A great little memoir you should check out.

Hero Worship

 I recently finished, Just a G.P., A Memoir, written by the late Dr. Richard F. Bliss, my former general physician and the first great love of my life. True to his humble personality, he used the term “General Practitioner” like an apology for his practice having no specialized focus and ignored the skill required to address the myriad of conditions he treated on a daily basis for so many decades. The doctor summed it up best when he warned that patients shipped to various specialists are sometimes dissected into so many illnesses that the “specialists” then lack the wisdom to reassemble the patient they have taken apart.

He wrote every chapter by hand, because he was old school like that, and infused his life’s story with a sense of humor as sharp as the syringes he used to administer booster shots to local children. Sadly, the good doctor passed away before his daughter, Sarah, finished typing the final draft, but she and her siblings saw to it that his hard work was not in vain and for their effort I am grateful. Woven into a story that follows over fifty years of a country doctor’s personal life and career is an underlying message that is especially relevant during our recent national debates on health care: for Dr. Bliss and the many country doctors that sadly are a dying breed, there was never a need for distinction in the standard of care to which a patient was entitled. Each patient, rich or poor, insured or uninsured, was treated equally to the highest quality of not only healthcare, but dignity and respect. If Washington concerned itself less with special interests, profit and the bottom line, and instead reverted to what many would consider as “primitive methods” of medical practice, America would be a healthier, happier place to exist. I will now dismount from my soapbox and share a few of my favorite portions of his story, but first you need to understand a little about the man.

He was a six foot two, two hundred forty pound, ex Marine with hands the size of Christmas hams. He still wore a regulation, military buzz cut, but age and experience had turned it stark white long before I first knew him.  He had a deep baritone voice that rumbled like thunder from somewhere far down in his chest every time he spoke and big, kind eyes that betrayed his giant, intimidating demeanor and always made me think of puppy dogs. As a child I ranked his overall importance in my universe as resting somewhere between my father and Santa Claus. I always felt that if I could just get to Dr. Bliss that everything would be fine, something not even Santa could guarantee.  His passing and the passing of my father, both in 2004, left my pedestals empty and a void in my heart.

I fell in love all over again with each chapter I read. In all my years of blind, hero worship I never imagined that Dr. Bliss had a southern trial lawyer’s ability to tell a story. He described something as simple as the town square in Talladega with such vivid detail that I felt I had walked the sidewalks beside him decades before I was a twinkle in my father’s eye. And while the book contained all of the technical terms one might expect from a doctor’s memoir, he told the stories in such layman’s terms that I felt like I knew the general ailment he was treating even if I could not pronounce the words he was using. Sprinkled in with his wonderful and entertaining stories is the southern charm that made him so beloved. One patient’s drinking problem was humorously referred to as, “dates with John Barleycorn.” Another patient was shot right between the eyes with a .25 caliber pistol, to which he commented,

“Hostility still flowed loudly from her undamaged mouth and throat.”

 I also caught glimpses of the man I remembered, a man who had a heart as big as the great outdoors. One such example being the story he relayed about performing surgery on a five year old girl for a .22 caliber rifle injury during a time before Medicaid and guaranteed payment:

“Many years later, after I had discontinued surgery, a friend of mine asked me what had been the most I had ever received for an operation. Without hesitation I related this case to him with this ending: When she returned for her follow-up visit, she wore a broad smile, a freshly washed dress, neatly braided pigtails, and held a somewhat dirty and greasy paper sack containing a dozen banty eggs that she had gathered herself- to give to me. She couldn’t see my wet eyes as I hugged her in my thanks for that payment.”

There are countless stories of this type throughout the book involving not only Dr. Bliss, but many other G.P’s in the Talladega community. His understated personality, which shines through in his story, in no way requests that the reader “admire me for my charity work,” it is simply the matter of fact telling of the practice of medicine in an era where doctors loved their profession, their patients, their community, and did not have the leisure to focus on the bottom line, and yet, in the end, the bottom line always seemed to take care of itself.

He covered all aspects of his practice with his clever storytelling weaving the reader down cold, isolated roads in the dead of night and through the middle of an operating room so hot in the summer that the staff took up a collection for a window air conditioner. And while, much to a small town’s disappointment I’m sure, the patients in his stories remained anonymous, they were described with such detail that I was able to create my own cast of characters wielding .25 caliber handguns, axes or simply waddling swollen and aggravated to his office above Henderson Drugstore.

His memoir was the perfect mixture of humor and humility that was needed to deliver its message: that for all of the advances in modern medicine we must be careful not to forget the doctor patient relationships that are so very basic but so absolutely essential for good health care. There was no “God Complex,” just a genuine love of profession and a deeply felt duty to his patients and his town that left me wanting to be a better person.

I did not know the “Dick Bliss” my parents knew. I did not know the husband of Billy or the father of Debbie, Sarah, Rick and Bill. I did not know the story teller, the man who worried through the night over a patient’s condition, second guessed his own diagnosis, or regretted a decision decades after the fact. I did not know Richard Bliss, the mere mortal, but having read his story, I do now, and feel more enriched for the experience.

Dr. Richard Frederic Bliss

For order information email: rfbliss.justagp@gmail.com