The story that “A young Springfield woman Friday was graduated from the Ohio State University School of Medicine and will begin internship at Mercy Hospital July 1.”
Sixty-one years later, in a house a block north from where Mercy is now being demolished, Miller’s memory of it all seems as sharp as the saw-tooth edges the pinking shears sliced into the clipping.
“I think what intrigues me the most is how we came down from the theoretical to the practical with a jolt,” said Miller, who at 87 lowers herself into chair to talk about it with a somewhat gentler jolt.
“It was a lot of work, a lot of learning. I enjoyed it all.”
One of of six women in a medical school class of 144, Miller had applied to be in Mercy’s second class of interns just like the others who ultimately spent the year with her. Unlike the others, she always had resided where she continues to reside: on that block.
“I don’t have roots,” she quips, “I have tap roots.”
Miller watched the hospital rising just down the block from her home at 1607 N. Fountain Blvd. while going to Springfield High School and saw it open in 1950, the year she graduated cum laude in pre-med from then Wittenberg College.
By then, however, she had long since decided on her profession, a thought that came to her full force when she was in elementary school and her family lived in the house south of her current residence.
Sitting at the lunch table the day after seeing one of the Dr. Kildare movies of the 1940s, “All of a sudden, I had the feeling ‘That’s what I want to do,’ ” she recalled.
Young Sue had always liked science and still remembers as a child marveling at the giant moth that emerged from the cocoon she’d been keeping.
Becoming a doctor seemed the logical choice.
“It wasn’t the glamour,” she said. “I could see myself working and analyzing this, that and the other thing to make a diagnosis about what was wrong and correct it. I loved the thought of playing detective, figuring out what was causing what. It felt right for me.”
The announcement left her mother, who had hoped music and dance lessons would lead her daughter into a life of culture, feeling like “the hen who hatched the duck egg,” Miller said.
But if it was drama Mrs. Miller had hoped for, daughter Sue was involved in that from the first weekend as an intern.
“I was on ob/gyn for my first rotation July 1, 2, 3 and 4,” she said.
“They had a patient. She was having irregular bleeding, and she was at term and getting irregular contractions. Dr. Nelson Brandeberry was her doctor, and he even slept at the hospital that night because he was so sure she was going to deliver.”
He’d finally gone to his home on Woodedge Road, just steps north of the hospital, to bathe and have breakfast, when “She went into labor with a vengeance” Miller said. “It turned out to be a breach birth, which was very tricky.”
Miller had crowded into a delivery room once in medical school to see the unusual event, the only experience she had to call on when “they put out an SOS for me” in the hospital.
Sister Olivia, the department administrator, told the fresh intern: “We can’t hold her back. You have to deliver.”
“She came out like a little greased pig,” Miller recalls. “I didn’t have a speck of trouble. It was thrilling.”
So was the wait in her emergency room after an emergency squad phoned to say they were bringing in a man with a badly mangled hand. The vehicle pulled in, complete with a volunteer riding on the running board, and unloaded a patient whose arm was heavily wrapped.
“I was ready for anything,” Miller said. “We unwrapped and unwrapped and unwrapped and we found (he had) a finger that had three little cuts on it.”
That contrasted with the episode that began about 10 one morning when half a dozen Springfield policemen brought in a raving, ranting fighting man, then pinned him to an emergency room bed.
One of the policeman shouted “I want a doctor!” then added “My Gawd” when Miller said she was the doctor.
Noticing the patient was “perspiring terrifically,” she asked whether he was a diabetic. Hearing he was, “I got out a bottle of 50 percent glucose, and he came right out of it. Then it took me half an hour to convince the police they shouldn’t arrest him.”
Miller remembers then Mercy Chief of Staff Dr. Bill Montanus as “a pistol” — an autocrat with a dignified, no-nonsense, by-the-book style that was gracefully balanced by the administrator, Sister Theresa.
“She stood up to him,” Miller recalled. “She was very pleasant, but she was an authority figure, and she knew it.”
Although Miller found surgery fascinating, enjoyed assisting, and even watched when her son, Harter “Buzz” Jackson, was removed from her womb by cesarean section on July 28, 1963, she “didn’t have the guts for surgery.”
She retains fond memories of the Southern gentleman surgeon, Dr. Robert McLemore, and Dr. Rudolph McCullough, an internist who was a particularly good teacher.
Likewise, she remembers Connie Murphy, who ran the hospital’s practical nurse training program as “excellent.”
So were the pies served in the coffee shop — meringues and others with three-inch crusts that helped the young intern to accumulate pounds as quickly as she did experience.
Although there was one doctor “who rode me,” Miller said most were more kindly and supportive, and helped make her transition to her practice at 923 N. Limestone St. “smooth.”
In the midst of the baby boom that followed World War II, she was busy enough that, after first working at both City (later renamed Community) and Mercy hospitals, she restricted her practice to Mercy. Soon, she also shed her ob/gyn duties to focus on what always had been her first love, family practice.
“I wanted to see the whole family as a unit, their interactions,” she said.
In her own family, she had not only parental support but was “blessed with a wonderful husband who backed me up and gave me the freedom to do what I did.”
She lost Dale Jackson, whom she’d married in 1959, seven years ago.
Miller practiced until age 75, keeping at it because she retained a quality that radiated from the photo in the now yellowed clipping harvested with pinking shears 61 years ago: She liked helping people.
Just like Dr. Kildare.
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