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Got the paper today and was reading this article, I thought a few people here might enjoy it. There isn't much of a lesson in it, just a feel-good story:
http://www.theday.com/article/20100726/NWS01/307269942/1018
40-year family physician looks back on days of $5 house calls
At 26 years old, Albert Gosselin had a decision to make.
On the verge of graduating from Brown University, he was about to become a father. He'd wanted to be a doctor since he was 8 years old but soon he'd have to care for his young family. It appeared his dream would have to be put off.
So when his wife Laura's obstetrician said if Gosselin applied and was accepted to medical school he would deliver their daughter free of charge, it was an offer the couple couldn't refuse.
Four years and three children later, Gosselin graduated from Tufts Medical School in 1953 and completed his residency at the former Northeast Deaconess Hospital in Boston in 1955. All the while, Laura worked as a nurse at Cambridge City Hospital and raised their three infant daughters; the couple would have two more children, a son and a fourth daughter.
"I was very serious. I had a lot on my shoulders," said the 87-year-old Gosselin, who just last month retired after 52 years as the public health director of Griswold, Lisbon and Voluntown.
Originally from the Packerville section of Plainfield, Gosselin returned with his family to eastern Connecticut in 1955 and went on to become one of the most well respected family practitioners in the region before retiring in 1995.
"He is one of these legends you don't see any more," Dr. Frank Friedman, a Norwich-based urologist, said last week. "He didn't separate his profession from his personal life. He and his wife raised a large family, they cared for their patients. Dr. Gosselin is a reflection of another time."
In addition to running a family practice on Main Street in Jewett City for 40 years, Gosselin worked for 17 years as an anesthesiologist at the former Uncas-on-Thames Hospital in Norwich, did a two-year stint at Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam and for decades was a member of the medical staff at The William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich. He was also a founding member of the Griswold Visiting Nurses Association.
"I tell you, God blessed me with good health," Gosselin said, as he knocked on a wooden table in one of his three home libraries in Lisbon.
Way back when
When Gosselin opened his family practice, he said that "things were pretty backwards."
There was no ambulance service in the area, just an old hearse that had been rigged to transport patients to the hospital and even then it couldn't be used unless requested by a doctor. Gosselin remembers going to an accident on Interstate 395 shortly after the highway had been built. There he found a young girl with a broken leg in the middle of the road. It was raining and people were trying to shelter her with blankets.
"They wouldn't move her until I got there to call for the ambulance," he said.
Gosselin later donated his time to train volunteers at the region's fire departments in basic first aid.
In 1958 he was appointed health director for Lisbon and in 1960 was appointed to the Griswold position in the midst of a passionate debate over whether to infuse fluoride into the public drinking water supply.
He tended to his duties as health director and sanitarian in between his responsibilities at his medical office and working as an anesthesiologist at the Uncas-on-Thames Hospital, where he assisted with thoracic surgeries.
In the late 1950s, Gosselin encountered his first case of typhoid. A woman on Matthewson Street in Griswold was stricken. With antibiotics no match for the disease, Gosselin told her that she had to have her gall bladder removed as treatment. She refused. Eventually, Gosselin gave her an order to undergo the surgery or be sent to prison to prevent the spread of the disease. She complied.
Throughout the decades, Gosselin tackled many issues as public health director: getting the proper septic systems installed at houses around the region's ponds, dealing with a bat infestation in some homes in Voluntown and shuttering the former Jewett City Hotel, a five-star establishment on Soule Street that "degenerated into a big fire, health and safety mess."
There were two significant mill fires - Ashland and Aspinook - and other incidents related to illegal dumping into the rivers, in which he worked closely with the state Department of Environmental Protection.
In the early 1970s, during the first swine flu outbreak, he coordinated a local vaccination clinic. Thinking he'd be brave, he was the first to receive the vaccination through the new "air gun" technique. He was sick for six weeks, but couldn't miss work because of others who were worse off them him.
He became involved with several political and public health fights - some he won, some he lost.
Of his victories he counts stopping a man who owned property on Route 138 in the 1970s from plowing mycelium, a substrate of penicillin, into the soil because it was leaching into Pachaug Pond.
Perhaps his greatest loss was the campaign he launched against the Lisbon incinerator. He held off the project for eight years and through multiple hearings, he said. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control became involved but it didn't matter.
"Actually, they've been quite good neighbors and we've never had a real problem with them," he conceded.
