by Jon Osterholm

At 83 years old, he still practices medicine three days a week, seeing between 30 and 35 patients per day. Roland P. Sharp, D.O., has been a fixture in the small Pocahontas County town of Green Bank for over 25 years. During that time, he also served as the first president of WVSOM, from 1974 to 1978.

Sharp is from a long line of doctors. Three family members have followed his lead into osteopathy: John Sharp, a graduate of WVSOM and the son of his first cousin, practices in Green Bank; his nephew, Jeff Sharp, is a second-year student at WVSOM; and John's son, Eric Hunter Sharp, is a first-year student.

Practicing in Green Bank

Dr. Sharp's office in Green Bank is a little white cinder block building across the street from a gas station/restaurant. Outside the office on a post is a wooden sign that simply says, "PHYSICIAN'S OFFICE." A similar sign is posted on his door, with his office hours handwritten on a sign just below that.

Inside, Barbara McCarty assists Sharp as she has for 26 years, since early in his practice. She joined him right out of high school and has never left.

Why does Sharp stay there, in such a humble office in a little town after all he's accomplished? "I like it here," Sharp says, adding, "but I was also born near here, at the farm above the one I now live in."

The townsfolk like him, too, as evidenced by a sampling of his patients.

"It's amazing that he is still going," one female patient comments. She says he still makes house calls, and notes a time she cut her eye while driving and went to his house. He took care of her there -- a different kind of house call.

A male patient, 80 years old, says, "I would not go to anyone else. I've been coming to him for around 20 years."

Another patient says he has seen Sharp for nearly 30 years. His mother has been seeing him that long, too. She suffers with rheumatoid arthritis, and while she and Sharp chat in the waiting room, Sharp does a quick check on her ankle, which was enflamed by a fall and compounded by her arthritic condition.

Educator, student, coal miner's doctor

Sharp began his career in the early 1930s as a grade school teacher, later joining the faculty of Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (KCOM).

Before he began teaching, Sharp received a bachelor degree from Concord College, and from WVU he earned a master of science degree.

Sharp searched for a student assistantship in the late 1930s, in order to work in a college, and found Kirksville to have the best offering. "I did not know anything about the osteopathic profession at the time," he admits.

Sharp was immediately impressed with the advanced training at Kirksville. Though he expected to teach Embryology and Histology at Kirksville for only a short time, he ended up staying a while, as the instructor he filled in for resigned. The following term, things changed even more for Sharp. KCOM's dean waived his tuition and helped him work out a schedule so that he could teach classes and attend the college, something he had not originally planned to do. Sharp's grandfather, George M. Jordan, was an M.D., but he didn't care that Sharp was going to be a D.O. He was happy that Sharp was going to be a doctor.

In the 1940s, Sharp was frozen in his position at Kirksville due to World War II; he graduated in 1943, but left Kirksville in 1945. Then, when he tried to enlist, he was told there were too many doctors in the armed forces and that he should look for a needy community to serve.

So Sharp moved to Wyoming County, West Virginia. He attended Concord with several people from that county, and he knew he would be comfortable there. Sharp signed a contract with the UMW and became a West Gulf Coal Company doctor at Marylane Mine in Maben, near Mullens. Twelve years later, a retiring M.D. and friend asked Sharp to take over his patients at another coal company, though there were some other M.D.s in the area. Sharp took on the additional patients.

Sharp worked as a coal company doctor for 17 years, then opened his practice in Green Bank, in 1962. A decade later, Greenbrier Military School in Lewisburg was to close, opening another chapter in Sharp's career.

The WVSOM years

Sharp was involved with the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine from the beginning. He became executive officer during the development of the Greenbrier College of Osteopathic Medicine (a private school) in the early 1970s, at the site of the former military school.

The early life of what was to become WVSOM involved a war for academic credibility because the Bureau of Professional Education of the American Osteopathic Association was skeptical of its success, having recently watched another school nearly close due to severe financial troubles. The final insistence from the accrediting agency was that the school name a president before they would sanction it. After other candidates fell through, Sharp explains with a chuckle, "The board of trustees voted me president, though I wasn't even a candidate for the position." In 1974, Sharp began working full-time in Lewisburg, his practice in Green Bank set aside.

Sharp thinks timing was essential to the school's early success with him at the helm. Many of the best in their professions at the time had either been taught by Sharp or with him, and he recruited them to speak at his school, the fees for which they typically signed over to the school. "I leaned on them," Sharp jokes. Clinical speakers cost the school virtually nothing for the first two years, he says. "Several years later, I would have had no such influence at all," he claims.

Sharp wrote his resignation just after the school joined the state system as WVSOM (in 1976), feeling he had done what he could. "The chancellor looked at my resignation," Sharp says, "then he told me, 'Look, you're the president. I'm looking for four other presidents for state colleges, and I'm not going to start looking for a fifth one.'" Sharp laughs, recalling the scene. The chancellor then told him to "'get back there and write your budget,'" he remembers. He remained as president until 1978.

'Like Family'

Fifteen years later, WVSOM's soon-to-be alumni center is named after Sharp, honoring his early leadership, and his continuing help -- each year, a few WVSOM students are exposed to rural health care at his office. The center is to be finished soon.

While Sharp was WVSOM's president, his practice in Green Bank was put on hold, but his patients didn't mind, as he tells it: "I had as many patients that first Monday morning I was back as I had when I left," he proclaims. "They're like family to me," he continues, explaining, "I listen to their health problems, their problems with their neighbors, their money problems. I enjoy helping them."

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Written by Jon Osterholm