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Award: Physician Award honors physicians whose performance is considered exemplary by patients and peers.Name: Dr. J. Mack WorthingtonAccomplishments: An engineer turned physician, Worthington has been a leading physician, educator and administrator who over a half century career built the University of Tennessee College of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine residency program at Erlanger hospital.
Fifty years ago this summer, J. Mack Worthington made a decision that would change his life.
A engineer working at a General Dynamics plant in Ft. Worth, Texas - a place with parking lots bigger than his father's tobacco farm back in North Carolina - Worthington felt pulled in a new direction. After some soul-searching and fact-finding, the young engineer decided to return to college to study medicine.
Worthington, now 74, said it's one of many decisions he has made in the last 50 years that, taken together, appear to be part of a providential plan that lifted him from rural North Carolina to become a physician, educator and administrator.
Today, Worthington is chairman of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine's Department of Family Medicine residency program at Erlanger hospital. Worthington, whose first office at Erlanger was a converted closet, built the program from scratch.
Over the last 20 years, the program has launched the careers of more than 100 family physicians, and, by extension, affected the lives of tens of thousands of patients. By helping to train family doctors, the backbone of American medicine, Worthington is reinforcing his own affection for serving as a primary-care physician. He says that the United States continues to have a shortage of family physicians, who trail medical specialists in pay and prestige. Yet, family medicine has its special rewards, Worthington said.
"I like people, and the broad aspects of family medicine," Worthington said. "I enjoy the continuity of seeing patients over time."
Even with his teaching and administrative responsibilities, Worthington continues to see patients and do hospital rounds. Stephen Adams, a Chattanooga physician who considers Worthington his mentor, remembers being scolded once for not scheduling him for a full slate of rounds.
"He puts others before himself," Adams said. "I was scheduled to be on call one Christmas. He called and said: 'You don't need to work. You have young kids. I'll do your shift.'"
Worthington's rise to become one of Chattanooga's top docs, began from humble beginnings. He and his three siblings grew up working on a family farm in North Carolina, and all four eventually graduated from college. Worthington's hometown, Winterville, N.C., had a population of about 400 and just one stoplight. There were 42 students in his graduating class at Winterville High School, he recalled.
He studied math at East Carolina University in the early 1960s and later earned a master's degree in math from North Carolina State University. After his stint as an engineer, he attended medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
After a few years in private practice, Worthington began his career as a medical educator at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. He was chairman of the hospital's Department of Family Practice starting in 1989, before moving to Erlanger in 1995.
Worthington said that working with family practice interns in their 20s and 30s helps keep him young. He told a story of attending a brass band concert recently and remarking at "all the old people" in the audience. He later learned that most of them were baby boomers, who are, by definition, younger than him.
For a time, Worthington and two of his children, Josh, a general surgeon practicing in Cleveland, Tenn., and Julie, an internal medicine resident in Harrisburg, Pa., were all working at Erlanger simultaneously, which resulted in some confusion when pages were issued for "Dr. Worthington." (Worthington's other daughter, Christy Darr, is an interior designer in Memphis.) Worthington said his children, not his work, may ultimately be his legacy.
Still, he has hopes that the family medicine residency program at Erlanger will continue to grow and flourish, he said. He has dreams of adding a fellowship in sports medicine some day.
His best advice to young docs is to "listen to what your patients tell you," and to "try to get to know them."
"Just being available is very important," he said.