In 1979, a young emergency medicine intern decided he could serve humankind more compassionately by volunteering to help those in greatest need. “I had always wanted to volunteer overseas, but my advisor said it would ruin my career,” recalls Robert A. Barish, MD. “So of course I signed up immediately.” He joined the International Rescue Committee, founded by Albert Schweitzer, and left New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital for Cambodia.

“I was at Khao I Dang, the largest refugee camp on the Cambodian/Thai border,” Dr. Barish says. “This was the locale of the movie The Killing Fields, and it was a war zone. We had a MASH unit there and treated Cambodians, Vietnamese, Khmer Rouge—if they were injured, we treated them.”

“My interpreter was a 15-year-old boy whom I taught to treat malaria, start IVs and perform spinal taps,” Dr. Barish says. “I gave him my stethoscope when I left Cambodia. I later found out that he applied to medical school in the United States and is now practicing here. That was a very proud moment for me.”

His second assignment, to Somalia, was vastly different. “This was during the great famine,” Dr. Barish remembers. “The level of medicine was not as sophisticated as in Cambodia. In Somalia it was all about taking care of starving children—we buried about three children each day.”

Dr. Barish received a letter from St. Vincent’s asking him to come back and finish his internal medicine residency. He returned to the States—career intact—and completed his residency in 1983, and then pursued an emergency medicine residency at Georgetown.

Emergency medicine in the early 1980s was in its infancy, particularly on the East Coast. The Maryland program was young and in trouble. Dr. Barish was recruited from Georgetown to take over the struggling program and became the youngest chief of emergency services at a university hospital in the U.S. He started on July 1, 1985, the same day the program lost its accreditation.

Dr. Barish remembers vividly his first day on the job. “Emergency medicine was such a new field,” he says, “but to lose our accreditation was tough. I knew right then what my main two goals were going to be: to build the faculty and to rebuild our credibility.”
Several years after his arrival, Maryland partnered with Georgetown, George Washington and Shock Trauma. Georgetown ran the program, and residents rotated throughout the three institutions. Over the next few years, with Dr. Barish’s leadership and outstanding faculty, including the present director Dr. Brian Browne, the Maryland program gained strength and began to grow.

By the late 1980s/early1990s Mercy Hospital, Bon Secours and the Baltimore VA Medical Center had all asked Dr. Barish to run their emergency departments. Soon the program had 48 full-time faculty, a network of four hospitals, and the strength and diversity to stand alone. Maryland applied for a sole residency program and was accepted on its first attempt. The University of Maryland’s emergency medicine residency is one of the largest in the nation and is the only one with three programs in emergency medicine (emergency medicine, emergency medicine/pediatrics, and emergency medicine/medicine).

In the midst of incredible professional growth, Dr. Barish still had a desire for personal growth. In 1986, he walked into an Air National Guard recruiting office and signed up for flight school, ultimately becoming an A-10 “Warthog” flight surgeon. “A flight surgeon is responsible for determining medically whether a pilot can fly,” he says, “and they must log a certain number of hours in all the various aircraft.” He eventually retired as a lieutenant colonel.

In 1991, Dr. Barish became one of the “Kuwait 38”—a group of physicians who accompanied then-Governor Schaefer to Kuwait after the end of the Gulf War. “Our purpose was to provide care,” he remembers, “but when we got there, we saw that, apart from seeing land mine injuries and documenting instances of torture, there wasn’t much for us to do. But we stayed for two weeks and advised the Kuwaitis on how to get their health system back on its feet, how to rebuild the medical school and how to streamline their emergency medicine system.”

The following year Dr. Barish was accepted as a finalist in NASA’s astronaut candidate program. “I had an abiding interest in aerospace medicine,” he says. “I first applied in 1985 and reapplied every year until I became a finalist in 1992.” Dr. Barish was one of 21 finalists out of 5000 applicants. (Rick Husband, who died in the Challenger explosion, was one of the finalists.) They were told that all were qualified to be astronauts but that rigorous psychological, physiological and medical tests would determine which were ultimately chosen.

Of the 21 finalists, 16 were picked to become astronauts. Dr. Barish was not one of them. “I had a two-second arrhythmia one night at 10:32 p.m.,” Dr. Barish recalls. “This arrhythmia isn’t enough to keep someone from being a fighter pilot, but it was enough to keep me from being an astronaut. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. I would have loved being an astronaut, but I am just thankful I had the opportunity to try.”

Not one to let grass grow under his feet, in 1993, realizing it was imperative to understand the business of medicine in the era of managed care, Dr. Barish entered Loyola University’s MBA program. This degree would prepare him for his next professional challenge.

In 1998, with the emergency medicine program well-established and ranked nationally, Dr. Barish got a call from Dean Wilson. The dean wanted to discuss a new opportunity to oversee the medical school’s clinical enterprise and to coordinate all clinical and business activity between the medical school and hospital. Did Dr. Barish want to be that person? You know he did. In 1998, Dr. Barish became associate dean for clinical affairs, and since then a new infrastructure has been developed to better manage clinical operations, key business processes have been redesigned, and revenues and collections have risen significantly.

Not even Dr. Barish knows what’s next on the horizon. But whatever it is, you can be sure it will benefit all of us.