CLICK HERE for Dr. Shelly's obituary.

Note: The Icon interviewed Dr. Howard Shelly several years ago. The interview focused on his career as a small town doctor. The interview follows:

I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania in a Mennonite community. I had seven brothers and one sister and they all came to Bluffton College. My oldest brother, Maynard, came to Bluffton College and became a minister and I followed in his footsteps.

I came out here in 1946. My other brothers were Kenneth, Ralph, Walter, Alton and Sterling, who was here for one year. Margery Ann, my sister, came here, too.  Her son is Darrell Nestor.

I graduated in Bluffton in 1950. I got married in 1949 and my wife had a teaching degree. We were planning to go to Chicago and I was somehow going to start medical school. She looked for a teaching job in the area and eventually got a job in Henderson, Nebraska, after we’d been married for less than a year.  During that year, I made six or seven or eight trips to Henderson, Nebraska. Those were long, long trips.

I attended medical school at the University of Illinois. The reason I went to medical school there is that Bluffton graduates had a good reputation in the persons of Otto Klassen and Arthur Thiesen – both Bluffton graduates.

So they told me that they would accept me if I would be a resident at the University of Illinois. That required living there for one year and being self-supporting, and registered to vote – those were the requirements.

During that time I became a union carpenter in Chicago and when just got a raise of up to $3.25 an hour. That was big money back in 1952.

Our first child, Rene, was born in Chicago. She now practices here. Bluffton was the place where I was first on my own, where I had been married, and my wife was from Lima, so we decided we wanted to come back to this area. My original plan was to be a medical missionary. We lost that plan along the way came back to Bluffton and started the practice.

Dr. Rodabaugh and Dr. Travis both were good to us. Dr. Rodabaugh took me under his wings and I took my internship at Memorial Hospital in Lima. You don’t always do these things perfect. In Illinois you had to take your internship before you got your license. I assumed that was the way it was in Ohio, but it wasn’t. I could have gotten my license at the beginning of my internship, but I didn’t realize that so, I found out that I had to take my license and wait three months and get it approved. So my internship ended at the end of July and I didn’t get my license until August 27th, 1957.

New doctor in town
We bought a house at 564 South Main right across from Garau Street and moved in there in May of 1957. I was going to do things the modern way. I was the new doctor in town. Many of the doctors had taught me to keep their records on four by five cards and I was going to be more modern and I kept my records on eight by ten cards.  Right now at the same office, it is completely computerized.

Another thing I was going to do differently was that no other doctors in town made appointments for patients. I was new and modern, so I was I was going to have people call for appointments. You see, up until then, if you needed a doctor you just walked into the office if you were willing to wait.

So as a result of that innovation, the first day I was in practice I had three salesmen and one patient. And that patient came without an appointment and I’m glad he came. I can’t remember his name now, but he was a good patient and we had a long, long relationship.

My office was in our home. It was a big house. There was a large living room with an opening into the dining room. We put in a wall and cut the living room off from the dining room and put another wall down on the side of that and made a waiting room. And then we had one examining room and there was a hallway and another room. There was a small downstairs bathroom, which became the office bathroom and the laboratory. In the hallway was where you did everything else.

To start with that was fine and my wife served as my office help and assistant and so forth. The office, in the house to start with, I think was good then, because whoever came to the door, you could see them right away and fortunately or unfortunately many people just came to the door whether it was midnight or noontime. After a while when you had more practice you were never really at home and you were never completely in the office.

As time went on, when Dr. Huss, a dentist, came to Bluffton. He had his dental office in his home. About the time I was really yearning to get another office. He was also.  Earlier I had made some plans with Lester Neuenschwander uptown to make an office. I was ready to sign something with him. I told my wife and I soon found out that I had a chose to sign an agreement with Lester Neuenschwander or get a good divorce lawyer. I didn’t sign with Lester.

