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Transcript: Henry V. Kirby, 1983

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We have with us today, on the fifth of May, in conjunction with their 50th Class Reunion, Dr. Henry Kirby, M.D., 1933, from Harrison, Arkansas, who is probably a fifth generation graduate of Washington University.  [Ed. note: With Dr. Kirby is Dr. Lloyd L. Penn, also a member of the Class of 1933.]  They are looking at a xerox of a diploma and they are going to talk about it.

Lloyd L. Penn:  It was in that book though, I thought there was a Kirby on here, but it’s not.

Henry V. Kirby:  Frank Kirby was a general practitioner and he practiced in Harrison, Arkansas from 1904 to 1934 in general practice.

Was he an uncle of yours?

HVK:  That was an uncle of mine.

And he was born in Arkansas, too?

HVK:  Yes, he was born there in Harrison.

And he’s Franklin Beverly Kirby?

LLP:  There’s a Leonidus here.

HVK:  Yes.  He’s my grandfather.

LLP:  Here it is right here.  Leonidus Kirby, right here.  Here it is, born Harrison, Arkansas, class of ’76.

1876?

HVK:  All right, I think it’s ’78.  He was born in 1850, but he was born on the line between Dade County and Greene County, Missouri in 1850, December the first.

Do you remember him?  Did you ever meet him?

HVK:  Yes.  I was born in Harrison, where he was practicing in 1908.  And he died in 1926, the year that I graduated from high school, so I had a very good knowledge of Grandpa Kirby.

What was he like?  What did he look like?

HVK:  He was about five [foot] four [inches] – he had broad shoulders, big hands, long arms that reached down to about his knees.  He had a very snappy, short step and he always wore soft-toed shoes with elastic on the side.  He had a beard, as I ever knew him; he always had a white beard.

I guess he drove horse and buggy to visit his patients?

HVK:  He did at the time which I early knew him, but he procured some of the earlier cars there in Harrison to practice in.

Did you ever go with him on calls?

HVK:  Yes, I used to go with him on some calls.  And he was in general practice.  He did a lot of surgery, however.

In a hospital?

HVK:  He did some in Harrison.  He did appendectomies in the early [18]90s, which was very early for most any area.

Yes.  Was he very successful with those?

HVK:  Yes, he had a good deal of success with his surgery and he would go up and down the railroad carrying his sterilizer with instruments and drapes on the railroad and go to neighboring towns and operate in their homes.  So he was pretty well known in that area.  Medically, he was president of the Arkansas Medical Society in 1904 and he was Grand Master of the Masons, made the cornerstone in the Temple at Little Rock, Arkansas.  And he was one of—  He came to Harrison, Arkansas in 1871 with a barrel of whiskey and a wagon load of drugs.

Is that about what it took to set up medical practice then?

HVK:  Well, he came from Springfield, Missouri down there.

What had he done in Springfield?  Do you know?

HVK:  He was born in Greene County, on the line between Dade County and Greene County, Missouri and Springfield is in Greene County.  His father and grandfather had graduated from school, which is now Washington University, in 1858.

Medical School or [other]?

HVK:  Medical School.  And his father then died when he was twelve years old and he went to Kansas to live with his uncle, Dr. John Bender.

Okay, now can I interrupt for a minute?  You were talking about your great grandfather, Leon?

HVK:  That’s my grandfather, Leonidus.

Okay, good Latin name.  And he’s in the catalog of what year?

LLP:  St. Louis Medical College graduates of the years 1841-1898.

Okay and that was Leonidus Kirby?

HVK:  (Corrects pronunciation)  We called him Leonidus.  That was his listing there.

Okay, so you said his father was also a graduate of Washington University?  Leonidus’ father?

LLP:  Well, this is the Medical College of the City of St. Louis.

Okay, right.

HVK:  That was his father and his grandfather were in the same class.

Whose father?

HVK:  Leonidus.

Kirby, and Dr. Penn’s relative?

HVK:  No.

Leonidus Kirby and—?

HVK:  And his father, along with Dr. Penn’s grandfather, were in the class of 1858.

LLP:  Now I saw him in there, C. V. Kirby or something, in the books of the days – she can’t find it – she photocopied it and I have the photocopy and it’s in my stuff that I’ve got all packed to send back to California.  But I can look it up down there tonight when I get back down to the hotel.

Good.  Dr. Kirby, who was C. V. Kirby?

LLP:  I thought it was C. V., maybe not.  I was just looking through them.  Was that your great grandfather?

