Van Zee seemed to have all the time in the world for his patients, never mind that he worked sixteen-hour days, rising at four in the morning to type up his patient notes from the previous day’s visits. A doctor who’d trained in Philadelphia recalled working with Van Zee during medical school and residency: “We’d rotate in and out of these big medical centers, and when we’d get back to school, it would occur to us, ‘The best doctor in America is actually out in Lee County, Virginia,’” he told me.
