Lynn P. Carmichael, MD was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1928, but raised in the small town of Mooresville, Indiana. He discovered his calling early in life, finding inspiration from his family's physician, Dr. Kenneth Comer. In a 1991 interview, Carmichael fondly recalled Comer's influence, noting:
"Some of my earliest remembrances, my first really positive feelings, were about this family doctor. He made a pet out of me and was always available whenever I had a problem. I wanted to be like this man. I wanted to be a family doctor. I knew there were specialists... But specialists were different. They weren't your doctor. To be a doctor was to be a family doctor."
This point of view epitomized who Lynn Carmichael was as a family physician. He believed that fundamentally, family physicians did not treat illness, but treated people– a belief that he would continue to develop and promote throughout his career.
After graduating from the University of Louisville Medical School and serving in the Korean War as a battalion surgeon with the US Army, Carmichael settled in Miami, Florida, where he wanted to become a general practitioner. But he soon realized that his training and experiences had not at all prepared him for being a family physician. He then began working at nearby Kendall Hospital, which was established to aid in the treatment of underprivileged populations in Southern Dade County. Carmichael later compared the small 125-bed hospital to being back in the war zone in Korea, noting that:
"At Kendall there was no full-time staff other than house officers. There were five of us. We delivered the babies; we kept a clinic going 24 hours a day; we took care of the patients in the hospital... It was like being back in a war situation again. It was a frontline activity, and you never knew what was coming through the door."
This experience convinced him of the absolute necessity for residencies in family practice where doctors learned by doing.
By 1955, Carmichael was working in private practice as a family physician. He later recalled of this period that, "I probably did more for more people than any other time in my life." It was then that he began to realize that people did not come in alone and that the familial ties of the patients played a very important part in treating them. Furthermore, he realized that patients returned to see him regularly with different types of problems, thereby underscoring the need for developing a continuing relationship with the patient. It was at this point that Dr. Carmichael had a revelation: "My patients were what I was taking care of, not their particular illnesses."
This realization led Dr. Carmichael to believe that Family Medicine should first and foremost characterize the type of relationship a doctor has with the patient. This relationship, according to Carmichael, had four critical components:
