For Every Family, A Family Doctor Dr Sam Taggart

For Every Family, A Family Doctor

presented by Dr Sam Taggart

Family Doctors hold a special place in our lives.  The family physician is often the narrator, father confessor, the soul who is there for families from birth to death; the person who is called in time of need. One principal trait is trust, trust to do the right thing, trust to be there when he is needed. Wisdom is another of those traits that sets them apart.

For the first 150 years of Arkansas’s existence, physician care was provided by family physicians who did most of the surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics, and medical care. In the first half of the 20^th century, medical education shifted its emphasis to training specialists and by the 1940s Arkansas was beginning to experience a dramatic decrease in the numbers of family doctors. In 1947, the Arkansas Academy of General Practice was created, and, in 1970, it morphed into the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians.   Slowly, over the last 75 years, the Arkansas Academy has worked hard to increase the numbers of family physicians in the state and provide them with the continuing education needed to keep up-to-date.. For Every Family, A Family Doctor is a narrative history of the Modern Family Medicine Movement in Arkansas. The lion’s share of the book is told through the lives of the men and women who led this movement.

Sam Taggart is a family doctor, raised in the White River Delta in Augusta, Arkansas. After medical school at UAMS, he completed a Family Practice Residency. He retired in 2013 as the senior partner and founder of Family Practice Associates of Benton. In 2012 he wrote The Public’s Health, describing a narrative history of health and disease in Arkansas over the last 200 years.

     For Every Family, A Family Doctor began as a series of interviews, recorded during 2018-2022, looking at the lives and practices of the family doctors of Arkansas over the last seventy-five years. This series was produced by the Arkansas Physician’s Oral History Project, created in 2015. This is the second project for this group.  In June of 2021 he published Country Doctors of Arkansas, as one of the products of that study. In April 2023, he published For Every Family, A Family Doctor a narrative history of the modern family medicine movement in Arkansas since 1947.

He and his wife, Dr. Annette Enderlin are presently working on a book called Against the Odds: Arkansas Women in Medicine before 1972.

Chat 1 – A Family Doctor

Chat 2  – A Family Doctor