HISTORY:

Our Department’s history is rich and diverse. Before our first Chair, Dr. Robert Smith, there was our founding visionary, Dr. Mary Allot Agna, a graduate of UC College of Medicine and former faculty member. She was instrumental in establishing the UC Department of Family and Community Medicine and its residency program.

After completing her residency at Cincinnati General Hospital, Dr. Agna and her husband joined the US Public Health Service and served in Burma (now Myanmar). Her work in Southeast Asia focused on women and children. She set up community-based inoculation centers with local health advocates in villages across the countryside.

The family returned to the US in 1959 where Mary worked as a physician at the Yellow Springs Clinic and as a research assistant in anthropology. Her interests in community and public health then led her to serve as the Clark County Health Commissioner. After that, Dr. Mary Agna served as the Greene County Health Commissioner where she was responsible for instituting many progressive community health practice, such as establishing the first home care program to send nurses and physical therapists into Greene County residences.

Dr. Agna’s vision in creating a Department of Family and Community Medicine included training physicians to practice in community settings as part of our nation’s response to ensuring health care access for our ever increasing underserved individuals and families. in 1974 Dr. Mary Agna secured and administered a $600,000 U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) grant, one of the first of its kind, enabling fourth year medical students to experience and learn primary care in the community offices of local family physicians, internists and pediatricians. She became Assistant Dean in the College of Medicine and an Associate Professor (1974-75) in the new Department of Family Practice, the original name of our current UC Department of Family and Community Medicine.

Dr. Mary Agna served as Acting Chair of our department from October 1974 until June 1975 when Robert Smith, MD, whom she helped recruit, became permanent chair. Dr. Smith noted in 2015 that ’Dr. Agna played a critical role in creating the Department of Family Practice and its residency program at a time when family medicine departments were first beginning to be formed across the country.”

Excerpts from the Winter/Spring 2024 edition of the UC Department of Family and Community Medicine Newsletter, written by Barbara Tobias, MD. Read the full story at:

Pictured (in no particular order): Clarke Baxter, Yolanda Duralde, Guy Mitchell Edmondson, Roy Finley, Frank Perrino, Lance Potocki, Douglas Puterbaugh, Anne Reddy, Audrey Spencer, David Swan, Robertson Ward

1984

The Osher Center for Integrative Health is one of our department's divisions taking steps toward the future of medicine.

The Division of Integrative Health was founded under the Department of Family and Community Medicine back in 2013 and has grown into the diverse and motivated group pictured below, being renamed the Osher Center for Integrative Health once invited to join the Osher Collaborative in 2022. This division strives to transform the modern healthcare system from a disease-care system to a well-care system.

We are proud of this evolving division and their work to empower people to take charge of their health and well-being by actively practicing whole health within their communities.

To learn more about the Osher Center, please visit: https://med.uc.edu/institutes/integrative/about/vision

UC Family Medicine Class of

1980s

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