DR. WHO
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
DR. CHRISTOPHER SMALLEY
AUTHOR Kathryn Vance
G
rowing up, Dr. Christopher Smalley didn’t expect medicine
to be his future career path. He grew up in small towns
all around the country, moving every few years for his
parents’ jobs. During his sophomore year in high school,
his family moved to West Virginia where he would meet
his future wife, Amy. The following year, in one final move
during his youth, his family settled in Pennsylvania where
he finished high school. He knew that he wanted to go to college
and both he and then-long-distance-girlfriend Amy decided that
they would stay in state at a school that most of his friends were
also attending, Penn State University (PSU).
“She told her parents she just wanted to go to Penn State, it
didn’t have anything to do with me,” he laughed. “I don’t know if
that’s true or not, but we wanted to go to college together, so that’s
what we did.”
Once enrolled, he set his sights on a subject that had sparked his
imagination in high school. “I took a psychology class in high school
and thought it was pretty interesting. I also had a job between high
school and college where I took care of people who had significant
mental illness, helping them in a community dwelling,” he said.
After a few semesters as a psychology major, he realized that
while he thought psychology was interesting, the practical appli-
cation wasn’t the right fit for him. “I enjoyed it in the books quite a
bit, but then when I went out to work in mental institutions, I did
not enjoy it as much,” he said. “But I enjoyed their medical care, so
then I kind of switched over. I thought I’d have to switch over to
a pre-med major or something like that, but my advisor said that
psychology would be a perfect degree for going into medicine. So,
I stayed and got my bachelor’s degree in psychology at Penn State
University.”
After receiving his degree from PSU in the spring of 1994, Dr.
Smalley and Amy got married while he prepared for life as a medical
student. He attended medical school at the University of Virginia
(UVA), where he was able to discover different specialties and what
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
those boded for his future. He quickly found that he enjoyed getting
to treat a variety of conditions and patients.
“Some people like a very deep and intense focus on one area and
other people like a more broad, wide spectrum. I liked a little bit
of everything. I enjoy all the aspects of medicine, and doing family
medicine allows me to do that,” he said. “I didn’t have to choose
between adults and children. I didn’t have to choose between deliv-
ering babies or not delivering babies. I get to do surgical procedures.
With this specialty I am able to do everything.”
So, in 1998 they stayed in Charlottesville, and he completed his
internship and residency in family medicine. He spent three years in
training, rotating through a variety of fields, with new and different
patients and problems coming one after another.
“We’d spend a month doing inpatient, then we might spend a
month doing outpatient pediatrics, and then you do dermatology.
You kind of rotate through. There was a requirement to do obstetrics
and deliver a certain number of babies. You had to spend a certain
amount of time in the hospital and outside of the hospital, and
spend time taking care of adults and children.”
Once he was ready to begin practicing, he did so through the
help of a national organization.
“I had my medical school paid for by the federal government
through the National Health Service Corps, which is a group that
pays for people’s training in exchange for working in underserved
areas,” he said. “And I spent four years working in rural Eastern
Kentucky and that was a good place for me. My parents had retired
to Louisville and my wife’s family is in West Virginia, so it was pretty
evenly spaced between our families.”
After his years at St. Claire Medical Center in Eastern Kentucky,
Dr. Smalley moved to Louisville in 2005 and joined his current
practice, now Norton Community Medical Associates – Okolona,
which has become a second family to him over the years.
“When I joined this practice, it wasn’t a Norton practice, but