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by Bill Wasserman
On Dec. 31, Dr. Carl Soderland will retire after 41 years as a practicing physician and clinic medical director in Ipswich. It is a landmark event.
There will be hundreds of former and current patients from Ipswich and up and down the North Shore who will be sad to see this moment.
Soderland, now 72, came to Ipswich in 1979 to join in practice with Dr. Ed Marsh. “Marsh did the pediatric care. I had the adults,“ said Soderland.
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He was fulfilling a life-long dream.
Asked when had he first thought of being a doctor, Soderland replied, “Around when I was five.”
Soderland was born in Falmouth and attended schools there. His father was an electrician and his mother worked at the Oceanographic Institute nearby in Woods Hole.
Soderland went on to college at Dartmouth and then to medical school at the University of Rochester, N.Y. He stayed in Rochester for his residency at Strong Memorial Hospital where he became chief of residency.
His next move came when he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine. “It looked like everything you ever could want in a lovely, seaside town,” said Soderland reminiscing. So he joined Dr. Marsh in a practice on North Main street.
By then, he had married “my childhood sweetheart, Diane,” and they were getting started on a family of two children, Peter, now a kidney specialist at Lahey Clinic, Burlington, and Callie, now a sixth grade teacher in Acton, both of them parents. The Soderlands will be celebrating their 50th anniversary next summer.
In 1985 Soderland accepted an offer from GTE-Sylvania, then the major employer in Ipswich with additional operations on the North Shore, to be their medical director. The offer was particularly attractive since the company agreed to send him to Harvard School of Public Health to get a Masters degree.
Four years later, his career did a U turn. “I could have stayed in corporate medicine, but I had a chance to come back to Ipswich as medical director of a group of general practitioners in Beverly, Danvers and Ipswich. I took it.”
“To be part of a community and to be a physician in that community is such a privilege,” said Soderland.
He later became medical director for Lahey Clinics’ practitioners, about 25 in all, and opened the Ipswich Lahey Clinic.
He did pick up some extra duties. He has been a Trustee of Lahey Clinic for 11 years, on the Board of Governors for 23 years, and a teacher at Tufts Medical School for 10 years.
He has also been an ardent fly fisherman. His office walls are decorated with fishing flies, and his periodic absences from the office, marked by automatic email replies that state “Gone fishing,” coincide with fishing seasons in Maine, the Bahamas and Montana.
So what does Dr. Soderland plan for his future?
“I will continue to teach in the ethics program and in the clinical skills program at Tufts. Some fishing. But I guess mainly I will have an opportunity to do the exploring around Ipswich that I have always wanted to do. You know, I would love to be at Crane Beach at dawn.”
That would be a change since Soderland used to make early morning hospital rounds in days before there were “hospitalists,” and currently is usually answering email at 6 a.m.
He does acknowledge that these times are hard. About a month ago, he himself came down with coronavirus. It did not come from a patient, but from a former colleague with whom he had agreed to a professional talk.
“For about two weeks, I felt completely without energy,” he said, but he is recovered, and watching over the impact of Covid-19 locally.
How does Soderland sum up his many years as an Ipswich doctor?
“I feel I am the luckiest person in the world to do what I have been able to do.”
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