH: Lockwood, in other words a group of businessman kind of developed this hospital.
LK: OK, I see.
BH: And then of course I got caught in that early phase of doctor recruitment so they could build a hospital. Now, let’s see. What, well I didn’t get past the first question.
LK: Well, that’s a big one.
BH: I guess that the guys who influenced me were some of the old-timers that I mentioned, Dr. Hugh Lyman, who was what I call the dean of physicians in terms of professional care and I remember that when I first came to town, he’d go on vacation and I’d kind of cover his office for him, and really learn about the community and the doctors involved, which was really part of the process. One of the old-timers who I thought also was a very classy physician was a doctor called G. P. A. Forde. Forde, along with this doctor Lee that I keep mentioning were really kind of the old-timers. There was a doctor Pemberton. These were all old-time names in the Houston Medical Forum.
LK: I’ve come across Pemberton quite a bit.
BH: Yeah. So we were kind of involved in some community projects. I don’t remember specifically, probably the ‘60s when physicians were pretty much individual, kind of lone wolf entrepreneurs, and not much activity, you know… groups that were popular at that time. We as part of the Houston Medical Forum were involved in what we call model cities clinics, and I think this had to do with, we were trying to reach underserved people in the community, there was a project, and of course there were federal stipends for the doctors, and I think we all worked free, and that was supposed to be part of our scholarship fund for the Houston Medical Forum. LK: Marlow Cities Clinic, is that what you said?
BH: Yeah, Model Cities, it was a federal program that came into underserved communities, in an effort to find people. So those were the guys that kind of influenced me.
LK: Did you want to come back to Houston because your family was here, or because that’s where you were from? What brought you back to Houston after medical school at Meharry?
BH: For me there was only one place to live and work and that was Houston. I never gave any consideration to any place else, coming home to my family and my roots.
LK: Both sets of my grandparents are long-time Houstonians, ever since I can remember.
BH: Well, on question three on the contributions, the level of medical care in poor communities… I lived through and grew up in the Depression years. We had a wide populace of people who were really poor, and of course what made up a significant part of their health care was our city hospital system. At that time was of course the old Jefferson Davis Hospital, so that I would think that most of the babies from the communities we served, Third Ward, Fifth Ward… I would think when I arrived… it was very common for probably about 80 percent of the women who had children would do it in the city hospitals but a few of the doctors that I mentioned, Bowles, Lyman, Pemberton, Pendleton, were all busy practitioners, at our St. Elizabeth’s hospital, and so we had kind of a very thriving community there. Being of course a specially trained obstetrician and the first one in town, I became a part of the hospital, you know, hierarchy in the sense that I became the chief of the Ob/GYN department and were for many years both at St. Elizabeth’s and Riverside and Lockwood Hospital. Until someone else came to town to practice in this setting…
LK: Not many competitors.
BH: No, not many competitors. So much of what I consider is the improvement, and of course I had Clarence Higgins, who was the first trained pediatrician, we began to deliver a level of what I thought was significantly better than what had been available in the past. And of course, general surgeons with Herman Barnett and Louis Robey, so now you’ve got a new breed of trained physicians. You know, who have come to this community, who didn’t have this caliber of physicians in the past. So we brought kind of a new thing on board, because, as I say, the glue that held us together in this interactive way was the Houston Medical Forum, so we had a once a month, second Tuesday of every month, the Houston Medical Forum met, and of course, we always had some scientific sessions, somebody was going to be responsible for presenting something that in scientific… in general. It was this new breed of physicians who had, you know, come to town and were involved in the practice. But, socially we became kind of good friends because after the meeting we always had a social meeting, and we’d generally meet at the hospital, at one of our hospitals, and we would follow that by going to the home of one of ours for a social kind of thing. And of course here we would, we had a poker club.
LK: That sounds very scientific.