Garau Street office
One day I was sitting down at the hospital looking out the front door and all at once I realized there was a house across from the hospital. Little lights went on and I thought, “That would be a good idea.” I talked with Dr. Huss and as it turned out we were able to buy that lot with the house on it for less that $3,000. That was about 1962 or 1963. So, we bought the property built and office and moved in.

The other thing about being down on Garau Street near the hospital was that the Bluffton physicians took care of all the emergencies and so, that made a lot of quick trips down to the hospital on foot. One way to build your practice is to be available to care for people in time of need. Because if they had an emergency they were grateful and the next time they’d see a doctor they’d often remember that visit to the emergency room.

The other thing I did was learn to do some anesthesia as an intern at Memorial. So I was available for that in Bluffton. The colleagues  at the time I came to Bluffton were, of course, Dr. Rodabaugh, Dr. Travis and Dr. Soash, lived right across the street from me. He was going to Florida for his winters and I could always tell when he left to go to Florida because my practice increased. When he came back in the spring I suddenly had more leisure time.

Dr. Soash was a particularly nice old guy. I remember I was seeing an elderly woman out in the country and she was having some problems, and of course I was a young doctor with a lot of ideas. I wanted her to come in to the hospital and get some tests. She said, “No way,” when I discussed her situation. She was Dr. Soash’s old patient and when he came back from Florida I discussed it with him and he said, “Come on, I’ll go out with you.” 

So, we made a house call together and we just sat down and talked to her. He explained to her that sometimes you have problems and you need to let the doctor take you into the shop and get you fixed up. She cooperated and he solved that and for me it was an opportunity to really observe him.

The other time I observed him at work, I was giving anesthetics for a tonsillectomy. He had a method of doing tonsillectomies and the youth started bleeding and I was giving him a drop of ether. Dr. Soash got the tonsils and adenoids out and was all finished and left the room. And I was there with this youth who was bleeding and fortunately in the process of waking up, the bleeding did stop and he survived. But, I thought, “Wow.”

The other doctor who did that to me was old Dr. Miller from Benton Ridge. He did a couple of touncils and wanted me to give the anathetic. It was the same story, second verse.

Intented to be a general practitioner
My intention was to be a general practitioner. That’s what Dr. Rodabaugh and Dr. Travis were. You had to realize that general practitioners back then did a lot of different things. The majority of general practitioners delivered babies. And so the obstetrical part was something that you really planned on doing.  Dr. Weldon Diller  delivered babies, but he never did any major surgery. He gave anesthetics. And I worked with him and gradually as he retired I did more of that.

Dr. Diller was in Rawson and Dr. Milo Rice in Pandora. Dr. Rice was retiring and that’s when Ollie Luginbill moved in.

Since I was coming out of med school, I was taught that if you were going to examine a patient they took their clothes off. And so, the majority of the Swiss people who came to me had to take their clothes off and they thought they were really getting a good examination.

Having people disrobe, you must treat people with respect.  You eventually get a good reputation because you give good examines. Travis and Rodabaugh – who had been seeing people for 30 years ­­­– if someone said to them, “I have a cold in my chest,” they’d just listen through their clothes. 

We were just beginning to get some good blood pressure medicines that could really do some good and so you had something to treat gall bladders and back pain and all that kind of stuff.  

By the time I moved down to the new office from my home, I realized that dispensing drugs was not the best thing because if I had purchased 5,000 pills of whatever and a couple weeks after I got these pills something really better came on the market I wouldn’t get the better stuff on hand until I got rid of all that.

I really felt that I was in danger of giving inferior care, so I decided one day that I would phase out dispensing and let the pharmacist worry about that and so probably by the beginning of 1970 I was out of dispensing.

