Young Dr. Charles Vlach, himself raised in metropolitan Omaha, quickly became Cedar County’s beloved country doctor. For years he made house calls, a welcome visitor day or night, to see anyone who couldn’t make it to the clinic on their own, the elderly, those with cancer, or recovering from a stroke. For much of his time in Hartington, he was the area’s emergency response team.

His medicine often included a hug. And in a town of only 1,600 people, plus farmers and other rural folks, he has delivered 1,000 babies over the past 40 years, including the babies of babies he had delivered years earlier.

Emergencies would send Dr. Vlach into the countryside in a hurry at any time. When one person collapsed on their lawn, the doctor was there and treated them in the rain. But when a farmer caught both legs in an auger, the man somehow was brought to the clinic in town. The doctor splint and stabilized the man’s legs until a helicopter could take him to a hospital in Iowa City, 60 miles away.

He was there when a man suffering from the side effects of chemotherapy took a turn for the worse. After giving the man anti-inflammatory medicine, Dr. Vlach joined family members in a prayer circle around their suffering father. “As you went around that circle, you could just feel the love and the warmth and hope,” he recalls. The session closed with a hug.

The next day the man’s condition improved. His cancer went into remission, and he returned to his job as a school bus driver.

The house calls finally ended in the mid-90s as local communities developed their own paramedic emergency teams and specialized home health care agencies came into use.

Dr. Vlach refers to his farm patients as the “salt of the earth.” He has seen too many farmers under financial and workload stress, so he encourages them to set reasonable goals. “Don’t let yourself get overextended with too many commitments,” he cautions. “Stick to the simple life.”

The doctor’s introduction to the community 40 years ago gave him a quick taste of small town rural America. As he and his family headed to Hartington to start his practice on July 3, 1962, the truck moving their personal belongings broke an axle. The family moved into their rented house, but without any furniture. Word spread quickly, and soon, “all the people in town stopped by with dishes, something for us to eat, and bedding.”

“I made my first house call the July 4th weekend before I even officially opened my office,” he remembered. The next day, his first in the office, he saw 26 patients.

After years of witnessing the friendliness of the area’s people in action, Dr. Vlach knows it is nothing for neighbors to help each other out with fieldwork or harvesting when a farmer is ill or has had an accident. It’s something that just seems to happen naturally.

Dr. Vlach has had the same nurse through all his years in Hartington. Elsie Lauer worked for the doctors who were there before him and is still there. “I doubt if there’s another case in the state where the same nurse has worked with the same doctor for all those years,” he commented.

The obstetric part of his practice has been his most rewarding. “You have a special bond with those families,” he said. “We often have a big group hug with Dad or Mom holding the baby. I’m always on a high after delivering a baby.”

The elderly too have a special place in the doctor’s heart. They appreciate his hug therapy. “A hug says you really care about the person, but that’s only one of the tools I use in treating older patients,” he explained. He also writes personal medication notes, complete with encouraging messages, such as, “I’m proud of you, your diabetic control is better than ever.”

Dr. Vlach sees the end of house calls and the coming of technology and ultra-specialized medicine as a double-edged sword. “There are wonderful advances, but sometimes they are overused.” He thinks blind technology has sometimes replaced common clinical judgment and has put a financial burden on the health care system.

“It’s good, but we’ve lost some of our personal contact with patients,” he said. “To me, the most important part of all medicine is to be able to know your patients. I’m a big believer in specialists, I just don’t believe that four or five specialists should be dividing up a patient into pieces and parts,” in order to treat them.

There must be some kind of magic in Dr. Vlach’s approach to country medicine: four of his six children went into the medical profession in various ways, the other two have spouses with health care careers.