Reedville country doctor just wants to have fun

Reedville, Va. — The sign outside Dr. Emory Lewis’s office is as big as the broad side of a barn.

Actually, it is the broad side of a barn. A hay barn.

“Dr. Lewis,” it says in enormous letters visible to anyone driving down Route 360 near the fishing village of Reedville, at the watery end of Virginia’s Northern Neck.

There’s also the giant fish. It’s a fake rockfish, big as a killer whale, perched by the side of the road at the head of the long driveway. The fish is part advertisement, part running gag. The doctor uses the fish to create visual word plays to amuse passing motorists. One day recently, a small chair dangled above the fish. Rock . . . and chair. Rocking chair!

One senses, driving along, that there’s a character lurking, some Americana demanding scrutiny. It is so: This is the realm of a certain Wallace Emory Lewis Jr. — country doctor, nostalgia buff, yachtsman, crabber, entrepreneur, raconteur and slightly loony pillar of a Tidewater community.

He’s a big talker.

“Everything I know is a story, so bear with me,” he says as, eating fast food in his personal lighthouse on the water (yes, he has a personal lighthouse), he retells a complicated yarn about why he recently bought an 80-foot boat from a neurosurgeon whose girlfriend was hydrophobic. (“I know you’re going to kill me, but . . .” Lewis said to his wife, Janet, when he informed her that he’d already signed the contract.)

You might say the doctor is living in the past simply by being here in Reedville, which is about as sleepy as modern America can get. It’s serene and pleasant, but it’s literally a dead-end town, an hour and a half from the nearest interstate highway, and eight decades removed from the last steamer service to Baltimore.

Lewis is one of five doctors, by his count, in Northumberland County. He doesn’t embody the trends in medicine so much as he defies them. He’s a doctor who still makes house calls. His patients are mostly Medicare-eligible, and they supplement the doctor’s reimbursements with gifts of home-canned relish and menhaden roe.

Lewis has no interest in assembly-line medicine. “A lot of times that’s therapeutic, just to talk to people,” he says. He knows his patients and their parents and their parents’ parents, and remembers which families have a history of diabetes.

He wound up in the barn after a dispute a couple of years ago with the health-care company that employed him. He relocated his practice and entire staff to the farmhouse, built in 1816 near the head of Cockrell’s Creek.

The bedrooms have been converted to examining rooms. The floorboards are as creaky as some of the patients.

The farmhouse doesn’t have an X-ray machine, which he thinks is a good thing, because that cuts down on needless tests.

“Give it a week, and it’ll feel better,” he will tell a patient.

The doctor’s assistants, all of them women, have stuck with him for decades. Two have been with him for 34 years. “It’s a family here, not just nurses and doctors,” says one of those two, office manager Janet Crowther, who used to clean crabs for Lewis back when he ran a crab house on the side. When not helping patients, the staffers make asparagus soup or spaghetti sauce in the farmhouse kitchen, for group lunches, and they tend a small garden near the barn. “The girls,” he calls them.