Learning from a master.

He was one of a handful of general practitioners in my home town, Louisa, Kentucky. Back then in eastern Kentucky, there were no specialists— no pediatricians, no obstetricians, no surgeons, no psychiatrists, and no anesthesiologists. There was only your family doctor, a GP who may have had one year of training after medical school. GPs back then did just about everything; obstetrics, surgeries such as tonsillectomies and appendectomies, setting broken bones, and the provision of anesthesia for such things. Dr. Carter and I should have crossed paths on the day I was born. You see, Dr. Carter was my mother’s physician while she was expecting me. But on the night my mother went into labor, he was off. Perhaps if I had not been born three weeks late, I would have been born on his call night. His partner at the time delivered me, with no apparent complications either to my mother or myself.