John Frey

When I moved to UNC Chapel Hill, I taught the Literature section of a senior elective on History, Literature and Ethics and started working with the Southern Oral History Program at UNC and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. I worked with oral historians, photographers, and others involved in capturing life histories and stories.

In 1991 a colleague of mine, Bill Ventres MD, and I collected 20 oral histories of the founders of the discipline of Family Medicine and published 11 of them in Family Medicine, which is the journal of our academic discipline. I have done other oral histories since then.

I have been editing journals since the mid 80’s – editor for Family Medicine and the Wisconsin Medical Journal (WMJ) and associate with The Annals of Family Medicine. I enjoy writing essays and have published a number of them over the years. I have been a journal consultant for the National Library of Medicine since 1987.

That is a lot of information, but how the humanities affected my teaching and practice is typified in an encounter I had with Dean Stewart Bondurant at UNC when we were talking about how he – a native North Carolinian understood the culture of communities and medicine from his life in the South. He asked how I, a native Midwesterner who had never lived in the South, had come to an understanding of its people and history. I told him I had read and still read Southern writers – novels, stories, essays – and then looked for what I had learned from them in my patients. My patients and novels taught me. The practice of family medicine is like reading novels – long ones, full of complexity and emotion – and if we are fortunate, we can read them to the end.

I grew up in Wisconsin and so have an understanding of the Midwest but it is both different and the same from 60 years ago. I need to keep reading.