40 Years of Rural Medical Education This Rural Mission

To tell you that we are experts in Rural Medical Education is a bit of an understatement! We have been training and retaining rural doctors in our state for more than 40 years! So, let's take it back to where it all began, the U.P., and learn how it all happened from the man that was there! 
This Rural Mission is a podcast brought to you by Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. The podcast is produced with funds from the The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation and The Michigan State University College of Human Medicine Family Medicine Department. Welcome to season two. I'm your host, Julia Terhune, and I hope you enjoy this episode.
I don't think there's been a week that has gone by since I started working for the college of human medicine that I haven't talked about how we have been recruiting, training and retaining rural doctors for over 40 years. For those that I work with, I'm pretty sure they were able to dub those words with almost my exact inflection. I talk about it all the time and not just because it's my job, but because I'm really proud of the outcomes of our program. I'm really proud of the work that everyone for decades has put into the success of our medical students and the success of the rural medical systems that take our medical students. Now in 2019, I get to change my script just a little bit because this year we are celebrating 45 years of rural medical education.
In these 45 years, we have been able to show the outstanding and significant outcomes related to developing the rural medical workforce, and we have expanded our rural medical education certificate programs to include two additional rural campuses where students can receive that certificate. Those campuses are now Traverse City and Midland. With that expansion in 2012, we have been able to cover the map of Michigan with rural medical education opportunities. Those opportunities provide students with an understanding of the unique needs found in many of our rural regions across the state.
For those medical students who want to get rural medical training, they can pick from two different programs, the rural physician program based out of Marquette or the rural community health program that's based in either Midland or Traverse City. Both programs are under one big umbrella called the Leadership in Rural Medicine program. But this umbrella wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't for the men and women who worked so hard to establish rural medical education opportunities in the upper peninsula starting back in 1974. To honor this legacy, we wanted to showcase the man who was there when it started and let him tell you the story about how it all began. Dr. Daniel Mazzuchi was an internal medicine doctor who came to the upper peninsula of Michigan in the late 1960s.
He was an integral part of establishing the program first in Escanaba and then in Marquette in later years. His influence on the college was so tremendous that much of what he's established during his medical education career is still in place today. Dr. Mazzuchi sat down with Dr. Andrea Wendling, the current director of our program, and told us the story of how it all began.
To talk about medicine in Marquette, you have to kind of... Medical education in Marquette, you have to kind of break it up because nothing happens in a vacuum. The political factors that went into allowing the UP experiment, which is what it was called, to be started, the people or cast of characters involved in it, and then how it eventually evolved as medicine evolved in the UP.
We owe a great deal of credit to the development of our Marquette campus and our rural medical education heritage to the late Donald Weston who served as Dean of the college of human medicine from 1970 to 1989.
He's the reason why we're here. I mean, that's a simple declarative sentence. He was a fly fisherman and he and his buddies were up fly fishing somewhere in the mountains. They were dreaming. They were iconocl