Family practice by choice
Throughout this time, it was his family practice that held a primary position in his professional life.
In medical school, Gosselin said he consciously made the choice not to become a specialist. He likes people and wanted the freedom to interact with his patients, to follow them through an illness and provide them with constant care.
"He was probably the busiest physician ever to practice medicine in Connecticut," Dr. Larry Coletti, former chairman of surgery at Backus, said.
Gosselin and Coletti worked closely together when Gosselin would refer a patient to the surgeon.
"He saw his patients from the beginning of the illness until it was complete. He was knowledgeable of all phases of medicine. He took care of his patients and they just stormed into his office. He never shirked his duties in the hospital. That was the kind of doctor he was an excellent, excellent physician. A good man in every respect," Coletti said.
As a new mother in 1958, Cynthia Kata said Gosselin's presence in Griswold was invaluable. Kata was caring for her newborn daughter who was already suffering with asthma.
"From the time she was born he'd come by the house at night on his way home from the office to give her a shot. He was our buddy," Kata, now the Jewett City borough warden, said last week.
Her daughter Linda grew out of her asthma and is now a healthy 51-year-old woman, she said.
"Dr. Gosselin, he is a good man. There is nobody better than him, nobody can compare. There's still times, and I know other people feel this way, that we'll go to a doctor's appointment and the doc is not quite sure what's wrong and everybody always says, 'If Dr. Gosselin was only here,' " she said. "He was it."
Gosselin believed in house calls. He believed in seeing a patient, hearing them out and treating them. He believed in being firm with his patients, yelling if necessary, and treating them with respect.
A typical day would start in surgery at Uncas-on-Thames before heading to Backus Hospital to check on his patients. He'd then go to his family practice - which was always overrun with people waiting - before coming home for a quick dinner and then go back to the hospital to make final rounds for the night.
"I wish we could have that again, but there were a lot of things back then that we didn't have to deal with, that we didn't have to worry about," Kata said.
"Doctors don't have time to enjoy their patients anymore," Gosselin said. "We made house calls because that's how we learned how they lived."
During the first few years in practice, two-thirds of his patients he saw were at their home. He charged $2 for an office visit and $5 for house visits.
"When I was in medicine, I think we were a lot more altruistic than we are today. At Christmas we'd go through our accounts receivable to see who didn't work and had two kids and we'd forgive the debt. It didn't hurt me and gave such good will," he said.
If people didn't have money they'd pay with other means. One woman gave him a grand piano.
Detailed records
Always studious, as a child Gosselin would spend hours sitting on the swing on his family's farm looking up words in the dictionary. He worked in the Ashland Mill as a teenager and then at Pratt & Whitney after graduating from high school in 1941.
He enlisted in the Navy in April 1942. He served three years and nine months before being honorably discharged and being accepted at Brown.
He is a painter, wood carver and book collector. He is a meticulous record keeper - from his family's lineage and family pictures to documenting long-forgotten children's games.
He has drawers full of service awards and recognitions, three libraries and laundry baskets full of an eclectic collection of books, mostly soft cover because they're easier to read in bed.
He's written a novel and recently started another. He's fascinated by Native American history. He's written his autobiography and his obituary.
"I hope my kids keep all this stuff up and appreciate all this work I've done," he said looking over his collections.
His deep love for his family is evident. Pictures adorn nearly every wall in his house. He talks endlessly about their accomplishments and how proud he is of each of them: five children, 15 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
He surrounded himself with family as the public health director. His son, Albert Gosselin Jr., was the district sanitarian for more than 20 years and his wife Laura worked in his practice as a nurse and ran the office.
"I never had to worry about a thing," he said.
Each morning he plays "Laura" by Johnny Mercer and David Raksin in honor of his wife of 65 years - they were really together 70 years, they were high school sweethearts - who died in August 2009.
Gosselin took care of her while she was sick. He is devastated by her passing.
"He and his wife were a team. She was a nurse and they would see 100 patients a day, see everybody they could. He was the old fashioned doctor who worked all the time and she did, too," Friedman said.
"It was such a tremendous loss to the community when he stopped practicing. He's just an amazing person. His devotion to his profession and his patients and his family this husband and wife team, you just don't see that," Friedman said.
Gosselin retired from his practice after 40 years in 1995.
"I've led one hell of a life," he said.
http://www.theday.com/article/20100726/NWS01/307269942/1018
