This piece, “Fritzi Engelstein Changed My Life”, appeared on page 22 of the Winter 2023 issue of Chicago Life Magazine.
The free clinic movement, including Fritzi Engelstein Free People’s Health Center in Chicago, where Marc volunteered as a medical student, changed lives, especially of the people who worked there. Thank you to Mary Driscoll, who supplied some history as well as the image. And one random note about the online version, the article on the facing page is by Marc’s first cousin, Cory Franklin.
It can be viewed using this link: Chicago Life Magazine - Fritzi Engelstein Changed My Life
--
I never met Fritzi Engelstein, a generous parishioner who was instrumental in getting a free clinic at Church of the Holy Covenant in Lincoln Park off the ground. She didn’t live to see her name on the sign for Fritzi Engelstein Free People’s Health Center when it opened in 1969.
The Center ran until 1975 on donations and volunteers. I was one of a number of medical and nursing students who over the years gave our time, alongside nurses, doctors, lab techs and plenty of lay people from the community, all of us serving however we could.
Starting in 1971, as a second year medical student, I helped with intake, interviewing people who had sought care at the clinic, then starting them on a journey to see the nurse, doctor or laboratory. These professionals guided me.
More important were the lessons I learned from lay colleagues. Called patient advocates, they escorted Fritzi’s clients as they wended their way through our little system and out into the larger world, advocating for them all the way. Being from the same neighborhoods as the individuals and families whom the clinic served, the patient advocates understood intrinsically the challenges folks such as they have always faced in this country. Getting medical care was and still is a major one of those challenges.
There was so much to imbibe in medical school: gallons and gallons of information delivered through a fire hose; endless facts for the brain to categorize, file and prepare to recite on demand to a resident or attending physician. In the course of the first two years of medical training we never touched a homo sapiens, except dead ones in cadaver lab in first year and live ones a bit in second year when we were taught how to do a physical exam. As I progressed from sophomore to senior student I did gain some rudimentary knowledge of medical science. But school was devoid of opportunities to feed my soul. Fritzi Engelstein gave me a reason to keep plugging away toward becoming a doctor.
It was the things I experienced alongside my patient advocate colleagues that really affected my ability to serve. Starting on day one at Fritzi I worked with actual living human beings. Besides some practical medical stuff, I learned invaluable lessons about the lives of people outside the privileged circles I’d been raised in. In spite of my dearth of actual medical knowledge and experience, I even helped some folks a little.
The Fritzi patient advocates brought home to me the importance of really knowing the people of the community you’re serving. That lesson applied just as well to me, a Chicago native, regarding patients at my first post-training job, as a general practitioner with the National Health Service Corps in Yuma, an eastern Colorado prairie town of 2000. These rural folks were at least as different from me as the people I’d encountered at Fritzi Engelstein clinic. I subscribed to Colorado Farm and Ranch magazine so I could converse with a little more knowledge of this new world I shared with my patients and neighbors.
In its heyday the Chicago free clinic movement included facilities affiliated with the Black Panthers, women’s groups, and Latinx and white gangs turned political. (Fritzi Engelstein was run by Rising Up Angry, an organization of white working class young people.) These clinics grew in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War, feminist and civil rights movements of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, in political turf that had been freshly turned by the riots that marked the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
For a while it looked like the free clinic movement was giving the Chicago Board of Health a run for its money, confronting the establishment at every turn about their failure to meet the health needs of the people. Eventually the reigning pols figured out that rather than try to shut the clinics down and give the community reasons to rally and demonstrate, they ought to just leave them alone. The Board did eventually back off and the movement did eventually end. But boy did those free clinics leave a mark on so many of us who worked in them and in that way, a mark on the world.
Here’s a great story. In 1988, pursuant of my job as acting medical director of the Weld County Health Department, the largely rural Colorado county where I spent most of my career, I joined the American Public Health Association and attended their big annual convention, held in Chicago that year. I’m at an event dinner at Manny’s Delicatessen, carrying my tray from the buffet and looking for a place to sit. Someone calls my name. She and another woman at her table recognize me from fifteen years earlier when I was a medical student patient screener at Fritzi and they were lay patient advocates. These women were the first in their families to graduate college. Now one, an RN, is outreach coordinator for the perinatal center at Cook County Hospital. The other, a certified acupuncturist, treats AIDS patients at Cook County Jail. They tell me of several other patient advocates who at Fritzi took their first steps to becoming healthcare professions.
Fritzi Engelstein Free People’s Health Center and Chicago’s other free clinics managed to deliver, against all odds, a ton of quality, heartful healthcare to people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten it. Compared to the level of need, it was still just a drop in the bucket. The most lasting effect of the clinics was on the folks who worked there. At Fritzi I learned lessons not taught in medical school, like the pivotal role of community in health and illness, while a number of my lay comrades were inspired to pursue careers in healthcare. Thank you Fritzi Engelstein for starting us down a half-century path that enriched our lives at least as much the lives of the people we had the honor to serve.
