Celebrating Doctors’ Day 2023: Past Ozarks Healthcare Physicians reflect on Health System’s Legacy

Doctors’ Day is an annual observance focused on appreciating physicians who help save lives everywhere, along with their contributions to the field of medicine. This Doctors’ Day, Ozarks Healthcare is honored to share the perspectives of Dr. Marvin Fowler and Dr. Stephen and Betty Coats, who all were healthcare pioneers at the health system as its first days as a small community health hospital. While the health system has experienced a great amount of change over the years, Fowler and the Coats share how the health system’s roots have not changed.

(Please note: The following was originally shared in Ozarks Healthcare’s summer 2022 edition of “Insight” magazine published by Wheelhouse Publishing. Stories were written by Dwain Hebda and photography was conducted by James Moore.)

Upon this Rock – Dr. Marvin Fowler, 95, has seen It All in West Plains

Into the soaring entrance of Ozarks Healthcare’s new expansion walks Dr. Marvin Fowler. He looks around at the gleaming walls and sparkling glass, then glances down the hallways as workers put the finishing touches on the massive expansion.

It’s a lot to take in, especially for someone who remembers being there at the beginning, walking into the original hospital for the first time, a structure minuscule by comparison but not feeling that way at the time.

“I remember having a lot of pride when I walked into the hospital the first time. It seemed so new and clean, and we had a nice staff of people,” Fowler said, comfortably settled into one of the bright, airy conference rooms on the first floor.

“The hospital originally had a little emergency room, and it had one psychiatric room that had a lock on the door. One other private room for infectious diseases, contagion. That was the extent of the private rooms. The rest of them were two beds to a room and one four-bed suite — 50 beds.

Fowler is something of a living archive at Ozarks Healthcare, one of the originals who took medicine out of cramped downtown quarters and brought it into the modern confines of a new hospital. That 50-bed structure cast the mold for all the things that would follow in West Plains, providing a spark for the health system’s current status as a regional medical draw and growing it into the biggest employer in the region.

And at the center of it then was Marvin Fowler – Arkansan by birth, Missourian by choice.

“I always wanted to go into medicine,” he said. “My father, T.P., was a family doctor in Harrison, Arkansas, where I grew up. My brother Ross, who was 17 years older than me, was a family doctor there. And my Uncle Jim Fowler was a doctor there. As I grew, I was called ‘Little Doc.’

“My dad was 51 when I was born, and my mother was 46. Back in the late ’20s, during the Depression and all that, Dad wanted to get me educated because he had a feeling he wasn’t going to live to be old. In those days, you were old if you were 70. So, he started pushing me through school. I started college at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville at 16 and then graduated from the University of Arkansas School of Medicine when I was 23.”

Following a year’s internship and two years in the U.S. Army — 15 months of it in Korea — Fowler did a year of residency in Louisiana and then set his sights toward home. He’d get close.

“I wanted to come back to the Ozarks but Harrison had plenty of doctors, so I looked across Missouri and Northwest Arkansas which, of course, was booming and had plenty of doctors. I settled on West Plains,” he said. “When I came here in ’54, there were four doctors. I was number five.”

Fowler set up a general practice and settled into the life of a small-town physician. Like all doctors in West Plains at the time, Fowler treated patients through the downtown Christa Hogan Hospital while city leaders dreamed of a more modern healthcare facility.

“It was a two-story brick building on East Main, originally a girls’ school,” he said. “Most of the babies at that time were delivered there. And they gave me staff privileges there, too, of course. But so much of our healthcare that was of any seriousness went to Springfield. We didn’t have ambulances then; the funeral home would use the hearse to deliver critically ill people to Springfield.”

Also in that era, many advancements in medicine were just around the corner, but they might as well have been on the moon in day-to-day rural Missouri.

“We had quite a bit of communicable diseases,” Fowler said. “A long time ago, we didn’t have antibiotics; we had sulfa drugs which were about the best thing we could do for impactions. But there was quite a bit of pneumonia in the winter season.  And we had tularemia, which is a tickborne disease. Had a lot of tonsillitis, and we used some sulfa drugs for that. When I came in ’54, I was getting to use penicillin shots, but that was just coming out and it was the extent of the antibiotics.

“We treated so many things then that you don’t see now. We had polio; the polio vaccine was just coming in during the mid to late ’50s, and I recall we were very eager to get all the kids vaccinated for polio.”

The construction of the new hospital was a landmark achievement for West Plains, one upon which Ozarks Healthcare continues to build its reputation. Fowler liked what he saw then, and now at 95, he likes what he sees today and knows what it means for the generations to come in the town he long ago adopted as his own.

“It makes me feel proud. Oh, proud,” he said. “I’ve always loved this community. I enjoy interacting with the people in the community. I’ve said several times that I’ve never seen a board that I served on that I didn’t enjoy because that’s where you have community leaders.

