From the April 14, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times
In Memory of a Country Doctor
Christopher Knight, MA
Some people don’t just follow a template; they do life their own way. An unlikely country doctor serves as an example for what the author imagines medicine and a healthy work-life balance should look like, and inspires the author’s work at MCW-Central Wisconsin every day…
On February 11, 2023, we lost a country doc. Some of you may remember him as the 99-year-old keynote speaker from MCW-CW’s 2nd White Coat Ceremony, Charles Kemper, MD -- also affectionately known as the Bird Doctor or Doc Charlie from Chippewa Falls.
Graduating from high school at age 15, his mother forced a gap-year on him before he enrolled at Duke University, where he and his roommate were founding members of the lacrosse team. The team became a powerhouse, winning three national titles while he was there. He later attended medical school at the University of Maryland, which he considered the true national powerhouse.
He answered the call of country
This absent-minded professor-type and son of German-Jewish immigrants, like most of his family, answered the call to service in WWII while attending medical school. In a whirlwind romance, he married his wife of 69 years in San Antonio, Texas, before being shipped to the South Pacific (Okinawa). One of the only stories he recalled from service was the dismay of fellow servicemembers when he saved the life of a Japanese POW in the Philippines, who had suffered a venomous snake bite. Honoring his Hippocratic Oath, even when inconvenient, would look very different in private practice: delivering a baby by candlelight on a dirt floor hut in Guatemala while on vacation, with the assistance and limited translation skills of his new bride, and being the type of doctor who made house calls at any hour, in rural Wisconsin, throughout his long practice.
Indeed, his medical career was not his mother’s dream for him to be a specialist in a big, East Coast city
He wanted to be a rural family physician and do a bit of everything. He moved to western Wisconsin, where he was one of only three or four practicing physicians in Chippewa Falls. He delighted in the fact his parents were startled as they pulled up to his house on their first visit, and a truck full of armed farmers stopped them to ask if they had “seen the wolf” before resuming their chase. His office and clinic were separated from his house by a carport, allowing him to serve the community at all hours, which included frequent house calls. His son recalls it was common to see his pajamas peeking out below his dress slacks.
The way he ran his clinic and did billing looked different from today’s medicine
Dr. Charlie’s real passion, and source of wellness, was his love for animals -- birds, in particular. Regardless of the weather, he usually spent an hour at the beginning and end of each day, checking his nets and banding birds. (Not surprisingly, he was one of the first people in the state to contract Lyme’s Disease as a result.) His nexus of medicine and nature was clients who struggled to pay their bills. It was not unusual for him to provide a blueprint to clients and request a couple of bluebird houses as payment. Those bluebird houses were placed on fence posts around an 80-acre, forested lot – his private get-away, where he studied the effects of DDT on the thinning of bird shells and impact on hatch rates. His personal study would become Congressional testimony and later contribute to the ban of DDT use in farming in the US. His later study of radio and TV towers leading to mass kills of songbirds also earned him an invitation to deliver Congressional testimony. Today, you can visit the same woods -- now known as Kemper’s Woods -- as those 80 acres were gifted to Chippewa County with the stipulation they be kept in their natural state.
As one can imagine, Dr. Kemper’s patients were not only of the two-legged variety
One of his first patients was a Shetland pony with a broken leg, which the local vet thought should be put down. Dr. Kemper put a cast on the pony and his practice flourished from there. Usually, his non-human clients were birds, and it was not atypical for him to bring birds of prey into the radiology department at St. Joseph’s Hospital to x-ray wings or other broken bones. He rehabbed birds (typically owls, hawks, and eagles, but occasionally cranes, a roadrunner, or other, more exotic birds) in large cages in his back yard -- the pre-cursor to today’s far more sophisticated operations of the Raptor Education Center in Antigo, Wisconsin. Dr. Kemper practiced medicine as long as he could -- at the end as a locum, relieving small-town peers who had emergencies or needed a vacation. He only made enough to pay liability insurance. His final years of practice were exclusively for the love of medicine.
To the kind country doc – my grandfather, who delivered a significant portion of the Chippewa Falls population over age 40; who wandered out of the bleachers and down to the field, mat, or court, whenever an athlete was injured in a Chi-High sporting event; who would be stopped by patients in the grocery store, whom he didn’t remember or recognize, to thank him for saving their life, answering their call in the middle of the night, and making a visit when no other doctor would; who founded the local Audubon Society, and would MC the annual gala, saving his off-colored jokes for a once-a-year telling just to make my grandma blush; who never once bragged about his service to nation or national championships in sports, but would rather chortle over having written love advice as Uncle Louie in his school newspaper as a teen, and author his own blog in his 90s…
You lived all 103 years to their fullest. I will do my best to honor your memory, while helping to mold the next generations of doctors. May I learn from your limited regrets, prioritize wellness, put people first, consistently maintain a good sense of humor, seek adventure, and make friends of every color and creed, love healing so much that I never want it to end, to live life to its fullest.
Christopher Knight, MA, is Student Services Manager for MCW’s Central Wisconsin campus in Wausau. Chris also serves as a NCBI trainer, member of DIAC, Suicide Prevention Council, SET Force and BIT Teams, and Director of Recess.