HVK:  I think it’s William B., and I believe it’s William Beverly – was the father of Leonidus.  And his father, William Kirby’s father, was, I think, Tully C. Kirby.  Tully C.

LLP:  “T.C.” maybe.

Tully.  (Spells) T-u-l-l-y?

HVK:  Yeah.  (Spells) T-u-l-l-y, C.  Tully C.  I don’t know what the C is – Tully C. Kirby.  And they lived in the vicinity of Moberly, Missouri.

Okay, tell me about William Beverly Kirby.

HVK:  He was the one that graduated in 1858 with his father.  And he died in 1862 – [when] my grandfather was twelve years old – with supposedly tuberculosis.  And I just wonder if he may not have caught tuberculosis while going to medical school.  Because there was no other tuberculosis in the family, but that would have to be a supposition.  That’s about all that I know of and I—

Now William Beverly was an uncle of yours then?

HVK:  William Beverly was a great grandfather.  Franklin Beverly is an uncle.

So Franklin was an uncle.

LLP:  There, Vilray P. Blair.  [Vilray] Papin Blair, Instructor and Practical in Anatomy, 1894.  There he was – he was the greatest plastic surgeon, one of the greatest ever in America.  And we had him as our instructor when we started here.  He was still active in the class of ’33 – he was still teaching here.  In ’94 he was doing it a long time.  He put in as a professor at Washington University.

HVK:  William Beverly went back to the vicinity of Moberly, Missouri.

And he practiced medicine there?

HVK:  Yes.  Until he died and as I said my grandfather, Leonidus – as a child of five years of age – went to Kansas to live with his uncle, who was Dr. John Bender.  And there, I presume, is where he learned a certain amount of medicine.  Enough that he bought him a wagon load of drugs and a barrel of whiskey and moved from Springfield, Missouri to Harrison, Arkansas in 1871.  There he established a drugstore upstairs, which was in front of Dr. Hugh Ruse’ office.  And in the basement below, he had a saloon.  A few years later – a year of so later – he was in the home of one of his best whiskey customers and he saw the condition of the children.  And he went back and closed his saloon and figured up how much money he’d made off his saloon and gave that to—  He said that money wouldn’t do him any good, so he gave that money then to his wife’s brother, Pole Krump, who ran for the first county clerk in Boone County, Arkansas.  And so that was where that money went.  And so Grandpa Kirby had this drugstore.  One day they brought in a child, five years of age, which was chocking to death on some object.  Some said cockleburs and some said corn.  But anyway, he laid the child down on the table and used his pocket knife and made a hole into the trachea, which got some air into the child and the child expelled the object and lived.  And that was the story that traveled all over the country, so Grandpa began to have to practice medicine.  He practiced there before; he said, “If I’m going to have to practice medicine, I want to go learn more about it.”  So he left his wife and three children and seventy-five dollars and came to St. Louis and spent two years in what is now the Washington University, and his name is listed, Dr. Leonidus Kirby.  And that was, as I said, my grandfather, which I knew from early childhood till I graduated from high school.

Did he have much influence on your father’s choice on being a physician?

HVK:  My father was not a physician.  He graduated from the St. Louis College of Pharmacy here.  And he was, as I look back on it, I think he probably had dyslexia, but he operated a drugstore there from 1904 till 1937.

There at Harrison?

HVK:  There at Harrison.  I went to the University of Arkansas for three years and I was the last class they took in with three years of college.  They took me in here after my third year of college work at the University of Arkansas and I think Dr. Bob [Robert J.] Terry had a lot to do with it because he knew that I was – at that time – was a fifth generation to attempt to get a degree from Washington University.

So there was yourself, and there was your father.

HVK:  No, myself and there was three uncles of the next generation; my grandfather of one generation; then my great grandfather and great, great grandfather in the class of 1858.

Okay.  In medical school?

HVK:  In the medical school.

So let’s go with their names now – your great, great grandfather’s name was—

HVK:  William B.

William B.

HVK:  I think it’s Beverly.  I will look these up and if there’s anything different.  I’ll have to give this off the top of my head.

Okay, and the three, and his son also?

HVK:  No.  That was the father of Leonidus Kirby, who had the three sons.

And Leonidus’ three sons were—

HVK:  Frank, Hodgen, and Krump.  It was Franklin B. and Henry Hodgen, and Alexander Krump.  Those are the ones you had listed over there.

Okay, right.  I’m just trying to get this straight.

HVK:  William B.’s father was Tully C. Kirby, which was in the same class with him in 1858.

