Upon this Rock

Photography by James Moore

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 tick-borne 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.”