Interest in health, others leads to Volunteers in Medicine service

Dr. Robert Bowers still remembers the wonder he felt the first time he watched a physician at work.

Bowers was about 6 years old, and his father had contracted tuberculosis. Bowers watched the doctor take an X-ray of his father’s chest, examine it, then translate the mysterious image into an explanation of the disease in the father’s lungs.

“That doctor was able to go into a room, and read that thing, and tell my father what he had inside of him,” says Bowers. “He could see it, and

help fix it. That just fascinated me.”

Bowers’ father recovered from the illness, but the interaction with that physician stuck with Bowers over the years. The two-fold ability to understand problems others couldn’t see, and to take action to help fix such problems: This seemed like a powerful responsibility. And that deep sense of duty remains at the heart of his work as medical director for Volunteers in Medicine Chattanooga Inc., a faith-based nonprofit that provides primary care to people in the region without access to health insurance.

“You see another human being’s need, and you can help meet that need,” says Bowers, now 86. “You do something about it.”

After a long career as an ear, nose and throat physician and surgeon, Bowers has spent his “retirement” volunteering as VIM’s medical director since the program’s origins in 2004. The clinic — which is run on private donations and the work of 15 volunteer physicians including Bowers — logs about 5,000 patient visits a year.

As founder and past president of the Medical Foundation of Chattanooga, Bowers helped start Project Access — another local program that connects the uninsured to specialty care.