Barbara Ogur

Continuing our series “Getting to Know our Neighbors”, we’d like to introduce you to Barbara Ogur, M.D. who, with her husband Michael Altman, moved into the Esplanade in the summer of 2021. Barbara said that she wanted to downsize from their single-family home in the Fresh Pond area of Cambridge. She had been looking at places for about 10 years. Michael didn’t want to move; he loved the house, the neighborhood and “his garden.” After many unsuccessful attempts to get him interested in a potential new place, “there was always something wrong with them,” she showed him the Esplanade condo. “Our jaws dropped; it ticked off all the boxes for both of us and here we are!” Barbara then said that their being here “proved to be even better than they hoped…. The neighborhood is exciting and so close to Boston. We walk all over and love it here.” Barbara and Michael also have a place in Wellfleet where they spend most of the summer.

This is the second marriage for both and they celebrated their 27th wedding anniversary in August. They each brought two children to the marriage and now they have five grandchildren, ages 13, 11, 10, 7 and 5! Their adult children live in California, Brooklyn, Milton, and Falmouth, Maine.

Barbara was born in Brooklyn and moved with her family to Carbondale, Illinois, a small town where her father was a professor at Southern Illinois University. After attending Radcliffe, where she fell in love with Cambridge, she graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine and completed a medical residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1979. At that point, she moved with her first husband to Shreveport, Louisiana, which she amusingly describes as her “Peace Corps years” from 1979 to 1981. Although she loved her practice there as a primary care physician, “Civil rights and the women’s movement had not yet found Shreveport!” The couple then moved to Tampa, Florida, where Barbara was on the University of South Florida faculty and continued her work as a primary care physician.

It was during these years in Tampa that the couple divorced. Barbara flourished professionally and she made connections that brought her and her two children to the Boston area. She had been writing and teaching about healthcare for the underserved and had been on a panel with Stephanie Joan "Steffie" Woolhandler, an advocate for single-payer health insurance and co-founder and board member of Physicians for a National Health Program and David U. Himmelstein, also the co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. At their encouragement, Barbara accepted the position of Medical Director of the Neighborhood Health Center at what was then Cambridge Hospital (now Cambridge Health Alliance). Additionally, she spent time as a primary care physician. She noted, “I was a single mother with a job that was ½ administration and ½ clinical practice and very happy to be back in Cambridge.”

Barbara’s practice grew and she worked with others at CHA to develop a multidisciplinary approach to patient care as the HIV epidemic was expanding. She increased her clinical work with HIV patients, primary care teaching, and designing innovation in medical education. Observing that the medical students’ clinical experience, based on largely inpatient care, was often “very disjointed and retrospective,” Barbara and colleagues created a new approach — “following patients, making real connections, seeing medical decision-making in real time.” The result of this was “The Harvard Medical School-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship (HMS-CIC), a redesign of the principal clinical year to foster students' learning from close and continuous contact with cohorts of patients in the disciplines of internal medicine, neurology, obstetrics-gynecology, pediatrics, and psychiatry. With year-long mentoring, students follow their patients through major venues of care” (from Academic Medicine). This offers an antidote to what Barbara notes is the “ethical erosion” of medical education, preserving humanism in the developing doctors.

Barbara “tried to retire” in October 2019. She and Michael “had a nice vacation and, then, Covid hit. The younger doctors “were just smashed” so Barbara returned half-time to relieve them and help out. She continues to do tele-vists three mornings a week, “taking a load off the ‘kids’”! Her additional professional activities include providing medical and psychological evaluations for “asylum seekers,” survivors of persecution seeking asylum in the United States. She also facilitates eight-week mindfulness groups at the Cambridge Health Alliance and notes that there is a “growing awareness of the role that mindfulness plays in primary care medicine and in life.”

Barbara swims, bikes, walks, and reads. and she and Michael would love, after Covid, to travel more “anywhere, everywhere!”  Also on her mind is the “state of the world.” To that end, being semi-retired, she’s considering “where to focus my energies, how to become more involved” with a special focus on “the medically underserved, the climate, and politics.” Barbara has had a life of giving to others; she continues in that spirit and we welcome her as our neighbor!

Jane Hilburt-Davis