BH: Well, so you know we would kind of all look forward to this first Tuesday, that time was blocked out, our medical forum meeting, hospital meetings, you know staff meetings, and then followed by a social gathering. So we got to sort of mingle and become a pretty cohesive group. Now, what we then were interested in on a group basis was improving medical care in our community and to deal with whatever problems we had as physicians in the practice of medicine. And that’s essentially what the role of the Houston Medical Forum played for us. And most of us, that I mentioned, at one time or another we would kind of rotate the leadership of the Houston Medical Forum organization. I think I recall I was probably the president for a couple of years. And I’ve got a little curriculum vitae that will mention that I’ll see if I can find it in a minute. And so the growth of what we were doing at the hospital, the problems we were having and dealing with in the community, medicine things, which was where our main impetus was. Now in 1964, I think, we had the Public Accommodations Law, the Civil Rights Bill or whatever, and then integration of our hospitals. So for the very first time, those of us who were well-trained sought the bigger audience in terms of the bigger hospitals and so we each joined the [principals] in our communities like St. Joseph’s, Herman Hospitals, and I can, I stayed on the staff of those hospitals many, many years, but I didn’t stop what was the primary love, and that was our little community hospitals. There were a number of health issues you always tried to attack them with the Houston Medical Forum you know was to essentially bring our physicians along in an educational sense, to improve and what not. And our hospitals were principally concerned about peer review and quality of care so that we would, you know, we had staff meetings and you know our bad results, people who died, you know, or whatever, and the whole idea behind this was to take the skills and the learning of the physicians involved and see could we make everybody in our little community better, so that was pretty much our goal. I’ve been thinking, since having your questionnaire here about what I could point to specifically as it related to the Houston Medical Forum, but I guess an organization that’s really a compilation of its members.
LK: Right, absolutely.
BH: So, in that sense… so what, down here now I guess, to [question] five, and that is to do with what’s changed, and what’s changed of course is the involvement in the bigger community. For instance, I was the, I was involved at St. Joseph’s for a long time and at Herman Hospital, now Herman Memorial I guess. So you know I was on the staff for 35 years ago. Well let me go back a bit. I practiced as alone as a single, trained Ob/GYN guy for nine years. And what that did for me, since I did not interact with majority physicians in the community, it afforded me little opportunity for the majority physicians in my specialty to see what I did, how I did it, I was over here in my own little community but I think in 1967, the National Medical Association had it’s convention here in Houston. And I was to be responsible for the Ob/GYN part of that program. Our big national organization brings physicians from all over the country… as medical physicians, and then divided into specialty sections. So it was necessary for me to bring a program for that national group to Houston. What that would require was the involvement of the mainstream physicians and we had become involved since 1964. At any rate, in 1967 I actually asked the chair people of the Ob/GYN section in Texas if they would participate in my program. It was here in Houston we had Dr. Charles Flowers. Sychek or something. Anyway I invited these doctors, oh and anyway here at Baylor, in addition to Flowers, well we mustn’t forget UT. Down at Galveston we had Dr. [McGantity], and we had just opened a medical school in San Antonio, University of Texas San Antonio. That doctor’s name was Suchek or. . .
LK: UT here in Houston?
BH: Yeah, UT here in Houston, so we had four medical schools at that time. But anyway I invited the four chairs of those departments to the program and they all agreed to come. Sychek was the name of the doctor at Galveston, no not in Galveston, San Antonio. And with the chairman here at Baylor, they had just changed chairs and the outgoing, oh I forget. Anyway, as a part of involving these guys in the program, I was trying to think, essentially one of my chairpersons who was supposed to present a paper at that meeting got bumped, because the President came, and we shut down the whole thing to give the President total audience at that time, and that was Lyndon Johnson. And one of the big issues involved that Mr. Johnson, President Johnson, came to visit with us about, was you know Medicare. We had legislation for Medicare and the American Medical Association was kind of ambivalent about this process of involving the government in the practice of medicine. And our organization, the National Medical Association, saw great value in this. We had kind of gone out politically to endorse this. President Johnson was coming principally to deliver to our group about Medicare and what it meant. So our group was the first group that were sponsors of the Medicare program, the major people involved, it was a little bit ambivalent about it. They ultimately came to see it as a positive process. But anyway, my thoughts about that meeting, oh after that meeting, for instance, the chairman of the interview asked me if I wanted to participate in the program at Jefferson Davis as a part time position.
