BRATTLEBORO — July 3 marked the close of a chapter in the life of a caregiver here whose work continues to touch the lives of so many. Jane Katz Field, a pediatrician at Just So Pediatrics for the past decade, has retired after nearly 40 years in medicine.
She is leaving, she said, to get a better look at public health in the big picture.
As she does, she took some time recently to sit down with The Commons to discuss her career and, as she sees it, the importance of the community in her work.
Katz Field grew up on the East Coast, the daughter of a surgeon. From an early age she was shown that being a doctor was an important path to take in life.
By the time she made her way to Berkeley, Calif., in the 1970s, she was active in the women's health movement, which called for women to “take back control of their bodies.” She worked at a women's health clinic dedicated to that philosophy.
It was through this clinic that Katz Field became interested in getting people involved with their health care and in challenging what she saw as an overtly paternalistic health care system.
Through this experience, and given her background and strong desire to help people, Katz Field moved back to New Jersey and attended medical school at Rutgers University. There, she became involved with the state chapter of the Medical Community for Human Rights, and rose to become its chair. The committee encouraged medical students to take a role in political issues surrounding health care.
One of its main services was providing medical screenings to prisoners.
On graduation in 1976, Katz Field worked in Camden, N.J. She notes that, though it once was prosperous industrial city (it's just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia), Camden now suffers from high unemployment, high crime rates, and many other ills related to its status as one of the poorest cities in America.
There, she treated patients dealing with drug addiction in children and other health issues associated with widespread poverty.
In 2004 she moved to Vermont, settling into a beautiful house in rural Putney. She began working at Just So Pediatrics - named for the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling.
A fixture here ever since, she's cared for uncounted local children and their families. This country doctor describes as among her greatest challenges seeing how personal tragedies ripple through a community and can affect an entire town.
On moving here, she found that many families struggled with drugs, poverty-related illnesses, and a high number of untreated mental illnesses.
Indeed, she said, rural poverty is a big problem that many of us tend not to see, despite it being part of our lives and those of our neighbors.
“Affordable housing, access to health care, mental health problems that go untreated - all these things affect family functions. One thing that is marvelous is that there are a lot of people dedicated to these problems, that work collaboratively and are dedicated to the real problems,” she said.
Despite the difficulties, Dr. Katz Field has remained positive and strong. For her, small hurdles must be overcome in helping others and making lives better for families.
“The most tender moments are seeing the interchanges when the family respects each other,” she said. “I look back on some families and what an honor it was to be involved in that dynamic.”
Whether giving young patients books to read as part of the Reach Out and Read program, or giving teenagers a much-needed ear to listen to their problems, her dedication to families and the respect of families she holds is clearly a major driving force in her work.
She added that after years of working intimately with kids' health, she now wants to step back and “look at the larger picture, and that is what I want to do with the experience I have gained.”
It is clear that larger-scale public health issues are a longtime passion of hers.
As a medical student and with the New Jersey Department of Health, while working at the Mount Sinai Occupational and Environmental Medicine program, she studied the effects of lead poisoning, which expanded into interest in other environmental toxins and their effect on reproduction.
In Vermont, she served for several years on the board of the Windham Child Care Association. As someone who has long been fascinated by complex medical and social ills, she served for many years on Brattleboro Memorial Hospital's Clinical Ethics Committee.
She also said she's interested in the rise in the use of electronic medical records, touted by advocates as a benefit to efficiency, but which in her view misses a key point about the nature of the medical practice.
“So much of healing is done through interaction,” she said. Digital, sharable medical records can strip simple human interaction out of the equation, so a vital connection is missing.
“It is hard to put people's personal experiences into boxes and yes-or-no questions. [Digital records were] formulated for billing, so they can track charges, but it wasn't meant to help the medical encounter,” she said.
Now that she's shifting her focus to public health issues, Dr. Katz Field said she going to greatly miss being involved in her patients' lives on the personal scale.
“It is very exciting to be in contact with so many different people who have different thoughts of things, and sharing those,” she said.