It has been announced by the Consumers’ Research Council of America that Dr. Luther W. Oehlbeck (husband of Farmer & Rancher writer, Barbara Oehlbeck) has been named on of America’s Top Physicians, 2007, about which he says came as a total surprise.

Following serving in the Pacific theatre of World War II, he was faced with deciding in which direction to take his life. He said, “I’d thought a lot about medicine, and photography and to some extent law. My father gave me a camera when I was nine years old and took me with him to Florida. He was a gifted photographer in black and white and was often compared to Ansel Adams. I had done some photography in the Navy which was on my own, in other words, it was not an official assignment from the Navy. Then, when I got home I met up with a fine full-time photographer in my home town.

However, right away I learned that he was just eking out a living with what he was doing which caused problems in his family and so right then and there I quit thinking about photography as a career. However, my interest in photography has never diminished.”
And so the question arose: how did you decide on pathology?

“Well, my father was a doctor, a radiologist, and so I’d been in a medical family all my life, therefore the subject was not foreign to me. I had always been fascinated with a challenge, doing things on my own and the more I thought about the area of pathology, the more challenging it became to me.

Yet I enrolled in the University of Miami with the goal of becoming a teacher, but soon learned that the classes were so mundane and held so little challenge that after the first year I couldn’t get to the University of North Carolina fast enough. I’d always admired how the university was run and some of those who were graduates. Thus in due time, having earned an A.B. in Zoology I entered the UNC Medical School at Chapel Hill for my first two years of medical study then transferred to the University of Virginia Medical School in 1953 where I graduated.”

Dr. Oehlbeck went on to say that he interned at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in 1954, a resident in pathology in 1955 and a resident in pathology at Moses H. Cone Hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1956-1957, under the late Herbert Z. Lund, former surgical pathologist of Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Oehlbeck is a past president of Caldwell Memorial Hospital Medical Staff, the Caldwell County Medical Society and the North Carolina Society of Pathologists. He was also a member of the joint commission of North Carolina Blue Cross-Blue Shield, and is a board member emeritus of the College of American Pathologists.

He was instrumental in introducing the then-new technique of the Pap Smear throughout North Carolina.
Dr. Oehlbeck had a combined hospital and private pathology practice, The Laboratory of Anatomic and Clinical Pathology, which is still in operation in Lenoir, North Carolina.

In 1972 Major Donald D. McNeill US Army Medical Corps joined Dr. Oehlbeck as a Full Associate and Lab Director following Dr. Oehlbeck’s full retirement in 1984. The laboratory continues under Dr McNeill’s direction. Several of the employees have been with the laboratory for 30 years or more.

Since moving to Glades County in the late 1980s, Dr. Oehlbeck has served on the Glades County Planning Commission, formerly known as the Glades County Zoning Commission and the Glades County Board of Adjustments.

Dr. and Mrs. Oehlbeck live at Grassy Run in Muse, Glades County.