Country doctor retires with memories [The Leader Times, Kittanning, Pa.]

Dec. 30--They don't make many "country doctors" like Dr. Paul Frederick.

For the past 40 years, Frederick, 77, of North Buffalo, a Harvard educated medical practitioner and surgeon with the skills and training of a big-city surgeon, has made his home in Armstrong County and has worked exclusively at ACMH Hospital.

Frederick, who retires tomorrow , not only has practiced rural medicine during the course of his long and dedicated career here, he has lived the rural life as well in the comfort of his cedar-shake cottage in the woods. He's even accepted, as old-fashioned country doctors have been known to do, the occasional household item as payment.

"I have a whole cupboard full of Amish quilts," said Frederick. "That's how they paid. That was fine with me."

"I grew up poor. My father was a blue-collar worker," he said. "If you were a doctor you obviously made more money than you needed so you didn't think about money. You did what you had to do. I never asked a patient ever if they were going to pay or if they had insurance. If they needed me I was there. If they could pay afterwards, I was happy to get it."

Frederick was born in Munhall in 1934 and grew up in Swissvale. He is a graduate of Swissvale High School, Washington & Jefferson College and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

He interned and did a residency year at Ohio State University and for five years studied surgery at Harvard University. After attending Baylor University to study heart surgery, he was drafted into the military during the Vietnam War era and was stationed at the U.S Military Academy at West Point for two years before coming here.

Frederick came to Armstrong County in 1970 at the request of a childhood friend, Dr. Kenneth Kost, to help fill a need for surgeons in the area.

"I had been appointed to go back to Harvard to teach and do heart surgery, which had been my plan all of my life," said Frederick. "He offered me a good job and my family was in Western Pennsylvania as opposed to Boston. It was difficult to turn it down."

Frederick stayed hoping to become involved in a proposed medical school at Indiana University of Pennsylvania with Indiana and Armstrong hospitals as university hospitals but the concept was never developed, he said.

"Consequently open heart surgery was not going to be done here," he said. "By that time I didn't want to leave, so I became a general surgeon. When I came, people literally thought it took a passport to go into Pittsburgh, so every type of surgery was done here and that's what I did."

Frederick said medicine and surgery has changed "quite dramatically" in Armstrong County over time.

"All sorts of dramatic things have occurred," he said speaking of new surgical techniques and the arrival of specialists in varied medical fields.

Living in Armstrong County wasn't exactly the dream of his wife who was from New England, Frederick said, but he promised to make her happy.

"I told her I would build her New England in Pennsylvania," he said. "This house is an exact replica of a New England saltbox colonial house from about 1720. All of the interior came from barns where we got old lumber and stone. If you walk into a museum house in Massachusetts from that period, this is exactly what you would see. All the hardware and lighting was made by a local blacksmith and the furniture is all antique or exact reproductions."

Frederick has three children and eight grandchildren and said he is looking forward to spending time with them.

He enjoys "fiddling around with the stock market" and skiing. "I read the stock reports multiple times a day," he said.

Frederick attempted to retire from his surgical practice several years ago but continued working until now because of a shortage of surgeons at the hospital. He said he's satisfied that there are enough surgeons to allow him to retire.

He wishes that he wasn't retiring from practice.

"I'd like to work until I was 99-point-999 years old or til I died in the saddle but you have to be a realist," Frederick said. "At 77, you just can't be as good as you were at 37."

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(c)2011 The Leader Times (Kittanning, Pa.)

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