So father and son were both in the class of 1858?

HVK:  That’s right.

Do you have any family stories about them or any folklore?

HVK:  I did know a great deal about them because as his, Leonidus’ father died when Leonidus was twelve years of age.  And I did know Leonidus very well.  He was a very religious man and always taught a Sunday school class and he organized the First Christian Church there at Harrison – he helped organize the First Christian Church in Harrison, Arkansas.  As I said awhile ago he was the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge and laid the cornerstone for their Temple in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is there at the present time.  He was a great reader and he had a great respect of people from all up and down the railroad which came in there in 1901.

He was the one that would take his surgical instruments and ride on the railroad?

HVK:  And the steam sterilizer with drapes and would go up and down the railroad doing surgery in the home.  In Harrison, we had no hospital there and it was basically in the center of hill country; Ozark Hills.  And we didn’t have a hospital there until 1950.

No kidding?  In Harrison, Arkansas?

HVK:  And we had to go to Springfield, which was at that time 90 miles or to Little Rock, which was 140 miles, to get to the nearest hospital.

So I guess any physician practicing had a lot to do without hospital support then.

HVK:  Yes.  I practiced there.  I was interning at DePaul Hospital here when my uncle died.

Which uncle?

HVK:  Frank Kirby.  Franklin B.

Okay.

HVK:  When my uncle died, who was doing general practice in Harrison so I had already made a contract for another year with DePaul, but I broke that contact and went back to Harrison and started in the practice of general practice.

If you hadn’t done that would there have been another doctor they could have gone too?

HVK:  Yes.  There was, in fact, that year there was four of us who entered the practice of general practice of medicine in 1934 in that community.

About how many people lived in that community then?

HVK:  There was about, I’d say, seven thousand.  And they have about nine thousand now, but we have a 140-bed hospital there now with about—  When we opened the hospital there was eight of us practicing medicine there in 1950 and now there’s thirty-eight doctors there.

Are the people any healthier with all those doctors?

HVK:  Yes, we had to be benefited by it.  Prior to that if we had any thing that we couldn’t do in our office or in a home we had to take out the bucket seat on my front car – the right bucket seat – and fill that in with quilts or blankets and put patients on that and on a two-door car and take off for Springfield or Little Rock with them.

Even for emergencies?

HVK:  Yes ma’am.  If we couldn’t take care of them at home.  And we did have to operate in the home.  We operated in our office and one time I did have to do a caesarean section under local [anesthetic] with the woman sitting up because she had a decompensated heart disease and it was a first baby of a forty-one year old woman.

And you did that at her house?

HVK:  No, in my office.

At your office.  When was that?

HVK:  That was in 1935, ’36.

So you’d been like three or four years out of medical school?

HVK:  No.  I graduated in ’33 and had one year of rotating internship at DePaul Hospital, then I went back to Harrison to practice and we had no hospital there.

But wasn’t that a frightening experience for you?

HVK:  Oh sure, it was frightening experience, but when you have to do something you have to do it.

Had you ever had any instruction on how you do all that at the same time?  I mean setting up and local anesthesia—

HVK:  No, I just called Dr. [Shelbey B.] Hinkle, an obstetrician, down in Little Rock.  I told him the situation and I told him I was bringing her down there to him.  He said, “No you’re not.  You’re going to do her right there.”  So he told me to do it under – to use a half a percent procaine local injection and do it under local in my office.  And that’s what we did.

Did he give you any other advice or did he just say don’t bring her down here?

HVK:  No, that was all he said.  “You’re going to do her right there under a local.”

Was the baby healthy?

HVK:  Yes, the mother and baby moved away from Harrison when the baby was nineteen years old.

Were you the physician for the baby while he was a child?

HVK:  Yes, that’s right.  Those were unusual circumstances, but nevertheless I was confronted with that.  I went to the war then in 1942 for three and a half years I served in the medical corps for the Infantry.  I spent about 311 days on the front line with the Infantry in Italy.

Were you part of the 21st General Hospital for the Army?

HVK:  No.  They said that they didn’t have any place in the hospital for General Practitioners, so we were expendable as battalion surgeons.  I was a battalion surgeon with the 85th Division in Italy most of my time.  I was transferred later back to the clearing station which served the Division instead of the Battalion.  My job was to train a section of men, thirty-two men, to care for the wounded and get the wounded back to where they’d be picked up by the ambulance and then we were through with them.

That wasn’t a very rewarding practice of medicine, or was it?

