Between them, the two doctors served the Southern End for 65 years, working from the same office on Quarryville's 2nd St. Dr. Paul Herr opened his office in 1953, a year before Dr. William Fetchick was born. When Dr. Herr moved to West Virginia to teach, Dr. Fetchick took over the practice. Last week, a month after retiring and closing the practice, Dr. Fetchick invited Dr. Herr to come back to his former office and talk about practicing medicine in a small town. While the doctors are separated by more than a generation, their recollections of working in the Southern End were similar. Both worked as sole practitioners, both made house calls, delivered babies, and treated minor emergencies from the office. But there were differences, the two osteopathic physicians said. When he started out, he solicited patients using a list his father had developed, Dr. Herr said. "My dad had a very good business selling DeKalb seeds. Each one of his accounts got a card from me announcing my new practice," he said. The promotion paid off. "When I went to their kitchens to deliver a baby, I would see my card was up on the cabinet," he said. In the early years, few people had medical insurance. "They either paid me at the time of the visit or when their tobacco came in," Dr. Herr recalled. "I had a reasonable amount of welfare patients, primarily because of my upbringing and religion - I'm a Mennonite," Dr. Herr said. That occasionally caused him problems at the former Lancaster Osteopathic Hospital. "One week, I had four or five welfare patients at LOH and the medical director stopped me in the hallway and asked me if I had to send so many welfare patients there," he recalled. "The next week, I was walking down the [hospital] hallway and Dave Rothman [an osteopathic physician practicing in Oxford] stopped me. 'You just go back and tell them they aren't different from anybody else, just poorer'." Dr. Fetchick followed that system. "When it came to hospitals, I told them, 'you either got my patients or you didn't'," he said. A doctor in a rural area often performed minor surgery in the office and saw patients with emergencies. "I was comfortable with that because I came from an emergency room," Dr. Fetchick said. But the transition wasn't as seamless as he expected, Dr. Fetchick said last week. "When I started out, I made a couple of mistakes. I bought machines to do chemistry in the office and even had halter monitors [to evaluate heart problems]. What they didn't tell me when I bought that stuff was equipment breaks," he recalled. "I did the same thing [when I started to practice]," Dr. Herr said. When he took over the practice in the early 1980s, Dr. Fetchick began making changes. "When I came here, I knew everything," he said with a smile. "I set out to change everything Dr. Herr did. And, all of a sudden, the people weren't doing as well as they had been. That's when I realized that he [Dr. Herr] did things because they worked. So I started following his example." While both delivered babies, most of Dr. Herr's births were in homes; most of Dr. Fetchick's were in hospitals. "I realized I was not going to run an inpatient birthing center. It made more sense to cancel appointments when I had to and deliver at home," Dr. Herr recalled. By the time he took over the practice, home deliveries were becoming less common and most of Dr. Fetchick's patients gave birth in the hospital. "I loved to deliver. I never had a bit of a problem, but the increasing cost of malpractice insurance caused me to give it up," Dr. Fetchick said. "In one year, it [malpractice insurance] went up $20,000." While their practices were centered on the 2nd St. office, they made calls to their patients' houses and nursing homes. Some of those calls came after hours, the doctors said. The doctors also agreed that the Southern End could support a small hospital. "Many of my patients didn't want to go to the hospital because it was too far," Dr. Fetchick said. "There are smaller hospitals built to care for less serious injuries and illnesses, but we could never convince anyone to build one down here." Leaving an active practice was difficult, the doctors agreed. "I miss my contact with people in the area. They treated me like family," Dr. Fetchick said. "The patients in this area are wonderful." "I also miss the close association with the people," Dr. Herr agreed. "It took years to build that up." But retirement does have its perks. "I've been here 38 years and was on call every Christmas, every New Year's Day. Boy was it nice this holiday not to have to do that," Dr. Fetchick said. He decided to retire, Dr. Fetchick said, "because it was time. I was not enjoying it as much as I used to." The decision leaves the Southern End without a doctor in solo practice. "It used to be that you could be on your own. Now you can't find resources if you're a single practitioner. I liked being my own boss and physicians are now employees of large corporations," he said. Comments are closed.
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