LK: And Jefferson Davis was a city hospital?
BH: It was a city hospital, which was staffed by the Baylor physicians. And as a result of my getting to know those people, I took a part-time job as a physician in Ob/GYN. So I went two half-days a week, one day I went to the clinics with medical students, the second day I went to the [copper unit] where we did cesarean sections and delivered complicated obstetrics cases. And I continued in that capacity for nine years. I decided then of course that I did not need that job, I was a very busy solo practitioner.
LK:You were busy, yes.
BH: Very busy. So I It was a bit of a sacrifice but I felt it was unnecessary to continue. And my criteria for leaving that job is I must be replaced by an African American physician. As things happened, the physician who came and took a full-time with Baylor was a Houstonian that I trained with at the city hospital in St. Louis. C. Charles Johnson, Johnson at that time was a big education family in Houston… and Charles was a resident at the city hospital and he had left and went to practice in Chicago and then decided to come to Houston and take a faculty position with Baylor, then… go to the Ob/GYN department at the Jefferson Davis Hospital. So I gave up my position. Now part of that process of course remember what the background is of that and of course we had no integration, and Herman Barnett was the first graduate at the University of Texas and so we had very few African American medical students.
LK: At Baylor?
BH: Yeah, at Baylor. And so, one of the main thrusts or interests of the Houston Medical forum is to act as role models and assistants for African American Medical students. So a part of what we do now of course is we invite anybody here in Houston or residents or medical students or what not as guest members of our Houston Medical Forum meetings. I’m very happy to say that we have a number of students who do that and come to our meetings on a monthly basis, both students and residents who train here. So that’s a big plus, scholarships and encouragement of student participation. We’ve had a real problem as it relates to that issue, just looking at some numbers at our last meeting, just last week, and one of the medical schools here graduated only three African American students out of a class of 200. Of course we want to play, you know, somewhat the numbers game. We make up 9 or 10 or 11% of the population, we’d like to see 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, you know, but that’s been a goal of ours for a very long time. And so we were very active in that we have a scholarship fund to help some of these students on an annual basis as a part of our thrust. I’m just rambling on.
LK: No, I’m getting really wrapped up in your story, it’s really fascinating.
BH: So I was trying to get to the changes, the question about you know what’s changed for African American physicians. So as a result of the integration of hospitals, and the involvement, our members have become very active in the activities of the larger hospitals. St. Elizabeth’s was of course, you know, really in our geographic area. But many times we’ve had a number of physicians who have been chiefs of surgical services, or chiefs of various services of part of the whole process, you know, kind of integrating the whole process. Again, the chiefs of staffs at hospitals in the major communities. That’s been only a natural progression of interested people in that community and hospitals in that community being involved, that’s a significant part of it. I guess, kind of for your part of story we probably could, well let’s take for instance, we talk about Houston Medical Forum but our main medical society in Houston is the Harris County Medical Society. Of course we had some restrictive rules back in the ‘50s, and I don’t know I probably wasn’t until 1964 with the Accommodations Act that we’ve had physicians, where we all kind of joined the Harris County Medical Society. So most of us carry dual involvement here. And I was just thinking that one of the physicians was president of the Harris County Medical Society a couple, three years ago. I… have been involved in the Ob/GYN part of the thing, so I’ve been kind of a national officer of the national medical association. I was the secretary in 1967 when I organized a program here, and I went on many years later to be the chairman of our national medical association in the Ob/GYN section, and I was then again responsible for the program that was probably 6 or 7 years ago. But then in terms locally here at the Ob/GYN society, I became a member of the Houston Ob/GYN society and became the secretary and some progression of order and something, so you know I was the president for one year, of the Houston Ob/GYN society.
LK: So this is separate [from the national]?