Morphine in my bag
It’s amazing what you could buy back then. You could buy narcotics. I always had morphine in my bag when I’d make house calls. When I started to make house calls at night I asked Dr. Rodabaugh what he charged for a night house call. He gave me his classic answer: “Well, when the phone rings and it’s one in the morning I say to myself, I’m going to charge this guy thirty bucks. By the time you get your clothes on and get to the car, eh, I’ll charge him twenty. By the time you get out there and you are wide-awake and go to the house you say, we’ll, I’m going to charge him fifteen. Then when you get in there and you evaluate the situation then he says, “How much is it?” you say, “It’s ten dollars.” So, that’s the way it was.

Now the people who are making house calls are the home health nurse. One of the most valuable things, I think, in making a house call is you learn to know how people are doing. You better understand the situation. I always thought it was a satisfying thing to do.

Concerning obstetrics in the 1950s, you tried to work out some protocol so that you have some kind of decent, respectful prenatal care with check ups and educating the patient as much as you could.

When I first started out I was interested I hypnosis. I think I got three or four women to try to hypnotize them.

Dr. Mulvania, who was one of the OBGYNs would come over to Bluffton from Lima. Of course, Dr. Travis did C-Sections, too. One of Dr. Mulvania’s favorite stories was, “Do you know why so many babies are born at night? It’s because they are born at exactly nine months.” That was his humor.

We had an OB service in Lima and I would watch some of these doctors deliver some of those babies and they’d use forceps and so forth and it was hard for me to watch some of these guys because I really thought they were hard on the woman delivering the baby.

Of course, I always felt that I’d never do stuff like that because I felt you could really injury a woman. So I was always concerned about the anesthesia part. And there was a canister that you could give to the mother that was a kind of anesthesia mask. They could hold it and they could sort of go to sleep with it. It was supposed to be safer that way, but I was never real sure that I was giving a lot of relief.

We all learned how to use forceps. In all the years that I delivered babies, I had my favorite set. They are like salad spoons.  If you realize what you are pulling on, a couple times, especially with first babies, I remember one that was late at night and we wanted to get the baby out of there and so I put forceps on.

I tried to pull and I knew I was pulling against a brick wall. We went ahead and did a C-Section. I saw the kid about six months ago. He lives out on the west coast now and he’s a lawyer. I told me about his birth and he thanked me for not pulling his head off.

Simple fractures
There are a lot of simple fractures in this world. My mentors in the area for broken bones were Dr. McBride and Dr. Kingsberry. I called them about things and they would say, “Oh, Shelly, you could take care of that because no matter what you do, it’s going to heal.”

And that’s true and of course, you learned to reduce some simple fractures and straighten them out and put a cast of them. For me that was never a hard trick. You had to pay attention to some principles. I took care of a lot of simple fractures and tried to reduce some fractured wrists. Most of them turned out pretty good.

Concerning fractured hips in the 1950s, McBride and Kingsberry and another group, Jones and Tillison, would come to Bluffton. Of course, they had the X-ray machine. They would put the patient to sleep and reduce and line it up and those doctors could eye-ball the break and put the pins and the guide wire in and make sure it was in the right place and hammer those spikes in there. That’s basically still the way they do it. They have much better X-ray guidance today.

The telephone
The other thing that was more different in those days that we don’t have any more was the telephone. When the phone rang in the middle of the night and you wanted to call the hospital, you didn’t have to turn a light on in the house. You just picked up the phone and “tell Rhonda that you wanted the hospital.”

(Note: Bluffton did not yet have dial telephones in the 1950s. When you picked up the phone to make a call, a telephone operator, located in Bluffton would answer and say, “Number, please.” Dr. Shelly is referring to Rhoda Matter, the night telephone operator, who recognized many callers by voice and often knew where they might want to call.)

They (the operators) might often listen in and give some advice, like where the patient lived and stuff like that. My original telephone number was 161-W.

FOOTNOTE:
Dr. Shelly often joked that when he delivered a boy, he would perform the circumcision at no cost, if the parents name the boy "Howard." The writer of this column never had that opportunity. Dr. Shelly delivered both our daughters. No sons.