As hard as it is to believe, retired doctor Warren Bishop, 99, can sit in his room at Rogue Valley Manor and look out over Medford in 2002 and tell you stories he heard from his father about fighting in the Civil War 138 years ago.

Bishop, son of confederate soldier Harvey R. Bishop, may be one of the last children of Civil War veterans still alive.

"He might be THE last one. We’re trying to find out," said Kara Peccia, Manor public relations director.

The elder Bishop fought in Pickett’s Division, which suffered horrendous casualties in the famed "Pickett’s Charge" at Gettysburg in 1863, said Warren.

"Two-thirds of them were killed. My father said he never heard a sweeter sound than the bugle calling retreat. I asked him if he ran and he said no," Warren chuckled, "but he passed a whole bunch of guys that were running."

Time has dimmed memories of battle. Maybe his father, a soldier in Company F, 29th Virginia Regiment, had been transferred to a unit at Cold Harbor before the "slaughter" at Gettysburg — so an old photo would indicate — but, for sure, he did see action, where he had a cartridge belt and canteen shot off and was knocked out cold by a Yankee rifle butt.

"He was slammed in the lower back and lay on the battlefield two days before he could crawl off. He had back pain from that all his life. He didn’t like to talk about the war," Warren said.

Harvey Bishop was born in 1845. He was 18 at the time of Gettysburg. He didn’t marry Warren’s mother, Arabella, a schoolteacher and daughter of a Confederate officer, until 1899, when he was 54.

Warren was born in 1903 and grew up working hard on his dad’s Blue Ridge Mountain farm, tending cattle, pigs and sheep. "I hated it," Warren said. Farm drudgery was a major motivation for a medical career for him, as well as for his two brothers.

Bishop interned in San Francisco, saw the Rogue Valley on a Christmas holiday and told his wife, "We’re moving to Medford."

In his nearly 60 years as a doctor here, Bishop drew on the 19th-century values taught him by his parents, vowing never to refuse medical help to anyone, regardless of how remote the patient, how inconvenient the time and how little the pay.

"I got here in 1932 at the start of the Depression and people had no money to go to the hospital. Many lived way out in the hills and it was hard to get a doctor to come out. I knew someone’s life might be hanging in the balance because of me, and I didn’t want that on my conscience. I always went. I never asked if they could pay. They seldom could pay — about half the time. A lot of them would give me chickens, eggs, cherries, firewood. I got so much of that, my yard looked like a woodlot."

His first of 3,137 deliveries took him high in the hills of the Applegate, where he walked in on a breech birth. "Two ladies there asked if they could help. I said you can pray — I’m too busy." Bishop delivered the baby stillborn. He applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for many long minutes, then the baby finally gasped and began breathing.

"I feel I saved that baby’s life and probably the mother’s, too, by going where the going was hard. I’d be gone half a day and half the night. My wife was very considerate about it all."

Bishop was Navy doctor in World War II, practiced on the staffs of both Medford hospitals, maintained a private practice, served as president of the Jackson County Medical Society and was medical officer for the Rogue Valley Manor from 1960 to 1977.

Bishop hopes to "make it to 100." That would be next March. He attributes his long life to hard work, no drink, lots of fishing and hiking, eating good food and "the general idea of helping other people."

In honor of a son killed in a car accident, Bishop started two medical scholarships which over the past 20 years have given out $6,000 a year to more than 100 nurses at Southern Oregon University.

He has a wall full of honors — Oregon Doctor-Citizen of the Year, the SOU Presidential Medal, the Roanoke College Medal (his alma mater), Jackson County Medical Society Doctor of the Year, the Carpenter Foundation Distinguished Citizen of the Year. But his highest honor is the title "family doctor."

"I feel I was a family doctor and that I lived up to that. It’s one of the finest callings I could have found."

John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.