BH: That’s our major, you know I’m just talking about what’s happening in terms of progressive, of our members of the Houston Medical Forum.
LK: Kind of branching out a little bit. Great. Can you clarify for me the difference between a community hospital and a city hospital?
BH: A city hospital is owned, and run, and controlled with public funds. In Houston of course now we have a hospital district for which all of us our taxed.
LK: OK, Harris County Hospital District?
BH: Yeah, and of course that’s the funding source. For the hospital district hospitals, which of course is Ben Taub, and LBJ right over here in our neighborhood, in addition to Quentin Neese Hospital and nine or ten clinics here in town which the hospital district run, public hospitals. Now a community hospital is a free-standing hospital, it either is run by a board of directors or a special group of people that’s interested in health care. Riverside, for example, is a non-profit hospital. It has a board, a board of directors that directs the activity of that hospital and is primarily interested in you know the money management, the resources management, they make decisions. Now St. Elizabeth’s hospital was sponsored by the Sisters of Charity so it was a Catholic hospital. A particular order of sisters came to Houston and they came… so it was for them a missionary hospital. So they came to Fifth Ward, Texas. They had another missionary hospital in Latin America, either in Brazil or Peru or somewhere, you know where the natives were underserved and what not. So, I’m really impressed, because the hospitals we work at, Lockwood, Riverside, or St. Elizabeth’s are really for me got into the business, in addition to providing health care you know you have to have a trained staff, so the business of finding people and teaching them to be medical techs, nurses, LVNs, or what not becomes a part of the mission of the community hospital. So, now that I look back over the forty plus years or so, our hospital, and St. Elizabeth’s closed ten or twelve years ago, and became Riverside Hospital and developed a big drug treatment program.
LK: Oh, in the same building?
BH: So essentially the mission, well both hospitals, as integration of hospitals and the significant involvement of you know the major hospitals, this became a more difficult process to do administratively and financially. So if you’re going to use a hospital, then by the same token, if the people think the care is considerably better at these major hospitals, that’s where they want their doctors to take them. and as doctors involved themselves in multiple hospitals, they then have the thing of making a choice, so I send somebody to St. Elizabeth’s or should I send somebody to St. Joseph’s? Well it depends on the complexity of the thing, but that isn’t how the patient views it. The patient views it as where do I get the best care. And as a consequence, small community hospitals all over the country have closed. And some have just closed completely and some have found a specific mission. And what Riverside Hospital did was a drug treatment specialty hospital while they still do general medicine and what not. About 90% of what they do is in drug treatment.
LK: I didn’t know that. BH: And St. Elizabeth’s had difficulty, it decided it was not financially and administratively possible to continue that mission, the Riverside people then entered in and bought that hospital and brought their drug treatment program to the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. So now much of its mission is now of drug treatment. You talk about, you know, where is there a need for drug treatment, it’s in inner city communities. So these people have found their niche.
LK: That’s great.
BH: So both hospitals are now under the umbrella of the administrative part of Riverside. They’re serving a significant need. Now the citizens of St. Elizabeth’s hospital then decided, well hey, we’ve got still an unmet need here, and we’ve got a big percentage of those in our neighborhood and so we ought to be able to generate in our, and there’s a big thing in Houston where here in Houston our communities some ten are going to do sort of outpatient medical kind of clinics, especially in certain neighborhoods. And so there in the infancy of a program that sought a couple of the doctors here in our facility, Dr. Arthur Williams and Dr. Keaton, and our partner Dr. Harold Mullins who are members of our Forum group are involved in the involvement of that clinic so they make up the physician participants in a community based clinic that’s run with I guess federal funds. Part of the unused portion of the old St. Elizabeth’s Hospital is now being used for that clinic. But primarily it’s a drug treatment hospital, as is what’s primarily the mission of Riverside Hospital. So our physicians and obviously Medical Forum doctors are involved in, you know, those community kinds of activities in addition to that we have interests in terms of community health, health fairs, who are involved with churches or any other organizations who want to do things, you know, in the underserved communities here.
