The Guyton group: Where being a doctor is all in the family

After flirting with the idea of a career in physics, Gregory Guyton, MD, followed suit and put on the white physician's coat that fits his family like a comfortable pair of slippers. His father is a doctor. His big brother is a doctor. His six other brothers are doctors. And his two sisters are, too.

The Guytons are one big happy family.

Of physicians.

Ten children. Ten doctors.

From eldest David, 57, to youngest Gregory -- a 23-year gap between them.

Parents Ruth and Arthur Guyton, MD, didn't plan it this way. Honest. It just kind of happened.

"David sort of set the pattern for the next one," said Arthur, 82, who still lives in the Jackson, Miss., home he built for his family. "Once it got started, it just continued."

Gregory explains: "It's like a normal family -- except everybody is a doctor."

The Guyton children are spread across eight states, from Pennsylvania to Georgia to Washington. They are, from eldest to youngest: David, Robert, John, Steven, Cathy, Jean, Douglas, James, Thomas and Gregory. These MDs represent a variety of medical specialties, from ophthalmology to rheumatology.

There are almost enough specialties to staff a small hospital. "I guess if you could get everyone in the same location," said Cathy Greenberger, MD, one of the sisters.

This is the third generation of Guyton doctors. Arthur's father, Billy Guyton, MD, was an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist and dean of the University of Mississippi's medical school in Oxford.

Arthur wanted to be a surgeon. But during his surgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston after World War II, he was stricken with polio, leaving him partially paralyzed. He shifted his attention to research and teaching. He taught pharmacology at the University of Mississippi, and in 1948 became head of the department of physiology and biophysics.

Unhappy with textbooks used by his students, Arthur wrote his own, Textbook of Medical Physiology, which is now in its 10th edition.

"That financed all of our educations," David said of the well-known book.

A family that works together ...

Early in their lives, David and the other children learned the importance of hard work. They helped build the Mississippi home designed by their father. They mixed concrete. They pitched in to construct a swimming pool and tennis courts.

"He couldn't get around much anymore and had to walk on crutches. We were the hands for his brain and we learned a great deal from that," recalled David, now a professor of pediatric ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

When something broke down, the Guytons fixed it. David still knows how to repair a washing machine.

The elder Guytons expected all their children to excel in school. Ruth instilled an early yearning for knowledge by reading to the children before bed.

"Everybody was good in school and everybody was good in science. We were all sort of competitive," said Cathy, of Pittsburgh, a former internist who left her practice 15 years ago to raise her children. Her husband is also an MD.

James Guyton, MD, now an orthopedic surgeon at Campbell's Clinic in Memphis, Tenn., said: "We were always sort of achievement-driven. We were always father pleasers."

Growing up in a big family was fun, too.

"There was always somebody to play with. You were never lonely," said Jean Gispen, MD, a rheumatologist in Oxford, Miss.

Every other year the family vacationed at a summer house in New Hampshire. "It was three days in a car, a very tightly packed station wagon," Jean said.

Cause trouble on the way and you were told to sit on your hands.

"There were very strict rules or there would be chaos in the car," she said.

Around the house in Jackson, if someone got hurt falling off their bike or scraped a knee, their father would break out the medical gear and stitch them back up. Steven remembers his dad sewing up a cut on his foot in the Guyton home.

Following their father into medicine seemed natural to many of the children. They said their parents didn't pressure them to become doctors.

"I wanted them to do what they really wanted," mother Ruth said.

Although they didn't talk about medicine at the dinner table, the children became aware of how much being part of the profession meant to their father. His passion rubbed off on them.

"It was the only thing we knew about. It was natural to go that way," David said.

David was the first to graduate from Harvard's medical school. All eight boys went on to graduate from Harvard. Cathy and Jean completed their undergraduate studies at Harvard, then went elsewhere for medical school.

At one point, it seemed that the youngest, Gregory, might be the only Guyton to break the chain and go into physics. His siblings joked that he had to become a doctor or risk breaking some record for doctors in a family.

He didn't let them down.

Being a doctor "was something that was always in the back of your mind," said Gregory, an orthopedic surgeon and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Second opinions

The Guytons don't serve as each other's physicians. But they do ask for medical advice by phone on occasion. David asked one brother where to make an injection for his tennis elbow. James had a brother with him in the operating room during his knee surgery. Cathy called David when one of her children got chicken pox.

When they get together, they play cards and talk about the grandchildren more than they discuss medicine. If a grandchild is hurt at a family outing, the Guytons may gather around and offer advice from their areas of expertise.

So who has the final say in such medical moments? The child's parent.

And will any of the more than 30 Guyton grandchildren extend the doctor tradition another generation?

"Not very likely. They don't have the great enthusiasm to do so because they see their fathers working hard and everything," said Arthur, who has received numerous honors for his research and inventions and still keeps office hours at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Ah, but there is a voice of hope.

"I bet mine do. All my children say they want to [be doctors]," James said of his three children.

Maybe then the Guytons' medical milestone of 10 doctors will fall like others it has bested.

David remembers the time a woman from the Philippines approached him after a meeting to let him know her family had nine doctors. She said that was a record in their minds -- until the Guytons came along.

"She said, 'I don't like you very much,' " David said. "Nobody set out to set any records. We were fortunate enough to all be bright enough. We inherited the right genes, I guess."