“An Extraordinary Flowering of Selfless Service.” That’s how President Lew Salter described the work of Dr. Mary Ludwig and the Christian Nursing Service when awarding her an honorary degree at Wabash in 1984. Praising her “ministry in medicine,” Salter called the pediatrician “an intimate friend of Wabash who, in this extraordinary enterprise of service, exemplifies the values we most deeply cherish for our students.” Dr. Ludwig held Wabash in high regard, as well. “Wabash was one of the groups that started us on our way and that I asked for help at various times: people like Eric Professor Eric Dean Dean, Hall Peebles, Lew and Mary Ann Salter, Vic Powell, George Lovell, and on and on,” Dr. Ludwig said during a ribboncutting for the new clinic in June. “I could name enough names from Wabash to fill a book. Absolutely wonderful people.” 2009 Indiana School Nurse of the Year Chris Amidon joined those “wonderful people” in the early 1990s, served for years as the clinic’s nurse manager, volunteered for several stints as CNS president, and is secretary of the new clinic’s board. She recalls one of her first CNS meetings, when board members Dorothy Riley and Mary Ann Salter picked her up, even though she lived only a few blocks from the church where the board was meeting. “I could have walked, but they insisted—maybe they felt protective, as I was by far the youngest on the board then. But they drove up in Dorothy’s big Town Car and I felt like I was getting to the meeting in style!” With CNS’s services now safely transferred to the new clinic, CNS itself has been dissolved. Amidon presided over the final meeting. “This was what we were working toward all these years; we had to have something new to do this work in today’s environment,” she says. “But it was still a bittersweet moment. “There is so much history—thousands of people over the years taking care of people in their own community, not waiting for the government or someone else to do it. They did whatever was needed, whether it was delivering a meal or holding a baby while the parent filled out the forms.” Amidon remembers how Wabash Treasurer Don Sperry ’59, serving as CNS treasurer, would pay the organization’s bills in person. When Professor Vic Powell H’55 was president, he’d get a check from the local liquor store. “Vic would say, ‘It’s just amazing who helps us,’” Amidon recalls. “It was a pretty amazing organization, too. Supported by donations, mostly unsolicited, with no federal or state funding. When we told people that, they couldn’t believe it.”
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.