��«����Ƶ

By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director

Maiko Estrada (pictured left) and Jessie Parchman (pictured right) have become the 27th, and 28th scholars of Honors Northeast to have published work in a regional journal since 2010. This past week, the forty-first volume of the journal, Touchstone, published by the Texas State Historical Association, was released.  Estrada, and Parchman, both winners of upper-division State of Texas Caldwell Awards in 2022, both made the cut for this release. Estrada’s essay is on the much-televised Texas physician of the 1980s, Dr. Red Duke. Parchman’s essay is about the sudden surge in Texas medicine during the 1970s.

A state-wide board of university and community-college professors, determines which essays can appear in Touchstone. One can read these essays on the website of Honors Northeast here. 

“Sudden Surge: From Past-Aid to Future-Aid Medicine in the Lone Star State,” makes the point that the 1970s marked a turning point in the Lone Star State’s commitment and outlook toward medicine. The Texas Medical Center in Houston developed world-wide prestige, nurses flooded into the medical care profession, and patients began to view hospitals such as M.D. Anderson, and Houston Methodist as ongoing centers of innovation, of new and improved cures.”

“The Well-Being Activist: Dr. Red Duke” argues that “Dr. Red Duke” made an ideal interface between medicine and the public. Unlike latter-day health specialists who rose up during the days of COVID-19, Red Duke, from Ennis, Texas, radiated hope and pre-emptive health care.  With his cowboy twang and outdoor scenes modeling a healthy life, Duke was a health leader who merits successors in the highly polarized climate of medicine today.

Both Parchman, and Estrada attended Mount Pleasant High School, and both are considering medical school as an option for their future.  Parchman is currently matriculating at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas, a Liberal Arts college, and the oldest independent institution of higher learning in Arkansas.  Estrada is attending Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches.  

As a scholar of Honors Northeast at ��«����Ƶ, Parchman was simultaneously the first high school senior of our region to

present work at a professional association, the East Texas Historical Association, in 2021.  Estrada was ��«����Ƶ’s fourteenth Cypress Bank Scholar, and also a contributor to ��«����Ƶ’s award winning film on Carroll Shelby. 

Honors Director, Dr. Andrew P. Yox, notes: “Estrada and Parchman not only succeeded while at ��«����Ƶ as top community-college students. Because they had over 60 undergraduate hours by December of 2022, they ranked second and third in the university division of the Caldwell Contest.  Their interests in health also augments a strong concentration of top student works here at ��«����Ƶ that we have been compiling in medicine in recent years.”