LK: Fantastic. Could you talk a little bit about African American women physicians? Obviously Edith Irby-Jones is quite a figure.
BH: Well, take our two stars, Dr. Natalie Carroll and Dr. Edith Irby-Jones. Both have been president of our prestigious national African American organization, National Medical Association. So we’ve got two presidents right here in this city.
LK: Which is pretty amazing.
BH: Really, well first of all, say for the National Medical Association is probably one hundred years old, Dr. Jones was our first woman president and that was probably about ten years ago, and to be followed by Dr. Carroll, you know from Houston, is really kind of a special whammy. LK: Oh it’s great, yeah.
BH: So, essentially what has happened as far as African American women is what has happened to medicine in general. In other words, the admitting classes of medical schools across the country has crossed the fifty/fifty threshold so there are now more women in medical school. And that trend has probably been going on for about ten or twelve years. So as part of the makeup of say our Houston Medical Forum group I would say about 30% of our physicians are women. Now what’s happening with the women group is that women stay in training longer. They don’t have the necessity apparently of taking care of family or something. And so we’re getting a significant number of, you know, super-specialists women in healthcare, and this holds true of our membership for instance. I see people who are such super-duper specialists that I don’t know what they do. For instance, we apparently have about two women who work at M. D. Anderson. And you know they’re salaried folks but look to our group as that social medical entity for which they yearn. So we have a fair number of people who are special kind of radiology and nuclear medicine, and all kinds of things. So the make-up of our group is significantly different. In the old days we had almost all what I call these solo practitioners in the community, and now we’re talking about a significant amount of groups of physicians who are involved in academic medicine or who are involved in some major health organization like the M. D. Anderson Hospital. And so I would consider myself a dinosaur, they’re just aren’t any, or very few, practitioners like Dr. Jones, Dr. Carroll, and I are kind of the old guard. Dr. Carroll… is not the old guard yet but Dr. Jones and I can admit to that.
LK: How long has Dr. Jones been practicing? BH: I think it says in the piece there she came in ’62.
LK: So how many women were involved in Houston Medical Forum when you first started? BH: Probably two. LK: OK, so really small numbers.
BH: Yeah. The women doctors involved was a woman that I trained, Dr. Clement Johnson. One of the old-time women you would have met in that old group I was talking about. It was someone who specialized in obstetrics was Dr. Patten, Thelma Patten, she was our first, she did not fit the criteria I’m talking about, with the formalized training. She was elected to specialize. And well I was thinking about women, Dr. Catherine Roett.
LK: Oh that’s right, her father was,
BH: A physician before, her, yes. Dr. Patten and Dr. Clement Johnson probably were the only women involved in our medical Forum at that time. Dr. Jones came, and you know since then the floodgates have opened and there are significant numbers of women involved.
LK: Fascinating. Did you say that you have a curriculum vitae that I could have copy of?
BH: Yeah
. LK: That will help me too, I mean you’ve done so much, in my mind, just kind of… I just wanted to check the spelling of some of these names. Dr. Walter Minor?
BH: Minor, he’s really the dean of the physicians when I came to town, he was the guy. LK: And Dr. Beal?
BH: Beal, yeah. Anthony Wayne Beal. We lost him about three years ago and he was a lifelong friend of mine because he was a golfer.
LK: Oh, I see that you’re a golfer from all the pictures.
BH: Us golfers really get it together.
LK: My grandfather’s a golfer, too, that’s all he does. And then Dr. Parker, and Dr. G. P. A. Forde, Dr. Hugh Lyman, how is that spelled?
BH: Hugh Lyman. LK: And then Dr. Lee, is that Lee?
BH: Lee, yeah. Well some of our doctors, like for instance the golfers involved, speaking about community activity and what not, Dr. Walter Minor and Dr. A. W. Beal, were responsible in legal action in helping the city to integrate its parks, its public parks. You know we couldn’t play golf in Houston, and as a result of the separate but equal doctrine, when we first raised the issue, they built us a new nine whole golf course out in [Clinton] Park, that’s a little bit off the wayside here at I-10. But these doctors were, Dr. Minor and Dr. Beal, were part of a group that brought legal action to help the city to integrate its parks. So many of the issues that we were involved in the early years had to do with…
LK: Could I get a copy of this to keep? [referring to his vitae]
BH: That’s yours, yes.