HVK:  Well, yes I think it was very rewarding, but I wouldn’t want to go through it again.

I hope we don’t ever have to do that again.

HVK:  I lived with them.  I guess I spent two and a half years sleeping on the ground.  I trained with them.  I had to train as an Infantry man.  Well, I did get a Bronze Star out of it.  When I left the Army I didn’t even sign a laundry ticket.  I didn’t want any more to do with it.  I came back home.  Then we – each one of the doctors that was there – had to establish a few beds.  I established an old house there with six beds and of course readily we began to try to establish a hospital and by 1950, we had a fifty-bed hospital established.

Did you build a new building or put it in a house in town?

HVK:  We built a new building from scratch and I was the first Chief of Staff for that hospital, which I was very well pleased with.

While we’re here talking about your relatives, we need to say something about Henry Hodgen Kirby.

HVK:  Now Henry Hodgen Kirby – he was interested in surgery and he was named after Hodgen, which Leonidus Kirby respected – Dr. Hodgen.  And he was in surgery and he was in Little Rock, Arkansas.

He went to Little Rock.

HVK:  And where he, in 1922, when he was 39 years old, he dropped dead when he shot a gun while he was hunting.  I think snipe hunting.

He shot a gun and just keeled over and dropped dead?

HVK:  Yes.  And dropped dead.

Had he had health problems?

HVK:  No, none that we know of.

Strange.  Did you know him?

HVK:  Yes, I knew him.  He was considered an excellent operator.  I think Mayo had asked for him at one time.  I don’t remember whether he trained under Crossen, or some of those up here in the school.

LLP:  There you are, Crossen.  There it is.  Harry Sturgeon Crossen.

HVK:  In 1922 when he dropped dead– so that cut off an era there.  He had a brother, Dr. Alexander Krump Kirby, who was practicing Pediatrics in Little Rock at that time.  And he was with his brother when he dropped dead and he wasn’t able to resuscitate him.  And so he practiced Pediatrics and he died with a heart attack in 1938.

They had hospital facilities in Little Rock for their practice?

HVK:  Oh sure.  So we’ve developed a real good hospital in our area and as I said with thirty-eight doctors and we were [got] national reputation here a couple years ago when ABC gave a picture of one of our surgeons there.  So that’s a kind of a blight to our hospital as far as I’m concerned, in regard to the whole thing, because I think it cut back our productivity a great deal.  And I hope that is all settled and we can proceed in the proper direction.  That remains to be seen.

Now, when you left St. Louis and went back to Harrison to take over your uncle’s practice, how long were you in Harrison then before you came back to St. Louis for anything?  What was Washington University Medical School like when you left?

HVK:  There’s one that can tell you.  He was in my class, Lloyd Penn.

Well, what faculty members do you remember and what buildings?  Where did you live?

HVK:  Well, we had – come help me here, Lloyd – we had [Joseph] Erlanger in our Physiology class.  [Addressing a 3rd alum]  You weren’t here then, were you?  Then we had Paul Schaffer [ed. note:  Kirby is referring to Philip A. Shaffer] for Biochemistry.  And of course we had Bob Terry as our Anatomy instructor, along with Mildred Trotter.  And then [William H.] Olmsted was teaching– he taught—

3rd alumnus:  Nutrition.

HVK:  Nutrition, which was mainly on how to treat diabetes by nutrition.  The use of insulin was in its early stages.  We had Williams McKim Marriott, who was the one that was the “grandpa” of all infant nutrition.  Before Williams McKim Marriott came along, in my day if I didn’t have a wet teat to hang on to, I didn’t live.  And Williams McKim Marriott changed that.  He incidentally died just shortly after with a ruptured appendix.  Then we had [Alexis F.] Hartmann – who had Hartmann’s—

3rd alumnus:  Hartmann’s solution.

HVK:  Normal saline – I mean [prompted by 3rd alum] Lactated Ringers Solution.  [We] also had Dr. [Warren H.] Cole who developed – he along with Graham, Dr. Evarts A. Graham’s wife [Helen Tredway Graham], who worked in the Biochemistry Department – developed the Graham-Cole gallbladder dye [ed. note: Warren Cole worked principally with Evarts Graham to develop the Graham-Cole test (cholecystography), though Helen Tredway Graham may have played a role in its development].

