If you work in the same community for 18 years, eventually you find yourself in the right place at the right time. I’ve been a fortunate witness to five significant moments in the creation of Crawfordsville’s Dr. Mary Ludwig Free Clinic, a stunning example of the good that results when the people of Wabash and its hometown work together for the city they share.
The new clinic, a Volunteers in Medicine (VIM) facility that is serving thousands of uninsured men, women, and children since its opening in August, is made even more essential by Indiana’s rejection of key components of the Affordable Care Act.
The story begins more than 40 years ago with a woman whose middle name is Grace and includes a roll call of Wabash legends like Eric Dean H’61, George Lovell H’59, Hall Peebles H’63, and Lew H’57 and Mary Ann Salter H’57, among many other volunteers. (Read “An Extraordinary Flowering of Selfless Service”)
I missed all but the last 15 years of the story—latter chapters, yet action-packed.
It’s a narrative that the clinic’s executive director, Wabash Professor Emeritus of Biology Bill Doemel, gets nervous hearing others tell. He’s concerned we’ll leave out any number of essential partners in what he accurately calls “an astonishing community project.” And he’s right: The list of contributors—nonprofits, businesses, churches, families, individuals —fills pages.
But to tell the story of many you must start with one, and these five moments at least capture the spirit of what it took to breathe life into this amazing endeavor.
A Template for Service
I was introduced to Volunteers in Medicine—a national organization that promotes and supports free medical clinics across the U.S.—when I traveled to Columbus, IN, in 1997 to write a story about Dr. Sherm Franz ’59 and the VIM Clinic he and local health workers had established. There I met Karen Yarnell, a woman who had been denied insurance by her employer because she was an insulin-dependent diabetic; she’d come to the VIM Clinic
as a last resort.
“Taking free treatment didn’t feel quite right,” she said. “You don’t want to have to take from someone else. But everyone at the clinic was extremely professional and very kind. Not once did I feel embarrassed there.”
That’s where I learned that, after finances, shame is the biggest obstacle to people seeking the medical care they need. Franz’s group had surveyed uninsured workers in Columbus who said that when they received care from a physician’s office or emergency room they “felt looked down upon, like second-class citizens.
“What came through loud and clear was their yearning for dignity and respect,” Franz said. “So we determined providing that was going to be an important component of our facility.” There’s a sign in the lobby of VIM’s Columbus clinic that reads: We welcome those in need to come without fear, and we invite those who serve to come without pride, so that their meeting may bring healing and hope to both. This concept—that providing care brings healing not only to patients, but to doctor and nurse volunteers demoralized by the constraints of our current medical system and a community overwhelmed by the needs of its people —is at the heart of VIM’s mission. It was a philosophy expressed in some way by every volunteer and staff member I met at the clinic; every patient that walked in that door brought healing to the whole community.
But I never imagined a group of volunteers in Crawfordsville would bring VIM’s “culture of caring” here.
The city’s Christian Nursing Service (CNS) was founded in 1968 by Dr. Mary Ludwig and seven other women to pro-vide medical care through volunteers and private contributions for those who could not otherwise afford it. The group had been running a clinic with a volunteer doctor and nurse twice a week in an old Presbyterian Church and were struggling to keep up with demand. By the turn of the 21st century those needs had become overwhelming.
CNS board members were looking for a solution and heard about the VIM Clinic in Columbus. In 2006, Franz and VIM volunteers visited Crawfordsville to talk with medical workers, and CNS board members visited Columbus.
VIM quickly became one of many essential partners in what would become the Mary Ludwig Free Clinic.
And when the new clinic celebrated with an open house last August, Dr. Sherm Franz was one of the first guests to walk in the door.
Bio Prof Turns Clinic Director
I know the clinic’s story because I served a brief but feckless stint on the CNS board six years ago, my sole contribution a naive attempt to get new windows for the Well Baby Clinic. Every time I stopped by the old church where the clinic was housed, Doemel was fixing some problem that had cropped up.
Even then he believed that the uninsured in Crawfordsville deserved the same medical care as all of us, that the city could do better by them than a few freezing-in-the-winter, hot-in-the-summer exam rooms in an old church.
He kept talking about this as I spent precious CNS funds on the windows. He insisted the current facility was
inadequate. I just wanted to put the windows in and go home.
But the tide was turning.
At meetings during my final year on the board I sat at the table with some of the most devoted public health servants in the city. Pat White H’10 had just been inaugurated president of the College, and Wabash First Lady and nurse practitioner Chris White H’07 soon joined the board. The conversations began to focus on determining the needs of the uninsured in the city and envisioning the facility that would meet them.
I thought, Bill’s gonna drive them crazy with this expanded clinic idea. And he might have had they not shared a similar vision, and if Doemel hadn’t been ready to do whatever and bring in whoever was necessary to make it happen. He denies playing such a prominent role, but I watched him bring an even stronger sense of urgency and possibility to a roomful of volunteers who had spent a good portion of their lives caring for people and yearned to do an even better job of it. In the VIM clinic in Columbus they had found a model of how that might happen. Now they had the leadership to follow through on what would become a six-year effort.
A Philosophical Intervention
But first they needed to get local physicians onboard.
