Dr. Dorothea Glass

Dr. Dorothea Glass is a twice-retired physician in her mid-70s serving at the Volunteers in Medicine Clinic, where she provides free care to working-poor patients in Stuart, Florida.

Photo: Thomas Roma

I first retired in 1982, in my early 60s. I had very bad arthritis, and was holding down three jobs. It had just gotten to the point where I couldn't do it all. So I retired and we came down here. But I didn't retire completely. I had both of my hips replaced. And then a friend of mine at the Veterans Administration in Washington said, 'Come to the Miami VA because we want to start a residency training program in physical medicine and rehabilitation there.' And I love teaching, love being with young people, so I said 'Okay.'

For 4 years I commuted to Miami every day. Then I became President of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine, which took about four hours a day of my time. So I worked at the VA and was on the faculty at University of Miami for close to 10 years. Then my husband and I both decided to retire a second time.

But I missed medicine. It is the most interesting thing I've ever done. I love the hospital and the interaction between people there. And I love physical medicine and rehabilitation because it involves such teamwork. It is truly holistic medicine. You know your patients. You follow them almost for the rest of their lives, especially if they are seriously impaired.

When I retired that second time, I joined the Treasure Coast Council for Planned Parenthood and the League of Women Voters, the AAUW, all those things. We have a little boat we go out on, and I love my garden. I am lucky enough to be close to my daughters and I see my grandchildren. It is really a very pleasant life, but there was something missing. Then this great doctor at Martin Memorial [the main hospital in Stuart], Fred Carter, came up with the idea for the clinic and got the legislature to pass an act that more or less protects us from malpractice issues. He just did fantastic work, and it has been wonderful volunteering there.

I see patients who fall into my specialty. And we don't have a neurologist, so I do gross neurological evaluations. I also do a lot of, for lack of a better word, psychotherapy, because many of my patients are pain patients. As we get older, we all have aches and pains. But these are people, many of them, who simply have not been able to cope with life. And life is tough, especially for people with such marginal incomes. They are just overwhelmed. And the pain oftentimes becomes an explanation for it all.

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I had some wonderful mentors, and they helped me to understand that. They also taught me that you practiced the best medicine you could, regardless of a person's ability to pay. You treated everyone as though it was yourself or your child. And they taught me that when a disaster occurs to somebody – a terrible accident – you can't just treat the fact that a spine got cut. There are ripples. There's a person and then there's a family, and then there's a community. You have got to take all of those into account. We psychiatrists don't know as much as a neurologist about neurology, or as much as the urologists about what they do, but we know enough about all of these things to put them together and be an advocate for the patient.

At the clinic I get a lot of the patients that nobody else knows what to do with. A lot of them come in with lung disease, or heart disease, or terrible wounds that won't heal, diabetes out of control. But mostly they are people who have used up all their resources, emotional and financial. Some of them are living in cars.

First of all, I try to tell them that someone really cares to listen to them, because they have worn out their families, worn out their friends. You need to make them know, 'You are still an important person to listen to.' One woman I am treating, we know that her disability is hysterical because the symptoms are so bizarre. But she believes in her symptoms, and we are treating them. And she is getting better! We are giving her physical therapy exercises to do. We're giving her psychological support, really a kind of mentoring. And her symptoms are starting to disappear. She is a nice person. I love her. She is just a person who has been hit too hard. And what is any person's breaking point? It's how strong you are, and some people are stronger than others.

At the clinic, there are also a lot of people who are lost between the cracks. And because we are all in there together – the volunteers – Diane [the clinic director], the nurses who run the clinic and who are very skilled – we make fewer cracks. Or we rescue some of these people from the cracks.

We have the luxury of practicing medicine the way we think it should be practiced – without having to worry about the money side. I believe it is very high quality medicine. When I was working for money I was so over-committed. I don't think that I could do as good a job then as I can do now. What's more, everyone at the clinic is here because they want to be here, and they aren't harried. They are people who loved what they did and like it even more without all the pressures they had.

There are other things we get out of it as well. It's intellectually stimulating. Every patient is a puzzle. They are coming to you because they have problems that they haven't been able to solve otherwise. It keeps you on your toes. I read my journals because I need to know what's going on. I'm going to prevent Alzheimer's in myself by doing all this reading [laughs]. And I just love the interaction, between not only the patient and the doctor but among all of us treating patients.

And I guess I was brought up to believe that it is important that you contribute. Maybe contribute is too arrogant a word. You participate in what makes the world good. So many of us contribute to what makes the world bad. And, you know, once we are at this stage, there is a joy in seeing what you know not only being used, but being used to help others.

And, as I was saying, we are also a family for each other. Diane [the clinic director] has been wonderful to me. She comes down to see my husband in the hospital. She has allowed me to consult with her. She is going to help us set up when we go back home. I am sure she would do that for anyone. I think the other people in the clinic would do it for me, too.

I know that I can't change everything as one person, but I can do what I can do. And hopefully that little thing will make a difference to somebody besides me, because it does make me feel good. And I think the thing about the clinic is you get a lot of encouragement and accolades for something that you just love to do. It's no sacrifice; it's a benefit. I would be devastated if it was taken away from me.

Dr. Dorothea Glass is a twice-retired physician in her mid-70s serving at the Volunteers in Medicine Clinic in Stuart, Fla. Born in New York, she comes from a family of women physicians. (Both her mother and aunt became obstetricians in post-World War I Manhattan.) The mother of four children, she decided to specialize in physical and rehabilitation medicine and become a physiatrist. After a distinguished career as a Department Chair at Temple University Medical School, Medical Director at Moss Rehabilitation Center, and Head of Service at Albert Einstein Hospital, all in Philadelphia, she "retired" to Florida where she promptly became a professor at University of Miami Medical School and assumed new professional responsibilities. The centerpiece of her second retirement is volunteering to provide free care to working-poor patients in Stuart, a small town just north of Palm Beach. Her husband of more than 50 years, Bob Glass, died a week after this interview from complications related to his diabetes.