O. C. Newman
O. C. Newman
“At one time during my first two years at Grand, I was not only the community physician, answering calls in town and out in the country, but I also was the deputy county clerk, the deputy county treasurer, worked in the county judge’s office, helped to run the post office, and worked in a saloon.”
Biography
Dr. Oscar Clarence Newman was born in Ohio and attended Fayette College and National Normal University before graduating from the University of the South Medical School in Tennessee in 1900. He set up his first medical practice in the panhandle of Oklahoma at Grand and served as the area’s only country doctor. Townspeople raised money for his tuition for post-graduate work at the University of Ohio and, in 1907, moved his family to Shattuck and established Northwest Sanitarium. In 1927, his Shattuck Hospital was dedicated. Dr. Newman became a Fellow in the American College of Surgeons in 1939 and served on Oklahoma’s State Board of Medical Examiners. When he was elected to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, Shattuck residents held a “Doctor Newman Day” and 130 of them came for the induction ceremony in Oklahoma City. In 1947, he was honored as the Most Outstanding Physician in Oklahoma.
Fun fact
After Dr. Newman moved to Shattuck, Oklahoma, in 1907, the daring young physician bought one of the area’s first motorcycles, a single cylinder belt drive Harley Davidson, to speed up his house calls to visit sick patients.
Oklahoma connections
Newman came to Grand in the Oklahoma Panhandle to open his medical practice in 1900.