Page 73 - Coffee County

and Coffee County community as a general surgeon – a career in part made possible by the South Georgia College Foundation. “I’ll put my two years at South Georgia up against anyone else’s frst two years of school anywhere in the country. The smaller class sizes at SGC were a tremendous advantage,” he says. For example, in his organic chemistry class, Bagwell was one of 15 students. At the University of Georgia, he would have been in a class of several hundred. “I could ask my instructors questions and receive more individualized instruction. That was a big asset. We did the same work as students at other schools. The material was the same.” Dr. Bagwell came back to Douglas because he wanted to practice medicine differently than he would in a larger community. In bigger hospitals, general surgeons spend most of their time operating on patients and that’s it. In smaller communities, general surgeons are sort of jack-of-all-trades doctors. They may serve as an emergency room doctor one day, a gastroenterologist another day or a pediatrician the next. Dr. Bagwell has the opportunity to interact with his patients in a way that would not be