Dr. Devitt is in: Alum returns home to pract When she was growing up, Phoebe Devitt used to follow her father on his rounds at the local hospital or accompany him on house calls to the local Amish community. She was a fixture at his clinic, where her mother also worked as a nurse. Everyone knew Dr. Devitt’s daughter in the small village of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. But these days, everyone just calls her Dr. Devitt, too. Phoebe Devitt is a family medicine doctor practicing in Viroqua, Wisconsin, just 20 miles away from her hometown. Her husband, Dr. Joel Charles, now runs the same clinic where her father used to practice, and even works out of the same office. Together, they’re helping to take care of the people of rural Wisconsin, handling delivering babies to end-of-life care and everything in between. It’s a big job, but Devitt loves it, and she loves her hometown most of all. The journey leads home Growing up, all Devitt wanted to do was get out of Soldiers Grove. The tiny town has a population of roughly 600; all of its residents could live in just one of towers of Sandburg Hall. When it came time for college, UWM seemed like the perfect fit – her relatives were close by, and she would finally get to experience city life after a lifetime in a place where her nearest neighbors lived over a mile away. “I was definitely a city girl, I thought,” Devitt said with a laugh. “I spent my first year in the dorms. … I loved it. I was craving that community.” But the more she experienced of the “big city,” the more Devitt realized she actually loved her little town. “I realized that I wanted to come back to my hometown specifically,” she said, so she planned her studies accordingly. “I knew I needed a skill that would be practical in a rural setting.”
Phoebe Devitt graduated from UWM in 2009 after majoring in Biological Sciences. She now practices m
Picking UWM’s pre-med track was an easy choice; Devitt’s father and grandfather were both physicians, so it made sense to go into the family business. Devitt majored in biological sciences and graduated with her BS in 2009. She attended medical school at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, where she met her husband, and they both completed their residencies in Santa Rosa, California. Then, they moved back to Soldiers Grove, though Devitt made a conscious choice to work a little farther away from her hometown. “A lot of the community, being so small, watched me grow up. In their eyes, I’m still their sixth-grade student or a little girl on the track team,” she explained. But sometimes, she still sees a familiar face when some patients seek her out – “Just based on the fact that they appreciated my father as their physician,” she said. But lately, things have been overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
10 • IN FOCUS • March, 2021