Who else did we have here?  [Evarts A.] Graham was here in surgery and old Ernie Sachs is the one we always remembered.  He taught us—  We had our Thursday noon questionnaire class down in the “Pit.”  He’d get somebody down there and he’d really work them over in regard to a lot of questions and he was a great teacher, Ernie Sachs.  Let’s see.  Who’s our Medicine man?  Who’s the man [who was] head of Medicine?  Barr.

3rd alumnus:  David Barr.

HVK:  Yeah, David [P.] Barr was head of Medicine.

3rd alumnus:  Alexander.

HVK:  And [Harry L.] Alexander.

(Addressing another alum)  You can join in.

HVK:  That’s right.  You just asked me what medical school was like when I was here.

Were you in the North building or the South building, or this location?

HVK:  The Anatomy Lab is where it is now.  Biochemistry and Physiology was over there in the same building.  Our clinic was in the old building on Euclid over there.  And they were building the new Ear, Nose, and Throat building at that time.

That would have been McMillan [Hospital], right?

HVK:  The McMillan building, yes.

Where did you live when you went to medical school?  Did they have a dormitory here?

HVK:  No, I lived in Phi Beta house at 4933 Forest Park Blvd.  There’s one of my roommates, there’s another one over there.  That was a very pleasant part of my medical school – was my Phi Beta house.

LLP:  Don’t put me in the Phi Beta house.

HVK:  I’m not talking about you.  I’m talking about Russell Smith.  And that was a great part of my medical education, I would say.

LLP:  Tell them how you hired Charlie Rugieri, the cook.

HVK:  He stayed with us how long?

LLP:  I don’t know – forty years.

Till the house closed, I think, wasn’t it?

HVK:  Yeah.  Ed Stewart and I went down and hired Charlie.

What did it cost to go to medical school when you were there?

LLP:  Tuition was four hundred dollars a year.

HVK:  Tuition was four hundred dollars a year.

Then what did it cost you per month to live in the Phi Beta house and spending money?

HVK:  When I first went there my sister sent me fifty dollars a month and [with] what I could earn working on the State Highway in the summer time, that’s what I got by on.

What did you do on the state highway?  Road building?  Paint striping?

HVK:  Well, I was a concrete inspector and I ran the level some.  I did some cross-sectioning for the highway, determination of dirt removal.  I got three dollars a day [for] a ten-hour day.  Then when I came up here they let me mow the yard and fire the furnace and distribute the laundry for my room.

At the Phi Beta house?

HVK:  At Phi Beta house.  My father had been in the drug business at home and we had a railroad strike there, which was the only railroad strike in which the union was not a winner.  I think one of the only ones that had ever happened in the nation.  We had a Vigilance Committee of twelve people who ran the town for a year and a half, and that was dominated by the Ku Klux Klan.  And they wrote my daddy a letter to join the Ku Klux and pay the dues or they would boycott him.  So they boycotted him at least ten years.

He wouldn’t join?

HVK:  He wouldn’t join them, so they boycotted him for that many years.  My daddy did manage to have twenty-nine college years in his children.

Wow!  How many other children are there besides you?

HVK:  There were five of us in all.

What were their names?

HVK:  There’s Lillian Kirby, and she was the one that was teaching in junior college in Oklahoma and was able to send me fifty dollars a month during my medical school days.  Hazel Kirby, [who] was younger than I was– she was in university.

Washington University?

HVK:  No, at Arkansas University.  And Eleanor, who managed to live with some other kinfolks in Texas and she got her degree from Texas University.  My brother, who is ten years younger than I was, he got his M.D. degree in 1944, and he went to New Orleans [for] his internship and became acquainted with Dr. [John] Adriani and he did the work, the physical work, for Dr. Adriani who owned the saddle-block [ed. note: Dr. John Adriani (1907-1988) developed saddle block method of obstetric anesthesia].  So he went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where he practiced anesthesiology from 1947 – and he’s still practicing there and is very active yet.  And he has one son there, Dean Lee Kirby, who is now interning in the Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge.

Did you have children?

HVK:  I had three children.  I had one son who is forty-five years old.  He graduated from the University of Arkansas in Chemistry.  He went to medical school in Little Rock, which he was not able to follow through with because he was found to have a pretty marked degree of dyslexia.  So he went back to University at Arkansas and got his degree in electronics in about three and a half years, so he has been an engineer and is at the present time working in Fort Smith, Arkansas.  And I had two girls who both got degrees over at the University in education as teachers.

I think you referred to a previous relative of yours who you think had dyslexia, so it’s like it skipped a generation.

