Lee Jess Seargeant Jr.

Male, #47941, (27 Dec 1915 - )

Birth*27 Dec 1915 He was born on 27 Dec 1915 at La Follette, Campbell Co., Tennessee. 
Marriage*say 1946 He married Ella June (?) say 1946. 
Biography* From the Knoxville TN News Sentinel Newspaper, June 3, 2003:

The doctor is STILL in
After 62 years of practice, LaFollette doctor is a perfect example of care for his community
By KRISTI L. NELSON, nelsonk@knews.com
June 2, 2003
It's 7 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Dr. L.J. Seargeant Jr. has already been up at least an hour.
He's driven the few minutes from his LaFollette home to St. Mary's Campbell County Medical Center, where he's seen a patient. Now he's headed to the adjacent nursing home, where he has three patients. But he's not visiting patients at the nursing home today. He's feeding breakfast to Ella June, his wife of 56 years, who's convalescing after a bad fall that broke her shoulder. She hasn't been home since November, but both of them hope that's a temporary condition. He visits several times a day, feeding her breakfast and dinner, often staying until 8 or 9 p.m.
Seargeant gently lifts food and milk to his wife's mouth. "Take one more bite," he firmly urges her, holding out a buttered biscuit. He adjusts her hearing aid and disappears down the hall to find her a pain pill.
"He's Doctor No. 1," says Carolyn Smith, ward clerk at the nursing home, displaying a poem she wrote for Seargeant's birthday. "He's been my doctor for about 100 years, and I wouldn't trust anybody else."
That's an exaggeration, of course. Seargeant has practiced medicine for only 62 years. But for the citizens of LaFollette, who respect him professionally and personally, his practice has made perfect.
*
Seargeant was born Dec. 27, 1915, in a house that still stands on Beech Street in LaFollette. Ten years after his birth, Seargeant's parents had a daughter. Two years later, they had twin sons. Their oldest son graduated from LaFollette's high school a year early, having skipped fifth grade, and spent two years at Maryville College and nearly two at University of Tennessee. He took an admission exam to UT College of Medicine in Memphis, graduated in 1941 and did a year of residency at the city hospital there.
It wasn't Seargeant's own dream he was pursuing.
"From the day I was born, my father said, 'You're going to be a doctor,'" Seargeant says. "I didn't want to be a doctor; I really didn't. I wanted to be an orchestra leader."
Though his parents made a comfortable living - his father was a civil engineer who worked for the coal mines in the area, Seargeant says, "how in the world they ever (afforded tuition for) medical school, I don't know."
Seargeant never led a band, but he served as a military physician in the Pacific Theater the first four years after his graduation, during World War II. On limited service because of imperfect vision, he attained the rank of major.
After his discharge in 1946, Seargeant opened an office for a few months over a service station in Caryville, "where I liked to starved to death," he says. He married Ella June of Harriman, whom he had dated for about two years and known for several summers before that, summers she spent with her aunt and uncle in LaFollette.
"I've been in love with him forever, since I was 16," Ella June says. She was 28 when they married.
Seargeant, with some coaxing by physician M.L. Davis, opened an office in LaFollette, also doing some surgery in a small, private hospital in a house in downtown LaFollette. He and Ella June had their first baby, a son who was stillborn. "That liked to got us," he says, softly. A few years later, they had a daughter, Carolyn - now an English professor in Chattanooga - and a son, Lee Jess Seargeant III, now director of the hospital pharmacy.
In 1955, Seargeant built the office where he still practices today, a small, squat, white block building at 307 E. Central in downtown LaFollette.
In 1963, he helped build the hospital.
*
The former LaFollette Community Hospital (later LaFollette Medical Center) has been affiliated with St. Mary's Health System for two years. It had previously been affiliated with Baptist Health System of East Tennessee. Perched on a hill overlooking downtown, the small brick hospital is in the process of a St. Mary's-funded renovation to make it "more modern, more patient friendly," says Nick Lewis, hospital administrator of five years. Workmen pound, drill, paint and lay tile around patients waiting to check in for day surgery. The outcome of this, the first of three phases of renovation, should be a new front entrance, lobby, chapel and gift shop, finished by June 16.
Seargeant can remember each addition to the facility: the third floor, the nursing home, extra wings. Now the hospital, which has 68 acute-care beds and 98 beds in the nursing home, stays full, Lewis says; in fact, a feasibility study next year will determine whether St. Mary's should continue expanding the current building or build an entirely new structure.
"It'd be perfectly all right with me," if they built a new hospital, Seargeant says, though he admits sentimental attachment to the original building.
"I got the idea that this town needed a hospital," he says matter-of-factly. "The mayor was a good friend of mine. He and I worked out the details, borrowed the money and built the hospital."
They issued bonds, some of which Seargeant himself borrowed money to buy. The bonds were paid off in four years, he remembers, and most of the seven doctors then practicing in LaFollette got involved with the new hospital, which closed three tiny "hospitals" in town.
Seargeant immersed himself in the community with various organizations. In 1965, he chaired the committee to build the new First United Methodist Church. Meanwhile, his practice grew. A charter member of the American Academy of Family Practice, he treated babies, great-grandmothers and all ages in between.
