Dr. Julian Duttera of LaGrange saw his last patient Monday at Emory Clark-Holder Clinic, closing the door on a 35-year practice in medicine.

Health issues were a factor in his retirement, although he didn’t want to get more specific.

“You don’t want to wait till you’re having problems yourself so you can’t do the things you want to do,” Duttera, 67, said Thursday on the phone from Jacksonville, Fla., where he was chasing after a 2-year-old grandchild while the kid’s parents attended a family wedding in Colorado.

He had planned to retire at 65, but another oncologist couldn’t be found. Recruiting efforts have continued and still nobody has committed because of the nationwide shortage of oncologists.

“We’re still in search mode,” said West Georgia Health System President Jerry Fulks. “We’ve had interest from a couple of well-qualified candidates, but we’re competing with places like Johns Hopkins” hospital in Baltimore.

Aside from babysitting, Duttera and his wife of 44 years, the former Sue McGhee, are in for a lot of traveling, having recently returned from a trip to Greece organized by John Lawrence, and now they have their sights on Alaska. But Duttera said he’s leaving his practice “in the very capable and caring hands” of fellow oncologist Lawrence Gynther and advanced practice registered nurse Frances Stuckwisch.

When he started, there were very few cancers on the curable list. Most treatable malignances were blood-related such as leukemia, but “we learned from that and applied those principles to solid tumors” such as colon and lung cancer, Duttera said.

He was in a training program when the first board examinations in medical oncology were given and he became board-certified in medical oncology and internal medicine.

“I think to some degree I felt a call to be a cancer doctor,” he said.

Later on, Duttera’s father-in-law died of lung cancer and his mother had breast cancer, but survived until the age of 93.

When a patient dies, “you always hope that you can tell the family that you’ve done everything you can and made everything that was likely to help accessible to them, even if it’s very esoteric,” he said. “You always like to think they had every opportunity to get better.”

Duttera was “a very compassionate person and very good to his patients,” said Vickie Kistler, his medical assistant for the past few years, along with Kalena Osborn. “”We loved working for him.”

Said Osborn: “I’m just going to miss him and his compassion and so are the patients. He’s taught me a lot, but most of all it’s his compassion, not just toward his patients, but his employees too.”

“He’s been a great mentor and teacher,” added oncology nurse Sheila Williams, who administers chemotherapy. “He has a lot of empathy for everyone, patients and staff alike.”

Duttera, a volunteer for the American Cancer Society for 30 years, was on the national board and is a current member of the South Atlantic Division board. He’s chairman of the State Medical Education Board, which for 25 years has provided scholarships to get physicians into Georgia’s smaller communities.

As for LaGrange, “we have an excellent physician group that is really patient oriented,” he said. “The hospital has worked very harmoniously with physicians and they do a good job with that,” he said.

Duttera vividly remembers June 7, 1975 when 10 congressmen who were here for the next day’s dedication of West Point Dam wound up in the emergency room of West Georgia Medical Center. Their bus had collided with a pulpwood truck that jackknifed while avoiding a turning car and slammed into the left front of the bus on U.S. 27 near Callaway Gardens.

Duttera was getting ready to leave when the congressmen started arriving at the hospital and he admitted two of them.

“The switchboard was smoking at the hospital because there were so many calls,” he said. “Walter Cronkite ended his newscast with a story about the accident.”

Somebody called Rear Admiral Freeman Cary, who was the attending physician for Congress and happened to be a LaGrange native.

“They told him there were all these congressmen in a Podunk hospital in LaGrange, Georgia,” Duttera said. “They were concerned about their care, and he said, ‘I know those guys. They’re in good hands.’”

Joel Martin can be reached at jmartin@lagrangenews.com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 235.