Dr. Don Jacobs retires after 66 years serving Iron Mountain patients

At 95, Dr. Don Jacobs ended a 66-year run in Iron Mountain medicine at a June 10 celebration at Marshfield Medical Center-Dickinson. For decades, Jacobs was the doctor families called for births, illnesses and emergencies, and his retirement closes a long chapter in how care was delivered across Dickinson County and the surrounding Upper Peninsula.

Jacobs’ path into medicine began in Crystal Falls, where he suffered a severe asthma attack as a child at a cottage. An adrenaline shot relieved the attack within minutes, and the memory stayed with him. He later left Iron Mountain in 1951 with $35 and a suitcase from his Lebanese grandfather, hitchhiked to Ann Arbor, worked his way through the University of Michigan, and graduated from medical school in 1957 before completing residency in Saginaw.

He returned to the Upper Peninsula and built a family medicine practice that stretched far beyond a standard office schedule. Jacobs delivered babies, made house calls and performed surgery, the kind of broad practice that once defined rural medicine in Iron Mountain and neighboring towns. For patients who saw the same doctor through childhood, parenthood and old age, that continuity turned him into more than a clinician. It made him part of the region’s daily life.

That reach also reflects how health care itself changed here. Marshfield Medical Center-Dickinson, the successor to the former Dickinson County Healthcare System, was renamed in 2022 after joining Marshfield Clinic Health System. The medical center now describes itself as a fully integrated campus serving residents in upper Michigan and northeast Wisconsin, a reminder that the patient base around Iron Mountain has widened even as long-serving local physicians have become harder to replace.

Jacobs’ retirement drew a public response large enough that the Iron Mountain Daily News asked community members to send in comments. That reaction fits the size of his footprint: he treated generations, mentored people entering medicine, and remained tied to a local identity shaped as much by family history as by professional achievement. For Iron Mountain, his departure marks the loss of a doctor whose career mirrored the evolution of care in this corner of the U.P., from house calls and homegrown family practice to a more regional system built around fewer, larger institutions.