Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
A conversation with a doctor who made house calls
As time rolls along, not every change is an improvement.
Robert Poole III is a West Chester general practitioner and family doctor, who still made house calls until he retired in 1994.
Poole is a blast from the past; doctors visiting a sick patient at home only seemed to happen in books and on TV, not in real life.
“We reserved house calls for the sickest people who could not come to the office – usually the very elderly and usually the very young,” Poole said. “I made house calls up until the day I retired.”
Poole remembers growing up in Doylestown, where his family doctor stayed up all night with him. Poole was hallucinating from a high fever.
“Dr. Hicks sat at the bedside until the fever broke,” Poole said about the house call. “Doctors during those pre-antibiotic days had few tools to work with.”
When the 89-year-old was a child, doctors had no modern day pharmaceuticals. They worked their miracles using aspirin for pain and more basic remedies to treat diarrhea and dehydration.
Poole lives in White Horse Village in Edgmont. He is still a regular visitor to West Chester, where he has attended Rotary meetings for 57 years.
“People stop me on the street and say ‘Do you remember?’” he said. “I often don’t. They’ve changed a great deal, they were little kids then, and I tell them that now they’re all grown up.”
The avid gardener sometimes tells his ex-patients that he doesn’t recognize them with their clothes on.
The doc is also an author.
His book, “My Uncle Sam Needs a House Call: The Faltering Health of a Great Nation,” is a non-fiction paperback.
The Ursinus College and Jefferson University Medical School grad coined the term, and writes about, “adversarialism.”
Poole said that Ben Franklin told early Americans that the founding fathers had formed a republic, but “only if you can keep it.”
“There’s a tendency for republics to have less and less control,” Poole said, from the comfortable dining room at his home. “It starts with a government that serves the people and ends up as a society where the people serve the government.”
The recent widower and great-grandfather said he noticed that over time more and more patients were in turmoil and anxious.
“I’d say to people in the office, ‘What in the world are you worried about?’” he said. “Then people would traditionally say, ‘I don’t know, but things are changing?’”
The reader of Arnold Toynbee said that so many groups are at “each other’s throats.”
“My patients are living longer but enjoying it less,” said the physician who has delivered more than 500 babies.
More children are being born and people are living longer. Poole served as the Henderson High School football team physician from 1969 to 1988. He attributes a longer average life span now to good nutrition, better health care, immunizations and neonatal intensive care units.
An old carriage house at Franklin and Marshall streets, next to Marshall Square Park, served as the doctor’s office.
When Poole asked to have it torn down, a builder refused.
“They do not build buildings like this anymore,” the piano player was told.
The groom’s quarters had been located on the second floor, with a horse stall and carriage storage on the first. There was an oat drop between the first and second floors.
The former local United Way fund president vividly remembers the moment when a high school math teacher told him to stay after class. She asked him if he’d made a career choice.
With World War II underway, he had considered joining the military.
“What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” the teacher asked. “Tell me, what homework you enjoy doing?” Poole was stunned. “Nobody had ever asked me those questions,” he said.
That weekend he decided that he most enjoyed biology and living things.
“I wanted to get up every day to face biology. Do the thing you really enjoy and the rest of your life, you’ll be happy.”
He said this was the best advice he’d ever been given and he’s suggested the same to hundreds of young people.
Poole lived through it, but didn’t realize that the Great Depression was occurring. His father brought fresh vegetables home from a garden and the family ate well.
Poole signed his book for me and I noted that his signature was crisp and legible.
“The drugstores used to tell me that my penmanship was the best in town,” he said. “They could read my prescriptions.”
The conversation returned to politics.
Poole looks at the big picture from the perspective of a doctor who has spent a great deal of time chatting at the kitchen table in houses where someone is ill.
“Any society’s strength is measured by the care it gives its weakest members, the very young, the very old and those who are not well – who are poor,” he said.
Dr. Poole would say it’s time for change.