[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 14 (Thursday, February 1, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E139-E140]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           DR. CORRIE ENDURES

                                 ______


                        HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR.

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, January 31, 1996

  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, there are two causes for the exorbitant, 
excessive cost of healthcare in this country--the Federal Government 
and large insurance companies.
  If it were not for the involvement of these two entities, medical 
care would cost only a tiny fraction of what it does.
  If we paid for anything else through a third-party payor system, 
costs would skyrocket.
  That is why I read with great interest the opening comments of a 
recent feature article about Dr. Corrie Blair in the Knoxville News-
Sentinel.
  I also would like to call attention to a similar story in today's 
Wall Street Journal entitled ``A Magnificent Misfit'' by W.E. Gutman.
  I wish we had more old-fashioned doctors like Dr. Blair and Dr. 
Gutman.

                   [From the Knoxville News-Sentinel]

    Loudon Woman has Been Practicing Medicine for More Than 54 Years

                           (By Don Williams)

       ``I'm one of a dying breed,'' says Dr. Corrie Blair.
       ``I don't like government medicine, I don't like insurance 
     medicine. I don't like pharmacists telling you how to 
     practice medicine.''
       If Blair seems set in her ways, she has reason to be.
       She is 80 years old, although with her clear brown eyes and 
     brown hair, she doesn't look it. She started practicing 
     medicine when common sense directed how to treat common 
     colds.
       In this age of HMOs, TennCare and other programs brought in 
     by big business and government, the bureaucrats and 
     politicians have laid down a thick stratum of regulation on 
     what used to be an uncluttered profession.
       When Blair entered medicine more than 54 years ago, so-
     called innovations, such as preventive medicine, boiled down 
     to using good common sense.
       These organizations and things they're doing now are all 
     based on economics rather than treating the patient,'' says 
     Blair in a clear, high voice. There was a time, however, a 
     time when . . .
       Blair was a child when the bridge was put across the 
     Tennessee River in Loudon, cutting her family out of the 
     ferry business. Her family's ownership of choice real estate 
     made life easy for her. Maybe too easy.
       It could be that's one reason she chose medicine. For a 
     young lady in the 1930s, training to be a doctor was far from 
     easy.
       Blair made good grades in Loudon County High School, but 
     while the boys were studying biology and algebra, she was 
     studying ``domestic science'' with the other girls.
       ``The only thing they thought we could do was get married 
     or teach school, but when I got out there was no one I wanted 
     to marry who wanted to marry me, so I went to college.''
       She attended two years at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, 
     Ga., taking her first real science course there as a 
     sophomore.
       ``I like science better than anything, so I thought, I'll 
     study more science and be a doctor.''
       She returned to Tennessee and entered the University of 
     Tennessee pre-med program.
       ``It wasn't too popular for women to do,'' she says, and 
     her family and friends needed convincing that she was 
     serious. Her first cousin, Dr. Blair Harrison, was chief of 
     staff at Knoxville General Hospital, and he offered to let 
     her take nurse's training to test her mettle.
       ``After that was over, I told them, why yes, I still want 
     to be a doctor, and I applied to the UT College of Medicine 
     in Memphis. Back then there were no dormitories and we lived 
     in houses with residents. My family thought it would be OK. 
     There was another girl in my class, and we went all the way 
     through together.''
       It was while in Memphis that she met Dr. William Thomas 
     McPeake.
       ``He was an old country boy, and I was an old country girl. 
     We were staying at the same boarding house, and every evening 
     we would get together on the front porch. I'd go for a walk 
     and he'd go with me. He was working his way through.''
       McPeake graduated ahead of Blair, but stayed in Memphis to 
     intern until she graduated in 1941. When he was called up for 
     military training in Pennsylvania, Blair went to Philadelphia 
     to serve her medical internship.
       There, on Jan. 25, 1942, they were married. When McPeake 
     shipped out to North Africa for service under Gen. George S. 
     Patton, he left behind a pregnant wife.
       ``Our daughter, Molly, was 3 years old when he got back,'' 
     she remembers. She was the first of four children.
       Molly Peeler is a physician at Fort Sanders Regional 
     Medical Center.
       William T. McPeake is an orthopedic specialist, practicing 
     mostly at St. Mary's.
       Sara Louise Gilkey, now a lawyer in Lynchburg, Va., married 
     a doctor.
       Ed Blair McPeake operates the family farm, raising cattle 
     in Loudon.
     
[[Page E140]]