Doctors Keith Baird ’56 and John Roberts ’83 were the first Wabash alumni I wrote about when I began editing Wabash Magazine in 1995. After meeting these men I realized that the skill, care, and concern I’d known from the family physicians of my youth were alive and well in Crawfordsville. My favorite quote from that story was Baird’s: “To practice good medicine you’ve got to have personal involvement, and we’re losing that.”
Baird was determined not to. After retiring in 2000, he began seeing patients at the CNS Clinic twice a week, and by the time he retired from that work, they were coming through the door in record numbers. Baird’s departure left a void no one was prepared to fill.
Then at the 2008 Wabash Big Bash Reunion colloquium session in June, Dr. Rick Gunderman ’83 gave a talk
titled “How Philanthropy Can Rescue the Health Professions.” He cited a survey by the American College of Physician Executives that found two-thirds of physicians had experienced emotional burnout and 60 percent of physicians had considered leaving medicine. Gunderman said the solution was a return to what had drawn doctors
to their vocation
“Let physicians do what they care about most,” he insisted. “It’s about the love of our fellow human beings. Generosity and compassion are the remedies to what is ailing modern American medicine.”
I was standing behind Roberts when Gunderman finished, and I asked him what he thought of the talk. He is my family doctor and a friend: I expected an answer tinged with irony. Instead, Roberts looked me in the eye and said, “He reminds me of why I wanted to practice medicine in the first place.” Not a trace of sarcasm, still a bit of reflection in his tone of voice. I wondered what he might do with his reignited passion for his vocation.
Doemel was sitting right behind him and no doubt had some suggestions, but Roberts didn’t need much convincing. He took on some of the new clinic’s most challenging work: recruiting other doctors and healthcare workers to join the effort. Roberts’ embrace of the project was a game changer.
A Student Inspired
I thought I knew most of the story.
Then I photographed Mary Ludwig at the new clinic’s open house celebrations and discovered I didn’t know the half of it.
I’d heard that Ludwig and seven other women had started the city’s CNS, but I didn’t know that her parents were
the children of Italian immigrants, that she’d lost two siblings in infancy as she was growing up during the Great Depression, a time when almost everyone was struggling.
“Little food, lack of medical care, and no jobs available due to the Depression made me very aware of the hardships and pain that my parents underwent, and those memories never left me,” Dr. Ludwig said. Maybe some of those memories were soothed when she began offering free care at the Well Baby Clinic in 1968, a place of healing for more than 40 years.
Doemel praises the eight women on that first board as heroes.
“You think back to those women who first had the vision for healthcare for those who needed it here; they saw the need, knew what they had to do, and just did it.”
So the new clinic is well named. At the open house it took more than half an hour for Dr. Ludwig to get through
a gauntlet of hugs from well-wishers to the Ludwig Family Room where I was waiting to photograph her.
Witnessing all of this that day and working throughout the summer to help make it happen was Wabash intern Rob Luke ’14. Doemel says Luke was far more than just an extra pair of hands.
“He went above and beyond our imagination helping with the clinic’s new Web site, software, and practically anything else that needed doing.”
Luke was even more impressed with the men and women at the clinic—from the volunteers to the folks repurposing what had been a MainSource bank branch into one of the nicest medical facilities in the city.
“No matter how many years of experience they have or how good they are at their jobs, they do not hesitate to ask for help or welcome a new set of eyes,” Luke said. “There’s a sort of humility and camaraderie here that’s lacking
in most businesses these days.”
In 1984, when Wabash President Lew Salter H’57 presented Dr. Ludwig with an honorary degree, he called such camaraderie “expertise freely and lovingly given,” and when he wrote to Ludwig on the occasion of her retirement, he said he wished every Wabash student bound for medical school could spend
at least a day at the CNS Clinic.
Luke hopes to practice medicine in the Navy, then “retire and start a clinic of my own to make the community around me a safer one to live in for everyone regardless of their lot in life.
“The experience here has shown me that there are great people walking among us who do not help others for recognition, but simply to see the smiles on the faces they help.”
Professor Don Baker H’57 wrote the first Wabash mission statement not long after CNS began its work in Crawfords-ville, and he concluded that a Wabash education should teach men to “live humanely in a difficult world.” This new clinic serves those who know firsthand how difficult this world can be and was built by those determined to make it better—in just eight weeks it became a formative chapter of Rob Luke’s Wabash education.
New Beginnings
In the last few minutes of the open house celebration at the new clinic, a tall, older woman walked through the automatic doors, gazed around the lobby of the renovated building, and spoke to several of us standing near the entrance.
She reminded me of Karen Yarnell, the woman I’d written about 15 years earlier when I interviewed Sherm Franz at the Columbus VIM clinic. Karen eventually got her own insurance, but she remained a grateful advocate for VIM.
“I would walk in the door and I’d get hugs from people and they’d ask me how I was doing,” Karen said. “Somebody from Volunteers in Medicine should go on 60 Minutes and tell the whole world how to do this.”
The woman who walked into the Dr. Mary Ludwig Free Clinic that Sunday in August didn’t have such lofty aspirations, but hers were as heartfelt.
“I was a patient at a clinic like this once, but I don’t think I’ll be coming here for that,” she declared. “This time I’m here to volunteer.”