Dr. Sam Taggart, a retired family doctor who practiced medicine in Benton for 40 years, has spent his time since retiring writing books about the medical history of Arkansas.
His most recent work, For Every Family, A Family Doctor will be released this month.
Taggart will be joined by several local businesses to launch his newest book at 6 p.m. on April 25 at Blue Heaven Restaurant and Bar, 15228 I-30 in Benton. the event is free and open to the public.
The early chapters of the book start with a look at the history of family medicine in Arkansas for its first 150 years. The book then shifts its focus to the development of the modern family medicine movement in Arkansas since 1947.
“The history of medicine is the history of the generalist. For the first 150 years of Arkansas’s existence, physician care was provided by family physicians who did most of the surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics, and medical care. In the first half of the 20th century, medical education shifted its emphasis to training specialists and by the 1940s Arkansas was beginning to experience a dramatic decrease in the number of family doctors. In 1947, the Arkansas Academy of General Practice was created, and, in 1970, it morphed into the Arkansas Academy of Family Physicians,” said Taggart.
A large part of the story is told through the lives of the family physicians of Arkansas. Proceeds from the book are being donated to the AFP Foundation to be seed money for establishing scholarships for young Arkansas physicians wanting to get into family medicine.
While Taggart served the majority of his professional career in the medical field, he said he has been writing since he was 17 years old and has been writing since 2000 as a published author. He founded Family Practice Associates on Military Road in 1977, and retired in 2013.
He started writing about the history of medicine in Arkansas when in 2012, Dr. Joe Bates at the Arkansas Department of Health asked Taggart to write a history of public health in Arkansas in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the health department.
Taggart wrote his first medical history book, The Public’s Health, in 2012, which was a narrative history of health and disease in Arkansas over the last 200 years.
“The book came out and it was very successful,” said Taggart.
In 2015 he started work on the Arkansas Physician’s Oral History Project. Taggart said he went around the state interviewing anywhere from 50 to 60 physicians to create a video record of their lives and the practice of medicine in rural Arkansas. This project was focused on rural areas and he tried to interview doctors in towns of 2,500 to 5,000 people. This led to his next book, Country Doctors of Arkansas, which was released in June 2021.
Copies of Taggart’s newest book, Every Family, A Family Doctor, will be available at the launch event or by contacting 501-316-4011 or michelle@arkansasafp.org.
