It's not every day that a physician retires after practicing for 54 years.
It's been a long and winding road for Dabbs since he was born in the small town of Hueytown near the Warrior River, and where he spent much of his boyhood around the area's fishing camps.
"My granddaddy was in the timber business," he says, "and I followed him everywhere he went. He'd cut timber, and I'd go stay in the woods with him. He built a slab shack, with a little stove and some cots, and we'd stay all week.
"Of course I was exposed to a lot of colorful language from the timber cutters, and by the time I was five or six years old I had a very extensive vocabulary," he says with a laugh.
A little more than a decade later he would go to Vanderbilt University on a football scholarship. He played middle linebacker, "and a little bit of tackle. I would be way too little to play nowadays, and my speed was a problem as far as being an outside linebacker. But we had a pretty good ball team. We beat Auburn in the Gator Bowl."
Apparently not all Auburn students held a grudge after the loss, because Dabbs married a young woman attending the university and then they both transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. After completing their studies the couple would eventually have two daughters and a son; both daughters are doctors, and their son is an electrical engineer.
After a time as chief resident at UAB's medical school, Dabbs and two partners moved into a brand-new office building in a high-traffic area, and the practice flourished. When he wasn't practicing medicine, he raised quarter-horses, Arabians, and cattle.
Along the way, he's also done a great deal of surgery at Princeton - sometimes 12 to 15 cases a week - before retiring from surgery a few years ago because of spinal stenosis.
His philosophy of surgery, he says, is "Never do anything you don't have to do." His most challenging cases over the years have been patients with cancer of the larynx who required total laryngectomies. "It's the kind of surgery you dread," he says, "not just for cosmetic reasons but also because it's disabling and makes life hard for people afterward.
"Fortunately there are fewer of those cases today, and that's a very good thing. Part of the decrease is because of so much better treatments with radiation, and part of it is because fewer people are smoking. I'd say more than 99 percent of cancers of the larynx are a result of smoking or of working in an atmosphere where there are caustic chemicals. Most cases of laryngeal cancer occur in people age 60 or above, but I've seen a few over the years in men in their late 30s who were welders, working in enclosed areas."
One of the biggest changes in medicine since he began his career is the revolution in diagnostic imagery. "All these new developments are a great aid in finding out what's wrong with people,” Dabbs says. “Plus, there's bypass surgery, stents, and so on. Cardiovascular care is so much better than it used to be. Overall, the technology of medicine has increased markedly."
The downside of changes over the years, he says, is the new financial basis under which physicians practice: "For instance, co-pays are so high that people don't go to the doctor unless they absolutely have to, because they can't afford it."
Why keep practicing so long past the standard retirement age of 65? "I've enjoyed medicine," he says. "I've never had any real problems. We were fortunate to have good nurses working for us. I'm a firm believer in treating your patients right. I've enjoyed my patients, and a lot of them have come over this week to say goodbye.
"Overall, my health has been good. I never smoked or drank. And when I was growing up, we didn't know what drugs were. But I've also been fortunate. Medicine's been very good to me. It's like I've led a charmed life."
