No Price Tag on Our Health and Happiness!

I lived my entire life on the same farm, and I still considered that piece of land "home" until my parents died and the land was sold. When I finished nursing school in 1951, I moved to Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. in 1951 was a very different town than it is today. I had a younger sister living there and I wanted very much to go live with her. We were very close, but my school and her work had put us in very different areas of the country and I wanted to spend some time with her. As my years of school came to a close, I began to make my plans to live with my sister. At that time I was passionate about medical research, so before I moved from Indiana I accepted a nursing position at D.C. General Hospital in the Tuberculosis Building which was actively doing multiple forms of research. I had been at D.C. General less than a year when we discovered the perfect treatment for tuberculosis, which healed the disease very quickly, and it is still the drug of choice today.

My sister, her friend and I moved from Washington, D.C. into a house in Arlington Forest in Arlington, Virginia. This was one of the first areas of Arlington that was being developed. It was a community of two-story brick houses just across the D.C. line, where we settled in to enjoy our lives, our freedom, and our successes. We had a wonderful year of working, dating, going places together, and being together, and then I got married. Marriage was an interesting challenge for me because I was not used to control, and suddenly I found myself being told what to do and when to do it, and my new husband did not appreciate my focus on tuberculosis research or my working at D.C. General Hospital. Gradually he wore me down and I left D.C. General Hospital and went to work at the Yater Clinic.

In the long run this was a perfect move, because working for Wallace Yater, M.D. was a dramatic gift to myself that I had no idea could happen. I knew him by reputation only when I went to work in his clinic. With my first meeting with Wallace Yater,I was struck by his gentleness, kindness, and his wisdom, which created a dramatic energy field around him. As I watched him work with "very important people" in the concept of our human reality, I was aware of his wisdom, his love, his utmost consideration of all human beings, and his total expertise as a physician.

It was after I started working for Wallace Yater that I realized he had written the "medical book" that was being studied by many medical students. To this day I cherish this medical book that he wrote and I use it to keep my mind fresh on many medical subjects. Wallace Yater had a wide following of patients, and as I started working in the Yater Clinic in Washington, D.C. I was always amazed at the steady influx of diplomats, movie stars, and "important people" that were his clients and that would fly halfway across the world to see him. His personality never changed in my presence. He was always calm, polite, brilliant, and considerate of other people. I have found his medical writings to be as important today as they were fifty years ago, and if they were followed more carefully by today's medical profession, perhaps we would have fewer problems healing diseases, and we would not create as many diseases as confront our human population today. As I remember, Dr. Yater had brilliant physicians working in his clinic and people came from all over the world to see him and his team of specialists.

As a young R.N., I felt very honored to work with these seasoned and intelligent men and women. When I began having children, I always took my children to the pediatrician that I loved so much at the Yater Clinic, whose name was Dr. Catherine Knop. I raised healthy children, and they have all done well in the world today. I do believe that getting off to a healthy start physically, mentally, and emotionally is like money in the bank for us as human beings. We cannot put a price tag on our health or happiness.

I left Yater Clinic to have my first child, but during my child-bearing years and my six children, I always took my children to the Yater Clinic to be seen because I trusted these physicians explicitly, and they were worthy of my trust. The pediatrician that I used for my six children was Dr. Catherine Knop, and she was also the best and brightest pediatrician that I have ever met. To make a long story short, after you have had the best medical care in the country, anything less than what you are used to falls rather flat in your mind and it may never reach your heart. Reaching the heart of a client does not appear to be the intention of our current medical community. Sometimes in my "musings," I wonder how many of today's physicians have studied the medical book written by Wallace Yater? I have his book and I have consistently used it as a reference in my life. I can see him and "feel" his energy when I think about him. Many times I have been given very important answers to my medical questions from his energy field. This is where I learned the reality of medicine and what it means on a personal basis.