Defined by the Delta -- now leading the nation's physicians

Incoming AMA President J. Edward Hill, MD, will stress the need for health education -- a lesson learned from his Southern roots.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. June 27, 2005.

They call it Delta Day, a day when patients pile into cars and journey more than three hours to see the doctor who delivered their babies, treated their diabetes and healed their wounds for more than a quarter of a century.

Once a month, the people of the rural Mississippi Delta take a day trip on two-lane back roads, past catfish ponds and fields of cotton and corn, to Tupelo, Miss., to visit J. Edward Hill, MD. They haven't forgotten Dr. Hill's years of dedication when he practiced family medicine at three clinics in the downtrodden Delta.

And he hasn't forgotten them.

Delta Day is about much more than getting prescriptions and routine medical care. It's about the respect and gratitude patients show for the man who cared for them all those years, and it's about the bond they formed that can't be broken by distance.

"My heart was in the Delta," said Dr. Hill, who takes over this month as president of the American Medical Association. "We brought medicine to a medically destitute area. It made you feel good."

Dr. Hill grew up in Vicksburg, Miss., where his family moved when he was 6. He arrived in the Mississippi Delta in 1968. He calls this time his "missionary years," a period that shaped him as a physician. He planned to stay three years but instead stayed 27.

"I sort of made my career there. It's the thing I'm most proud of," he said.

When he arrived in the Delta, one of the first things he did was take down the "colored" signs that separated whites and blacks in the waiting room and bathrooms at one clinic. He became a champion of the uninsured. He worked tirelessly, family and co-workers said, usually awakening at 4 a.m., even taking time on occasion to bake biscuits and take them to nurses at the local hospital.