Henrietta Hay's Column

Like all Americans, I am watching the news about the coming health care debate with great interest and some trepidation.

One issue, "choice of physician" is being kicked around a lot as though somebody just thought of it. This is far from being a new idea. My mother knew about it nearly eighty years ago.

My parents had lived in Colorado for several years when my arrival was imminent. Logically I should be a Colorado native. But no. My mother's father was a doctor and she chose him. My birth certificate reads Decatur, Illinois and I didn't get back to Colorado until I was a month old. I have always thought that was carrying "choice of physician" a little too far, but I had no say in the matter.

When I was a kid in Englewood we didn't have a very wide choice of doctors, but we did have a choice. We could go to the one doctor in town or skip the whole thing. As I remember it, his office was on the second floor over the First National Bank. The flight of stairs was so long and so steep that he probably lost lots of patients on the way up. Fortunately time has dimmed the details of any treatment I may have received, but I think it was limited to smallpox vaccination and the repair of a couple broken arms.

Today it is a whole new world and I don't have to climb all those steps. I do most of the things my doctor tells me to do as he tries to keep me healthy and have all the routine exams and tests that are recommended. So last week I had my annual chest x-ray. As I sat there in that sterile room in my little paper shirt, surrounded by huge, inhuman machines, and friendly technicians in lead aprons, I was thinking about the difference between my grandfather's practice and modern medicine.

My knowledge of medical history is almost nonexistent, but I do know that by the end of the 19th century most of the basic principles of medicine were known. Galen had discovered blood circulation in 200 A.D. Ligature, medical percussion, red blood cells, x-rays had been discovered. Smallpox vaccine, aspirin, digitalis were known. I don't know how much of the available information was in use by the late 19th century, when my grandfather started his medical practice, or how -- or how often -- doctors cured their patients in those days. I suspect their rate was fairly high. In any case I am sure that sight of my grandfather's horse and buggy clomping up to his patients' houses in central Illinois was good medicine in itself.

I wonder what he would think if he could see the x-ray room where I was sitting. I do know what my old pal Dr. Seuss thought. "And you'll find yourself wishing that You were out there/ in Fotta-fa-Zee and not here in this chair/ in the Gold Years Clinic on Century Square/ for Spleen Readjustment and Muffler Repair."

The technical gulf between medicine as my grandfather practiced it and today's medical miracles is colossal, but I wonder whether the true art of healing has changed that much. He knew, as my doctor today knows, that a big part of the healing process is the patient's attitude. That attitude may have been helped as much by the doctor driving up to your house in a horse and buggy as by the confidence you feel in your modern doctor in his well-equipped office.

A little laughter doesn't hurt the attitude. Only half the population is aware of how much fun a mammogram is. But Dr. Seuss describes the male version of something similar: "And the next thing you know, when you've finished that test, / is somehow you've lost/ both your necktie and vest/ and an Ogler is ogling/ your stomach and chest."

Thanks to my mother's "choice of physician" I have to cheat a little when I claim to be a true Colorado native, but she had the right idea. Choose your doctor, wherever he/she may be. Whatever comes of the health care battle, they'd better keep that.