Selwyn Hartley entered the medical profession as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force, but it was his first few hospital shifts back in civilian life that set the course for the rest of his nearly 40-year career.
He quickly found he enjoyed the pace and pressure of being an emergency room physician, treating patients in immediate need.
When he began, in the early 1970s, ER doctors were not yet considered specialists. He became one of the pioneers in professionalizing his branch of medicine, helping to found the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Jacqueline Hartley, his wife of 48 years, said he jokingly referred to his line of work as a 20-minute specialty. “If you don’t get it right in the first 20 minutes, you’re in trouble,” he would say.
He practiced his specialty for 18 years at Clayton General Hospital (now known as Southern Regional Medical Center), for 10 years at the since-closed Parkway Hospital in Lithia Springs, and for 10 years at Newnan Hospital.
Dr. Edwin Davis of Jonesboro, who worked with Hartley in the 1970s and ’80s, rated him of the first rank as an ER doctor — conscientious, thorough, intelligent and empathetic.
“He functioned well under pressure, a necessity in ER,” Davis added.
Another longtime colleague, Dr. Cathleen Tuley of Spring Island, S.C., described him as a careful manager of the Clayton General ER, always thinking of the big picture and ways to improve efficiency.
Dr. Selwyn Thomas Hartley, 72, died of respiratory failure Wednesday at his College Park home. A celebration of his life — plus a proper English wake, as he requested — is tentatively scheduled for mid-May. Parrott Funeral Home and Crematory is in charge of arrangements.
The Hartleys had no children, but he showered attention on a niece and nephew and their children, most recently giving the saber he received as a graduate cadet at North Georgia College to a great-nephew, Shane Hinton, upon the latter’s graduation there.
“Uncle Selwyn was a proud and supportive alumnus of that great Dahlonega institution,” said Hartley’s nephew, retired Lt. Col. Stan Hinton of Lorton, Va. “I believe he drew upon his time there as a foundation for life.”
His wife said Hartley was a confirmed Anglophile. “There was so much about England he loved. We made 15 trips there in all,” she said.
They customarily spent a few days each time in London, she said, then headed to alluring destinations in the countryside. “Selwyn used to say no trip was complete without one visit to a cathedral, two to great houses and 123 to English pubs.”
However, she added, he would concede with a grin that they could probably do without stops at the cathedral and the great houses.
“It wasn’t that he liked to drink a lot or play darts,” she said. “He simply loved the ambience of the pubs.”
The Hartleys also were regulars at the Manchester Arms, an English-style pub in College Park. “Selwyn and Jackie made it their country club,” said its owner, Anna-Kathryn Taylor of Atlanta.
“For a quiet man of few words,” Taylor said, “Selwyn loved word play, etymology and quotations. He collected pages and pages of the latter. I think one of his favorites is an apt description of him: ‘Things of quality have no fear of time.’”
Also surviving is a brother, Jonathan Dale Hartley of Cheyenne, Wyo.
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