"I've seen as high at 106 patients in here in one day," he says, "and the only thing I could do is tell the nurse what to do or fluff them off or something. That's no way to practice medicine."
Back then, he was one of the most popular of LaFollette's limited number of doctors. Today, he can practice medicine more to his liking.
*
Seargeant maintains between 300 and 350 patients now. His office hours are more flexible; he usually works 10 a.m. to noon and then about 1:30 to about 4 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. "By that time, I'm pretty well worn out," he says with a smile.
That alone doesn't wear him out. Seargeant has been medical director of the nursing home attached to the hospital for more than 25 years. He's been chief of staff at the hospital, an elected position among the 17 doctors there, for 40 years. He's also on the hospital's board of trustees and serves in various community organizations. This translates into a lot of meetings.
Seargeant checks in at the hospital a couple times a day if he has patients there. He sees patients at three area nursing homes about once a month. He walks a mile three times a week, something he considers crucial to his own health, and attends continuing education events to keep up with advances in his field.
His office is a monument to his longevity. Most furniture and fixtures are from another era; metal dispensers hold Band-Aids and paper cups, and an ancient eye chart adorns a door.
But other changes are evident. The office has only two exam rooms. A third, once equipped for babies and small children, is now packed with paperwork; a computer hums softly. Since LaFollette now has pediatricians, Seargeant no longer sees children younger than 4 and doesn't like to see them even that young, says office manager Brenda Lane, whose office is the former pediatric exam room.
"Everything that goes out of this office, I do it," Lane says. "Sometimes I'm in here up to 8:00 at night."
Lane, who is in her early 50s, has been Seargeant's patient since childhood. Many of the babies he delivered are now grandmothers, and they're still his patients. His oldest patient, a 92-year-old woman with pernicious anemia, comes in weekly for an injection.
Seargeant says pharmaceuticals have been the biggest change since he began medicine.
"Used to, we had absolutely nothing you could take for high blood pressure," he says; patients were instructed to "rest." During his career, Seargeant says, medications have gotten better and better, and there are so many options now, a doctor can customize a medical regimen to a patient's age and other conditions.
Vaccinations mean Seargeant hasn't seen an active case of polio since he was an intern. He seldom sees measles, mumps or whooping cough anymore.
"If everybody would take their flu shot and their pneumonia shot, we wouldn't see any more flu or pneumonia," he says with a hint of frustration. "I try to encourage (my patients), but a lot of them refuse to. They're just stubborn."
The other two biggest changes are in government regulation - Seargeant estimates between 10 percent and 20 percent of his patients are on TennCare - and record-keeping. Today's detailed patient charts are a far cry from the 5-by-8-inch cards Seargeant kept when he first began practicing.
"If someone comes in here now with a chest pain, why, you're almost obligated to send them up to get an EKG and a chest X-ray," he says. "Way back yonder, you didn't have to do that. But there's no doubt about it - it's better for the patients."
Asked what makes a good doctor, Seargeant says, laughing, "Fear of being sued." He's been sued three times in his career, all unsuccessfully.
Then he turns serious and says, "Conscience. If you have a good conscience and try to do well by people, that's what makes a good doctor. The worst thing you can do is be haughty and hard to get to. ... I hear more people complaining about doctors that are just hard to talk to. They'll rush you in, and say this, and rush you out. (Patients) want some attention, and I don't blame them. I'll take the time to talk to them."
*
Any visitor to the doctor's office can learn about the man. Notably, he's a UT fan and a proud father and grandfather. But sharing his wall with the degrees and the Oath of Hippocrates are plaques from the Boy Scouts of America, the Campbell County Historical Society (of which he's been president), the local Masons and various area medical organizations.
A proclamation in one exam room decrees Saturday, Dec. 6, 1997, "Dr. Lee J. Seargeant Jr. Day."
"He can forever be secure in the knowledge that his patients, peers, friends and neighbors have only the highest degree of respect, admiration and love for his years of service and contribution," read the words of then-County Executive Tommy Stiner.
Another plaque thanking Seargeant for serving as Grand Marshal of the Campbell County Christmas Parade reads, "Your life has touched us all."
Seargeant's hands have healed with more than instruments and medications. They've made rum cakes, chocolate pecan pies and fruit salads, for which he's nearly famous. He's raised money for things he thought were important for the community. Evenly mediated many disagreements.
Along one wall in a hospital hall hangs pictures of some of Seargeant's peers, people he worked with and remembers well: Dr. J.W. Presley (1890-1964), Dr. M.L. Davis (1910-1982), Dr. Roscoe C. Pryce (1886-1980). His picture isn't there, "not yet," he says with a chuckle. "They wait 'til you die."
Or retire - which, in Seargeant's view, may amount to the same thing.
"I'll drop dead right here in this office," he says. "That's what I've always thought."
 

Family

Ella June (?) (say 1917 - )
Child

Last Edited 10 Jul 2003