When she was 12 years old, Ashley Smith Lane remembers putting on her father’s white coat and walking around his Alabama clinic as though she were a doctor. Now, at the age of 28 and in her second year of residency, she’s no longer pretending. Growing up as a doctor’s child, you see the best part of it, and you see the time constraints,” Lane says. “I grew up going to house calls with my dad, going to the ER [emergency room] when he had to admit a patient. It’s definitely a lifestyle that you have to choose. Lane is the third generation of physicians in her family, following in the footsteps of both her father and grandfather. Through the years, they have witnessed the transformation of healthcare firsthand, along with the advent of new technology and changes in private practice. Her grandfather, George Smith Sr., MD, began his career as a pharmaceutical representative, where he says he gradually found his calling to pursue medicine. He began practicing on July 1, 1966, a day that dramatically changed healthcare when Medicare became available. His son, George Smith Jr., MD, says he respected his father’s job from an early age. “I used to carry [my father’s] bag on house calls when I was a little boy,” he says. “A lot of patients came by the house, and he treated people in our living room. I saw the respect and the admiration that my daddy’s patients had for him.” In April 1986, a month before his daughter Ashley was born, Smith Jr. joined his father’s practice. Today, they still work together at Clay County Medical Clinic in Lineville, Alabama, and they marched side-by-side with Lane in the processional as she received her medical degree from the University of Alabama. Source