LK: Oh, great thanks. Thank you very much. Well I don’t have any further questions is there anything you’d like to add?
BH: Well, let me see what you’ve got here. [referring to the questionnaire]
LK: This has just been fascinating for me, I’ve really enjoyed it and really appreciated you giving up some of your time.
BH: Well remember that in the early years much of the issues that we were involved in was how to be equal in this country. So the issues of, confrontational issues of how to integrate our society and how to make good health available to everybody. For instance, the practice of, here’s how the practice of medicine worked. The hospitals were closed to African American physicians, many of them, or just a few of them, obviously most of the care had to be in the major society, and those physicians who saw patients was on a segregated basis. In other words, I’ve got a waiting room for blacks, and another waiting room for patients over here. If there was a time of course when patients were taken into the major hospitals, it was on a segregated basis. They had special wards or beds or whatever for African American patients. So much of the thrust of the old guys was how to improve this, how to make Houston a community, health wise, that is for everybody. You remember the few physicians who were here were poorly trained, a good part were… but just didn’t have the skills of modern training and what not so obviously people who had complicated health problems had to enter the system on a segregated basis. So much of the thrust in the early years was how to integrate our health society, how to make good healthcare available to everybody. And as I say I was part of that first wave of trained physicians, of course guys like Louis Robey, were coming home, we’re coming home, to work and whatever and so much of what we were involved in as the Houston Medical Forum was the place where you sit down and kind of beat these things to death, as I say, the social camaraderie part of that thing takes you away from the entrepreneurship or the competitorship, you know, we’ve got common problems, so let’s try to deal with them. And so I would think to answer your question about the greatest contributions in the phase that we’re talking about is assistance in the integration of healthcare. But you know a number of other dynamic things, things I can remember for instance with the Civil Rights business of segregation… before the Public Accommodation Law. We have to sponsor people who were interested in [city ends] and things of that sort you know somebody has to be responsible for the plan and the payment of a plan so those were the kind of issues we were involved in early on. Those issues don’t just disappear and never end, they’re always a continuation of the fight and that’s you know part of what we’re about in society now, to see that our members are you know treated fairly and if they have problems in their facilities where they work and what not. Due process, and good hearings, you know, so that part of it never ends. But certainly, that whole business of, you know, absolute separation, the disappearance of that made things… for instance, once I was involved in the, after 1967, to become certified for the board of obstetrics and gynecology. Some member has to sponsor you, and since I was the only guy on my side, somebody else had, so my involvement with the Baylor teaching program and what not, I continued, I continue on a volunteer staff of Baylor and UT so, you know up until two, three years ago when I kind of semi-retired, I quit hospital work in 2001.
LK: So this is what retirement looks like for you?
BH: This is what retirement looks like for me, yes. I keep telling folks, I was of course in ob-gyn and the hours were, you know, long and what not, so for me, being able to come to work at 10 or 11 and leave at 5:00 to take my day off to golf, as we did with some of these guys who were golfers that I mentioned, when I got here, these guys all decided, that we’d play golf here on Wednesdays so that’s doctor’s out of the office day. So I decided six days and six nights a week was alright, I’m going to play golf with these guys, so I started at the beginning to bond and be involved in the process, so I have always, I still have a group of guys that I’ve been playing with for 35 or 40 years. We keep losing guys, but we still have Wednesdays off when we go play golf. So I’m semi-retired now but I come to work on Mondays and Tuesdays, and I play golf on Wednesdays, work Thursdays and Fridays and play golf on Saturdays and Sundays. A great retirement.
LK: Sounds pretty good to me, sounds pretty good to me. Well, thank you so much for your time.
Next Interview: Dr. Oliver C. Hunter, Jr.