       The children were all born in Loudon, and it was there 
     where McPeake rejoined his wife after the war.
       ``I told him this is the garden spot of the world, and this 
     is where I want to live.''
       By the time he returned, Blair had cobbled together a 
     family practice.
       Together they made house calls, mostly in a Jeep, like 
     those McPeake knew in the Army.
       ``We used to deliver all the babies. We'd carry a little 
     ether into the home and knock 'em out if they needed it. We'd 
     spend the night with them and charge about $25. If they 
     didn't have the money, sometimes they'd give us something. If 
     they were killing hogs, they'd give you some part of it, or 
     maybe a chicken.
       ``We had real good luck. The Lord took care of us.''
       The pair bought a little house downtown, where they 
     conducted their practice. Later they built the modern Loudon 
     Health Care Clinic, of concrete and steel, and moved the 
     little house out to their farm.
       Blair, who kept her maiden name rather than face a mountain 
     of paperwork to change it on licenses, certificates and other 
     forms, was ahead of her time.
       ``I was the first in our hospital (the old Charles H. Bacon 
     Hospital, now Fort Sanders Loudon Medical Center) to let a 
     man come in for the delivery of his baby. It worked out well. 
     I've had husbands jumping up and down when the baby came out.
       ``One of the old things, which is good, is stressing 
     preventive care. I've stressed it all my life. We told people 
     they shouldn't smoke. We had tobacco allotments on the farm, 
     but quit growing it. We got to feeling guilty.''
       McPeake died three years ago, and despite hands, swollen at 
     times from arthritis, Blair still wears her wedding rings on 
     a chain around her neck.
       People in town call her Dr. Corrie, and she has a personal 
     relationship with literally thousands of them.
       ``I think it's real important for doctors to know their 
     patients. In these new programs they just rush you through 
     like a herd of cattle. They don't talk to you. They don't 
     listen to you.''
       Blair still listens, even though specialists have taken 
     away many of her patients.
       She quit delivering babies, for instance, shortly after 
     babies she had delivered began having babies of their own. 
     These days, more often than not, find her visiting area 
     nursing homes, a practice she enjoys.
       Asked when she plans to retire, she says resolutely, ``When 
     something comes along and knocks me over. Of course, these 
     new medical programs might put me out of business. If that 
     happens, I'll find something else I like to do, but not any 
     better.''
                                                                    ____


             [From the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 31, 1996]

                          A Magnificent Misfit

                            (By W.E. Gutman)

       My father the doctor did everything himself without benefit 
     of nurses, clerical staff, or drafty assembly-line 
     consultation cubicles. He took your temperature as you sat on 
     a white enamel swivel chair. He even drew blood from your 
     finger and let it run up a thin graded tube as you marveled 
     at the strange powers of capillary action.
       This wonderful man had his own centrifuge, a gleaming 
     autoclave and an old Roentgen that hummed with imperturbable 
     omnipotence in a bright, cheerful room that smelled of 
     lavender and cloves. When he administered injections, he'd 
     deaden the point of impact with a dry little slap, and he'd 
     talk about this and that with neighborly solicitude long 
     after the needle was out.
       You were never surprised to learn that he'd pedaled several 
     kilometers at night in the rain to deliver a baby on an old 
     kitchen table, or to hold the hand of a dying village 
     patriarch as family and friends looked on. Sometimes it 
     lasted till morning. He'd go straight back to his office 
     looking tired, but he'd smile, put on a fresh smock and patch 
     up scraped elbows and knees, and he'd even ask how Aunt Lucy 
     or Uncle John was feeling these days.
       ``How much do I owe you, doctor?'' I'd often hear his 
     patients ask.
       ``Oh I don't know,'' he'd answer, staring at his feet, 
     clearly embarrassed by the question. ``Whatever you can.'' 
     Then he'd quickly add, ``Don't worry if you're short. You can 
     pay me next time.''
       Money made him feel uncomfortable. He had an almost prudish 
     disdain toward it, ``There is something incongruous about 
     charging money to heal, relieve pain or save lives,'' he once 
     told me. ``I shall never get used to it''--a remarkable ethos 
     for a man who, by his own admission, had embraced medicine to 
     escape the abject poverty of his childhood.
       ``It all happened in dissection class,'' he recalled in a 
     rare moment of wishful introspection. ``I wept at the sight 
     of my first cadaver. He was so very young, so very much 
     alone, forgotten. Who is this wretched mass no one had 
     claimed, I asked myself. Has he no family? Is there no one to 
     mourn him? He was alive, he felt pleasure and pain, joy and 
     sorrow. He had dreams. He loved. Was he loved in return? 
     Could he have been saved? did poverty deprive him of good 
     health or rob him of a decent funeral?
       A pre-med student who now boasts a Fifth Avenue practice, a 
     New Canaan estate, and a yacht at anchor in a secluded cove 
     on some Caribbean coral archipelago once asked my father what 
     he considered to be the three most important medical taboos. 
     My father replied:
       ``Do not operate unless your patients's life clearly is in 
     danger. Do not overmedicate. Never charge more than patients 
     can afford. Ignore the first two injunctions and you are 
     unprincipled. Break the third and I shall call you a 
     vampire''
       I miss my father, He was incorruptible. He had no time for 
     sophistry, no patience for equivocation, no room for the 
     shaded areas separating right and wrong. Compassion was his 
     guide, his patients' health and welfare his sole mission and 
     reward. He lived frugally--``how much does one really need to 
     live with dignity?'' he once asked a wealthy colleague who 
     found the question incongruous and contentious. My father 
     died poor but debtless.
       I wish I had a dollar in my pocket for every patient this 
     1935 summa cum laude graduate of the Paris Faculty of 
     Medicine treated for nothing, for every leg of lamb or basket 
     of eggs he accepted in lieu of honorarium, for every debt he 
     forgave. I would have had more than enough to afford the 
     thorough checkup doctors denied me when I lost my job, when 
     unemployment benefits ran out and I could no longer afford 
     medical insurance.
       I was 45 then. I am now 58. Will I find a doctor like my 
     father when I retire and my meager scribblings barely cover 
     the cost of a simple pine casket? They say it's cheaper to 
     die than to live. My father devoted his career to 
     reconstructing aphorisms. He was the magnificent misfit 
     lesser men do not have the courage to be.

                          ____________________