HVK:  I thought it was my father.  My father – the reason he probably didn’t go into medicine; he had three brothers that graduated up here, but he didn’t.  I never did know just what it was, but I have had a strong suspicion that he probably had dyslexia too.  Of course we didn’t know what dyslexia was until – first I knew of it is when they told me my son had it.

That would have been what, in the ’50s, ’60s?

HVK:  That was in 1960, along about there.  And I didn’t know anything about dyslexia before then.

Had never heard of it?

HVK:  No.  The only thing was when I was in Italy my wife sent me some writing of my son where he had copied his name.  And he copied a mirror image when he would write.  Any word – why he’d write a mirror image of it.  And so he had in his reading, he had to translate twice to read, so his reading ability was limited.  But he had a very high score in the comprehensive when he took his test down at Little Rock Medical School at the University of Arkansas Medical School, in Little Rock.  But he had a poor verbal portion of it.  He was high [enough] in the comprehensive part that they went ahead and let him try it a year, but he wasn’t able to carry it out.  He was married with two children and had all his eggs in one basket and twenty-three years of age with dyslexia.  I have to admire the boy for being able to go back and get a degree in electronics and practice the subject today.

Well, electronics is very difficult.

HVK:  Yeah.  And that’s about the basis of our life.  When Grandpa Kirby, Leonidus, went to Harrison in 1871, [where] he readily did do some practice of medicine and then got a degree in [18]76, died in [19]26 and his son went there in 1904.

Went where?

HVK:  Went to Harrison and practiced there until 1934 and at his death, I went back to Harrison and [I’ve] been practicing there since, except for the time I was in the army, but that was my home.

And you stayed there.

HVK:  So that made, I guess you might say, a Dr. Kirby in Harrison since 1871.  And I’m still practicing.

3rd alumnus:  Did you tell her about your episode delivering that thirty-two year old [patient] in your office by caesarian section?

HVK:  Forty-one year old.  I just told her that a while ago.

If he didn’t look so honest, I wouldn’t have believed it.

LLP:  Look here, the list in the catalog of the students – the list of the Missouri Medical College in ’79 and ’80 and here is Leonidus Kirby.  [ed. note: the interviewees continue to discuss the Missouri Medical College catalogs and alumni listings for the next few minutes]

HVK:  But you had him listed there as ’76 before.

LLP:  But it says here that he was still listed as a student in ’79 and ’80.

HVK:  Well, I don’t—

LLP:  But it said he was [class of] ’76 here.

HVK:  Well, unless he went back.  I know he came back to St. Louis from one time to another for different training programs.

LLP:  Well, that’s it.  See this is the spring session of 1880.  This is the catalog of it.  In the class of ’79 and ’80.  So he maybe came back for a refresher course, I guess.  That’s when he came back here.  Here’s it in the book.

Well if they didn’t have continuing medical education as a requirement – you had to do it on your own.

HVK:  I understood that he had had two years of training here and I guess he must have had one year.  He graduated in ’76 after one year and then probably came back and got another year later.  I know he was supposed to have had two years.

This was when they still had preceptors, right?

LLP:  Yes.  His preceptor then was the St. Louis Medical College in 1876.  I found that in there.

HVK:  You never did find William B. or Tully C.?

LLP:  No I didn’t.  We just can’t find it anywhere.

HVK:  [He should have been] in this 1858 class as I understood it.

LLP:  Yep, but we couldn’t find it.

HVK:  Do they have a list of the students in 1858?

LLP:  Yes.  My grandfather is in there.

HVK:  Right there is Kirby.

LLP:  That’s Kirtley.  Kirtley.  Kirt-ley.  That’s the graduates.  I don’t know what year that was – ’61, that’s the class of ’61.  Here’s another Kirtley – he was in there that year.  That’s the session of 1860 and ’61.

HVK:  You didn’t go back to ’58.

LLP:  Yeah, we’ve been back there.  I think this is ’58 here.  Here’s James S. Penn and his preceptor was Dr. George [Penn].  That’s my great grandfather, see.  And Dr. George [Penn] was on the board of trustees.  That’s my great grandfather.  And this is 1858.

(To Dr. Penn)  Okay, we’re going to start a new tape for you so do you want to sit down with that book and we’ll start a new tape.

HVK:  Is that about the gist of what you’re [looking for]?

Yes.  What would you like to say to the Archivists and to Washington University, just off the top of your head, about medical education, about primary care practice, about living and working in a small town?

HVK:  Well, like I said, we were a hundred miles from the hospital until 1950 and then—

[Tape stops]

 

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