Dewitt C. “Bud” Baldwin Jr. M.D. Collection

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    Biographical Note

    DeWitt C. “Bud” Baldwin, Jr. M.D. was a leader in the field of interprofessional health care education and collaborative practice and a career-long committed reformer of medical education. Dr. Baldwin was a pediatrician, psychiatrist, humanist, family physician, educator, and researcher. During his lifetime, he received many honors and recognition for his lifelong work in interprofessional collaboration. Recognizing this pioneering work, the editorial board of international Journal of Interprofessional Care published a special issue on his career and included his papers as well as naming an annual Baldwin Award for the best paper.

    In May of 2010, Dr. Baldwin was awarded the Pellegrino Medal by the Healthcare Ethics and Law Institute at Samford University, which is given to individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of medical ethics. Rosalind Franklin University created the DeWitt C. Baldwin Jr. Center for Interprofessional Education in 2014. In 2016, the Gold Foundation and the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education created the ACGME and Gold Foundation DeWitt C. (Bud) Baldwin Award that recognizes institutions that foster a respectful, supportive environment for medical education.

    In 1922, Dr. Baldwin was born to Edna and DeWitt Sr. who were missionary educators and world peace advocates. They served as his role models for learning about healthcare teams in communities of Burma where he was raised (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, 2022; D’Avray, 2007). His parents developed a philosophy for experiential learning in the community where student teams perform service-learning in local communities. As a child, Bud often witnessed and participated in these programs (D’Avray, 2007). Upon their return to the United States, the senior Baldwins founded the Lisle Fellowship, a student program for international understanding. 

     

    His youth experiences left an early imprint on him about health, teamwork, learning from experience, and communities. His unique upbringing exposed him to an array of 20 century social science thought leaders. These include: John Dewey, pioneer of experiential learning; the National Training Laboratory at Bethel, Maine; and later, Kurt Lewin, and Paulo Freire whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed, explored the role of critical theory in transformative learning. Lewin’s work in group dynamics was important to Dr. Baldwin’s approach to healthcare teams and learning. He and his colleagues founded the Interdisciplinary Association for Behavioral Sciences and Medical Education in 1975. His deep knowledge of social science and educational scholarship is what made Dr. Baldwin a standout among physician-scholars in both interprofessional education and medical education reform.

    After completing his undergraduate education at Swarthmore College in 1943, Dr. Baldwin attended Yale University from 1943-1949 where he obtained graduate degrees in medicine and theology. He also completed a residency in pediatrics at the University of Minnesota from 1949-1951. His experience as a physician at the Child Health Center in the University of Washington – Seattle from 1952-1957, where he worked within an interdisciplinary health professional team, strengthened his passion for team-based care. After spending 1960-1967 as a pediatrician at the Forsyth Dental Center for Children at Harvard University, Dr. Baldwin worked as a consultant for the Milbank Foundation in 1968 and traveled across the United States and Europe to facilitate the integration of medical and dental education (D’Avray, 2007).

    Dr. Baldwin served in a professorship at the University of Connecticut from 1967-1971. He then then served as a faculty member at the University of Nevada-Reno. During his UN-Reno tenure in the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Baldwin’s focus was on preparing health professions students for interprofessional careers, with a particular emphasis on underserved populations (Schmitt, 2007). He and his wife, Dr. Michele Baldwin, with their colleagues were instrumental in the design and implementation of a novel, required interprofessional health core curriculum, health professions students that began on day 1 (D’Avray, 2007). Students from the following fields took coursework that introduced them to the “concepts and practice of the team approach to primary health care and maintenance throughout the life cycle”: medical technology, nutrition, clinical psychology, communication, pre-dentistry, pre-physical therapy, speech pathology and audiology, and health education (Baldwin & Baldwin, 2007). The students completed their experiential part of the program as teams in twelve Native American reservations in Nevada.

    Dr. Baldwin served as the President, Earlham College in 1983-1984. After his numerous university faculty positions, Dr. Baldwin was brought on as the Scholar-in-Residence at the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), where he worked until his retirement in 2021. There, Dr. Baldwin’s research focus was physician/resident burnout as well as the importance of medical humanism and the social sciences in medical education (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, 2022). Bud passed away at the age of 99 in 2022, leaving behind a legacy that is preserved in this collection.

    Works Cited:

    Scope & Content Note

    As a prominent figure in the field of interprofessional practice & education (IPE) since its inception, Dr. Baldwin collected many important resources, conference proceedings, and research papers that may have otherwise been lost to time. The documents preserved in this collection represents likely the only documentation of the history of the field of interprofessional education and collaborative practice in the United States. The collection is unique because it not only includes his own work but his careful curation of materials that provide perspective about the evolution of the health professions, structures such as academic health centers, new medical schools, and interprofessional thought, dating from the early 1900s through the 2010s. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education generously housed these extensive documents while he served as Scholar-in-Residence from 2002 to 2021. Drs. DeWitt and Michelle Baldwin donated this collection to the University of Minnesota Libraries to be curated by The National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education in 2020.

    The collection consists of reports, research papers, conference proceedings, published & unpublished manuscripts, collaborative research, curricula, team training exercises & materials, course evaluations, bibliographies, slides, film, videos, and cassette tapes. It also includes Dr. Baldwin’s personal notes and correspondence. The collection houses Dr. Baldwin’s personal papers and records from his faculty appointments at the University of Washington-Seattle, Harvard University, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Nevada-Reno, along with materials from his various consulting roles (both international and domestic) for the Milbank Foundation, World Health Organization, & various academic health centers across the United States. Dr. Baldwin’s presentations, scholarship, and research from his time as Scholar-in-Residence at the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) are also included.