East Clarendon Medical, Dr. Smith back open Nov. 17

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After being closed nearly five months, East Clarendon Medical Center will reopen Nov. 17 as an arm of Colonial Healthcare.

Dr. Kate Smith will continue seeing patients at the center, which was closed in July by Clarendon Health System.

Turbeville native Smith, a daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Charlie Dorn Smith Sr., attended the University of South Carolina and the Medical University of South Carolina, where she earned her medical degree in 1963.

She said that her desire to be a physician was partly because of her father as well as her own interest in medicine.

"My father was a doctor, and I found that going with him to see patients was more fun that cleaning house," she said in a Manning Times file story from 2006. "My mother thought that I should be a school teacher, and she even paid me to work as a teacher after I graduated from college, but I eventually told her I was going to medical school."

Smith completed her family practice internship at Spartanburg General Hospital, where she worked as an emergency room physician from 1964 to 1966, after which she returned to Clarendon County to operate her own private practice. In 1994, she sold the practice to Clarendon Health System, and her practice became the rural health clinic for Turbeville.

"I sold my practice to the hospital so that I could get some extra help," she said.

Besides her work with the East Clarendon Medical Center, Smith has served with the Board of Trustees of Wofford College, the State Heart Association and the Clarendon County Development Board. She has served as chairman for the Clarendon County Alcohol and Drug Commission, medical director of a local Emergency Medical Services department and as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Family Practice, the American Medical Academy, the South Carolina Medical Association and the Sumter, Clarendon and Lee County medical societies.

She has also served on Turbeville Town Council and has received the Order of the Silver Crescent from the governor of South Carolina.

Schedule appointments at (803) 773-5227.