“The progression of the hospital through the years has just been amazing. The present administration has done such a good job of bringing in so many specialists. And the growth in the hospital seems like every decade we have another expansion. And this last one was just magnificent. They’ve really done such a wonderful job.”

Coats of Many Colors – Local Couple Spends Personal, Professional Lives Serving Others

Dr. Stephen and Betty Coats cracked the code on life’s meaning long ago, spending their adult lives serving others both professionally and personally.

Both came from small towns where the ethos of hard work and looking out for one’s neighbor were instilled early. Both went into healthcare — he as a physician, she as a nurse — in the belief the highest calling was to ease another’s suffering. And both were tireless in their community service in support of their adopted hometown and those less fortunate than themselves.

Neither of them likes to take much credit for all of that, preferring instead to be the other’s best and most steadfast cheerleader.

“My wife wears many hats,” Stephen said. “She’s an excellent cook. She’s a great mother. She’s raised our children, and I can’t take much credit for that. I can’t say too many good things about my wife.”

“I want to add that he was a terrific father and took care of his responsibilities,” Betty countered. “We had six children to raise and educate. I was only able to juggle family and a career because God gave me a lot of patience, and I had a lot of support from my husband.”

Stephen arrived in Missouri from his native Ohio and attended medical school at Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine. Betty, who grew up in Troy, Missouri, completed her nurses training at Kirksville State Teachers College, now Truman University. The two were married, and after Stephen finished his residency, they made a beeline for West Plains, setting down roots that have held them resolute in good times and bad.

“When I came here, there were only about six physicians that were pretty much standard in the hospital,” Stephen said. “Now, I don’t know what the number is today, but it’s much, much greater. Maybe closer to 100. When I came here, it [Ozarks Healthcare] was about a 40-bed hospital, a glorified nursing home, really. And now it’s a major medical center for the region. They’re bringing people in from all over the country to work here, specialists and nurses. It’s amazing how much this place has grown.”

While admitting he wasn’t wired to sit on committees, Stephen lent his leadership and guidance to that growth, serving several such bodies in his career.

“Every hospital has to have multiple committees, and I served on about all of them at one time or another,” he said. “Committees were not my thing, however. They took up a lot of time, and with a busy office and busy surgery schedule and emergencies in the ER, committees were kind of a thorn in my side, frankly.”

Instead, the couple preferred devoting what scant spare time there was to making a more immediate and tangible impact on others.

“We have been on many mission trips through our church,” said Betty, an RN by training. “We’ve been to Guatemala, we’ve been to Jamaica three times, we’ve been to Mexico and Haiti. All of them were very interesting clinics. We took care of thousands of patients.”

Back home, they were equally passionate about volunteering in various capacities.

“We’ve been volunteering with Whetstone Boys Ranch now for 10 years,” Stephen said. “It’s a religious ranch designed to turn young boys around. Now, we’re not talking about hardened criminals here; we’re talking about anger management, family problems, they don’t get along with their parents, they don’t do well in school. We try to teach them some of the basics of gardening. That’s been very satisfying. The Boy Scouts has been very satisfying as well. I was a High Adventure program manager for quite a few years. We took the Boy Scouts all throughout the United States and Canada. Those were always great adventures.”

Betty and Stephen, now 79 and 82 respectively, today live the life of retirees, tending fruit trees on their acreage and reveling in their children and grandchildren.

The hospital they served is flourishing, and the town they love is better for their being here — especially after they spearheaded the effort to get a full-time fire department established. It’s all gone so fast, yet every day brings the same measure of joy.

“My biggest pride is all the patients I’ve taken care of who have done well,” Stephen said. “I have people come up to me who show me their scars. We were donating our time to give COVID shots a while back and a woman comes up to me, pulls up her blouse and shows me this big scar from her gall bladder surgery I did back in the early ’70s. She said, ‘You remember that?’ I said, ‘No, not really.’”

They share a laugh, then Betty gets the last word.

“I’ve been very proud of this community and our hospital,” she said. “The hospital has always been very friendly and knowledgeable and devoted extra pride in the care they give their patients. West Plains is a phenomenal place to live with all the work that’s been done in our community by our boards, our teaching staff, all those who volunteer and administer to our citizens here. It gives you such a wonderful feeling to see all that. When people ask us where we’re from, we’re proud to say, ‘We’re from West Plains.’”

Ozarks Healthcare is a system of care encompassing primary care and specialty clinics, along with complete rehabilitation, behavioral healthcare, and home health services. While the 114-bed acute care hospital cares for more than 5,400 admissions, the entire health system has more than 364,000 patient visits annually in South Central Missouri and Northern Arkansas. For more information about Ozarks Healthcare, visit www.OzarksHealthcare.com.

This Doctors’ Day, Ozarks Healthcare is honored to share the perspectives of Dr. Marvin Fowler (right) and Dr. Stephen (left) and Betty Coats (center), who all were healthcare pioneers at the health system as its first days as a small community health hospital.