william hedrick

The author is a family physician who lives in the town of Wake Forest, N.C. and practices in Raleigh. He is eighty-eighty years old and is still in practice. He grew up in Raleigh and went to Wake Forest College when it was still in the town of Wake Forest. After three years in college he was accepted at Bowman Gray School of Medicine where he graduated in 1957. After a year of internship in internal medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta he began a residency in psychiatry at Dorthea Dix Hospital in Raleigh. After nine month he joined the U.S. Army as a Captain in 1959 and spent the next two years at 34th General Hospital in Orleans, France where he was appointed the Commanding Officer of the 760th Medical Detachment. After his tour of duty in France he returned to Grady for a pediatric residency. When his father became ill, he returned to Raleigh and opened a solo family practice on July 2, 1962. He has been in practice ever since. He has been an active member of the American Academy of Family Practice and was President of the North Carolina Academy in 1975. Though his focus over the years has primarily been on family practice, those early years in psychiatry would help him see that the treatment of mental illness should be no different than the treatment of medical illness.