He was back in Iowa, fresh out of residency and a two-year stint as a U.S. Army pathologist, in search of a city-county hospital to start his career practicing medicine on the underserved.
Ronald M. Rhatigan, M.D., professor in the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville, found just such a facility in 1967 at Duval Medical Center, forerunner to what’s now Shands Jacksonville.
He’s still here, through the ups and downs and a seven-year “retirement” into a private practice.
Now Rhatigan, 75, is writing a personal history of the place from 1967 until 1988, shortly after the Jacksonville campus came under the UF umbrella and he ended his two-year stint as acting associate dean.
Rhatigan, now medical director of autopsy and dermatopathology, played a key role in the growth of the institution, serving as medical director for 16 years from 1972 until the official alliance with UF.
“I realized there were so few people around that could do it, so I’d better get it down while I can still remember it,” Rhatigan said.
For those who know what it is today – a campus with a footprint covering 10 city blocks and 3.5 million square feet – it’s tough to imagine Rhatigan was just the 12th full-time faculty member when he arrived more than four decades ago.
A new hospital was on the way – and desperately needed.
Rhatigan remembers the first floor of the outpatient clinic having a dungeon feel to it. The wards were large, open rooms with beds stacked together like in old war movies.
Rhatigan kept some notes and a pseudo journal over the years and has been trying to get on paper the personalities and power struggles as the campus evolved into an established teaching hospital.
So far he’s drafted the first couple of years and has some pieces written on the creation of various departments but has to fit them in chronologically.
The stories are told first-person, through Rhatigan’s eyes as he saw them unfold.
Others could have a different take on certain events, he acknowledges, but there is an advantage to being one of the only guys left. “There aren’t very many people around who will be able to disagree with it,” Rhatigan joked.
Early on, every department had a chair from the faculty and a co-chair who practiced in the community. Faculty felt they needed someone in charge of the full-time staff and created the medical director position to be associate director for medical affairs at the hospital, head a billing and collection fund and lead the faculty.
Rhatigan was the only person to ever hold the job, which became the dean’s position with the UF merger.
Rhatigan said he’s proud of the evolution of the college – there were 12 full-time faculty when he started in the position and 130 when he left the interim dean role in 1988. Now, there are close to 400.
It’s a place that Rhatigan says “is always in a state of becoming, never in a state of being.
“I just hope a new generation of leaders can keep us becoming,” Rhatigan said. “I don’t want to ever feel like this is our final state.”