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For decades, a ‘compassionate saint’ watched over Springfield
Revered by patients and colleagues, Dr. Howard Ingling gave every bit of his energy to the practice of medicine
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By Tom Stafford,
Staff Writer
8:36 PM Sunday, June 21, 2009
As the story goes, word was sent to Community Hospital that a habitual drunk was expected to report to the appropriate floor in the wee hours of the morning.
The nurse was given strict instructions that once the man entered the room, he should be locked in for the night.
As Kim Owens tells it, her uncle, Dr. Howard Ingling, often started his work day at 6 a.m. and “always looked very disheveled” by the time his day ended.
So when he arrived at the hospital, the nurse “thought this was the man she was to shut in the room,” Owens said.
The next morning, the doctor who left instructions arrived to find his revered colleague in medical detention. But when he suggested disciplining the nurse, Ingling’s response was unequivocal.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “It’s the best sleep I’ve had in years.”
‘Love personified’
The man Springfield Sun reporter Alan Johnson called “Donnelsville’s practicing compassionate saint” and a colleague described as “love personified” was born Nov. 21, 1908, in a farmhouse near Enon, one of eight children of tenant farmers Guy and Jenny Ingling.
As a child, Howard Ingling no doubt joked with brother George in the way they did later when Howard was a doctor and George a funeral director. George, it was said, buried all of Howard’s mistakes.
Graduation from Enon High School in 1927 led to college at Ohio Wesleyan University and medical school at then Western Reserve University near Cleveland.
After interning at Community Hospital, Ingling took up practice with Dr. Stanley Hutchings in a yellow brick building on West High Street.
That year, he married Thelma McBeth — he called her Mickey — a girl he’d driven to Enon High School in his days as a student bus driver. In 1939, they spent a year taking medicine back into the hills of Harlan County, Ky., before returning to Springfield.
“I had a hankering for science and a hankering for people,” Ingling told Johnson about his choice of career.
He did not, however, have a hankering for war.
Worries a casualty
When World War II came, “I didn’t really want to go to the service” Ingling told Johnson. “But I learned a lot over there.”
In Europe, Ingling served as a battalion surgeon with the 20th Field Hospital and was recognized both for fashioning a portable X-ray machine and for his courage in getting wounded men from the battlefield.
He returned home with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and a Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest medal a service member can earn.
He also returned with memories of caring for 1,100 prisoners at the Langenstein-Sweiberg, a subcamp of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp.
In “Malnutrition of Political Prisoners,” a professional paper he wrote later, Ingling observed:
“The death from starvation appears to be an anesthetic type of death — the individual appears not to be distressed, to merely gaze out into space without actually seeing anything ... and to uneventfully cease all living process and slip from life into death almost unnoticed.”
“Before (the war), I was a worrier,” Ingling told Johnson. “But after the war, I kept thinking nothing could be that bad.”
Days started early, ended late
Upon his return, “He was, how would you say it, kind of nervous at first, and he whistled a lot,” Daughter Pat Everhart said. And he always carried a memento of his Army days — a kind of makeshift stethoscope he put together in Europe.
“Typically his day would start very early,” said his son-in-law, Bruce Everhart. “It might be a patient in his driveway knocking on the door at 6 in the morning. And it would go to 2, 3 in the morning.”
In a letter to the editor that ran after Ingling’s death, Alice Murnahan of South Charleston described what it was like to wait in Ingling’s office.
“You met a lot of people that you knew by name. You had time to read a book or to get a good start on it. You could see a lot of beautiful hand work being done by women (who) shared lots of recipes.”
In another letter, Mrs. Norman Brown recalled telling Ingling that a visit to his office was like a little bit of heaven: “When I see you, the wait is worth it.”
“One day my sister apologized to him for taking up so much of his time,” she added. “He sat down and took her by the hand and said, ‘Rosemary, I have only one patient right now, and that is you.”
Family calls
In a time when house calls were common, people often gave Ingling keys to their house so he could let himself in if he arrived late. Sick members of the Ingling family came next.
“If he ever got to our houses by 3 a.m., we considered ourselves fortunate,” said niece Connie Bost. “My grandfather (who lived next door) would shine a flashlight into our houses and we would know Uncle Howard was there.”
‘He never let up’
Just as his patients learned to be patient and his family members to expect late calls, rookie policemen were trained not to disturb the man taking a nap parked in his car in the middle of the day.
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12:22 PM, 6/22/2009
Thanks Tom for another great article.
9:27 AM, 6/22/2009