Dr. Howard Knobloch is welcomed by Debbie Keyes at a recent Bay County Division on Aging book event at the State Theatre.

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Dr. Howard Knobloch, 96, Bay City Pediatrician, Tells All in Memoirs

The Golden Age of Medicine Described by Popular Local Baby Doctor

October 7, 2007
By: Dave Rogers

If you lived in Bay City during the last three-quarters of a century, chances are you know Dr. Howard Knobloch, pediatrician extraordinary.

And if you knew him, you're probably mentioned in his autobiography.

The book was recently published by WingSpan Press, Livermore, California. ($20, available from the author, Bay Regional Medical Center gift shop and the office of Dr. Doug Cummings, 712 S. Trumbull Ave.)

"He was my baby doctor," I told a group after a tennis game last week. "He was mine, too," said one player. "Mine, too," chimed in a third. Did everybody go to Dr. Knobloch? I wondered.

At age 96 Dr. Knobloch has produced an amazing 339 page autobiography that will evoke memories for many readers.

It's called "An American Pediatrician's Odyssey: My Life and Memoirs Composed at Nine Decades."

Dr. Knobloch doesn't shrink from any subject, including the sexual misdeeds of some frisky physicians, nurses and local socialites through the years.

He chronicles desperate medical cases involving his own patients, family, friends, and others. The benefits of common sense medical care are documented and he tells frankly of miraculous recoveries as well as horrible deaths.

The years 1930 to 2000 he describes as "The Golden Age of Medicine. "Like firemen, we were on call 24 hours a day and ready for all medical demands at a moment's notice. As long as we had the bare necessities of life, we were content and did not strive to build up an empire of wealth. Honesty, loyalty, kindness, and faith in human nature were our prime values."

However, toward the end of that time his practice dwindled and was increasingly under pressure from bureaucratic forces that plague many physicians.

Dr. Knobloch taught pediatrics to University of Michigan interns at Saginaw hospitals for about 15 years. He was elected Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in 1982 and was named "Michigan Pediatrician of the Year" in 1996.

He doesn't spare even his physician friends, whose foibles and, in some cases, health problems, are revealed, although many have already passed on.



Dr Knobloch's Book.
(MyBayCity Photo by Dave Rogers) The odyssey begins June 3, 1911 in Trafford, Pennsylvania, where Howard Thomas Knobloch is born to Margaret Haines Knobloch, 18, and Howard Harrer Knobloch, 25, a factory worker.

One of his first experiences was surviving the flu epidemic of 1917. People were succumbing in 8 to 12 hours and there was no cure. Half a million died worldwide. He contracted the flu from a playmate, who died, but he "dodged the fateful cannonball."

At Greensburg, PA, high school, he specialized in English, was sports editor of the high school newspaper and participated in the usual teenage high jinks of the 1920s. He matriculated at the University of Maryland at College Park, taking a pre-med course.

Completing the University of Maryland's Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1935, he interned at the state TB sanitarium at Sabillasville and Union Memorial Hospital, Baltimore, gaining his M.D. degree in 1936. Deciding to specialize in pediatrics, he interned at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and then the University of Michigan Hospital, Ann Arbor, and, finally, was chief resident at the James Couzens Children's Hospital, Marquette, Michigan.

The Bay City part of the Knobloch odyssey began in 1940 in practice with Dr. Fernald Foster. The book reveals details that some physicians, nurses and their relatives would probably rather have forgotten, but some revelations are reported only indirectly. Bay Cityans undoubtedly will relish the juicy disclosures.

Here is a sensational tale Dr. Knobloch tells that newsmen can't recall: "In fact doctor dalliance relationships were not uncommon here, and there was a tale concerning a prominent doctor who was murdered in his office by a jealous husband who pushed him through a large second story window on Center Avenue." He preaches, after the fact: "Medical duties and affairs of the heart are incompatible, similar to oil and water."

Familiar names pop up all through the book and Dr. Knobloch spares no details or observations about his associates, patients and acquaintances.

Chapter 33 is aptly entitled "Meltdown Years," as Dr. Knobloch describes the end of his practice ten years ago, at age 86.

"A host of speed bumps descended upon the medical profession in the guise of HMOs, lawyers, insurance companies, and big businesses. It became almost impossible, literally and figuratively, to make ends meet. For about the last ten years of my practice, it seemed like Medicaid patients multiplied with leaps and bounds, until practically three-quarters of my work was engulfed in cases having substandard monetary remuneration."

In September, 1997 he made an agreement with Bay Medical Services and transferred his entire pediatric practice to the Doctors of Osteopathy Family Clinic in the medical mall.

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