Half a Century of Care

When Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr. opened his solo obstetrics and gynecology practice in Chandler, Arizona, on June 23, 1976, the surrounding landscape was dominated by cotton fields and dairy farms. Chandler was a quiet community of just 20,000 people. Today, fifty years later, Chandler is a thriving hub of the Silicon Desert, and that single clinic has blossomed into MomDoc, the largest and most trusted women's healthcare group in the state of Arizona.

Our foundation was built on a multi-generational legacy of civic duty and medical excellence spanning five generations and two continents. Dr. Goodman Jr. inherited a passion for healing from his father, Dr. Clifford Goodman Sr., a beloved Chandler family physician in the 1950s, and his grandparents, both trained pharmacists who ran Goodman's Pharmacy in Mesa. The roots reach deeper still: his great-grandfather, Dr. William Erastus Platt, practiced frontier medicine in the Arizona Territory for over forty years. And through his marriage to Nadina Hofstätter, the granddaughter of a Viennese gynecologist educated at the University of Vienna, the practice carries the legacy of two medical traditions across three thousand miles and a hundred years of history.

What does fifty years of independent practice mean for you? It means your provider works within a clinical network that took five generations to build. It means institutional knowledge passed from physician to physician, long-standing relationships with every major hospital system in the Valley, and a practice culture shaped by its founders rather than a corporate boardroom. Over 100,000 pregnancies delivered. 65+ providers who chose to be here. That continuity of care is something no recently assembled health system can replicate.

Five Generations of Healers

The MomDoc story does not begin in 1976. It begins in the Arizona Territory, before statehood, with a doctor on a horse.

Dr. William Erastus Platt (1858-1941) practiced frontier medicine in the Gila Valley for over forty years. His patients hung white tea towels on their gates when they needed him, and he spotted the flags from his horse and buggy. He learned five Native American tribal languages to communicate with his patients. He once performed an emergency appendectomy with a butcher knife when proper instruments could not be found. After his wife Isabelle's death, he organized a mass tonsillectomy for valley schoolchildren: more than two hundred procedures in two days, assisted by his three eldest daughters. A newspaper clipping from the era called him "Graham County's good Samaritan." Two of his daughters became registered pharmacists. Three of his grandsons became doctors.

One of those daughters was Clara Platt, who married George Nicholas Goodman. Both were licensed pharmacists. They founded Goodman's Pharmacy in Mesa in 1912, and George parlayed the civic trust he earned behind the prescription counter into five terms as Mayor of Mesa during the decades when Arizona transitioned from territory to state. For the Goodman family, healthcare and public service were never separate vocations.

Their son, Dr. Clifford James Goodman Sr. (1921-1962), left Mesa to attend the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Southwest and opened a family medical practice in Chandler in 1951, when the town held barely 3,800 residents. He was a general practitioner in the fullest sense: vaccinations, broken bones, heart conditions, and delivering babies. When Chandler Community Hospital opened its doors on July 17, 1961, with 40 beds and 91 volunteers, he was named its first Chief of Staff.

Weeks before the hospital opened, the family threw a celebration: "Life Begins at Forty." It was meant to mark a new chapter. The hospital was open. The legacy was in motion. Decades of practice lay ahead.

Clifford Sr. died on March 28, 1962, at the age of forty. He left behind his wife Earlene and eight children. His eldest son, Clifford Jr., was eighteen years old.

The Caregiving Line

The Platt branch carried the formal medical credential forward. Another thread ran parallel through the Goodman-Reed line: frontier women delivering babies and tending the sick where no hospital existed within a day's ride.

Eliza Taylor (1826–1901) — Cliff Jr.'s third-great-grandmother — served as the town nurse and midwife of Salem, Utah. Born in Gloucestershire, England, she sailed from Liverpool in 1856; her six-year-old daughter Louisa walked the 1,300 miles from Iowa City to the Salt Lake Valley with the first handcart company in history. Eliza spent the rest of her life delivering babies in a frontier settlement with no hospital. When MomDoc integrated certified nurse midwives into its care model in 2011, the practice was not adopting something foreign to the family. It was rejoining a tradition older than Arizona statehood.

Margaret Ann Taylor Goodman (1841–1926) — Cliff Jr.'s great-great-grandmother — brought the family from Lincolnshire to the Arizona Territory in 1882. Three years later she was a forty-three-year-old widow with nine children, a newborn named Theresa, chills and fever, and five dollars. She sold the family cow to bury her husband, bought a few bars of soap with what was left, and opened a store from her front room. She ran that mercantile for thirty years and served twenty years as the second postmaster of St. David. The storefront is still standing today, preserved on the St. David Heritage Society's Historic Driving Tour under the name Grandma Goodman's. She led the local Relief Society — frontier Arizona's de facto public-health ministry — for twenty-six years, remembered for going "among the sick, taking care of them day and night."

Two women, two Englands, two frontier settlements. Neither held a medical degree. Both were, by the standards of their time and place, exactly what a community required when a baby was coming or a fever would not break. That instinct has never left the practice.

The Vienna Connection

When Dr. Goodman Jr. met Nadina Hofstätter in Hamburg during his LDS mission in the early 1960s, he was encountering far more than a future spouse. Nadina carried the intellectual lineage of the Vienna Medical School itself.

Her grandfather, Dr. Robert Matthias Hofstätter (1883-1970), was a gynecologist trained at the University of Vienna during the faculty's golden age, receiving his MD in 1907. He practiced at the Wiener Allgemeine Poliklinik (Vienna General Polyclinic), where he became a pioneer of endocrine research, publishing continuously on pineal gland therapeutics from 1916 through the postwar era. He remained in Vienna through the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two world wars, and Nazi occupation. While many of his colleagues fled into exile, he stayed and preserved the Viennese clinical tradition.

Her father, Prof. Peter R. Hofstätter (1913-1994), became one of postwar Germany's most influential psychologists. He held the Chair of Psychology at the University of Hamburg from 1959 to 1979. His Fischer-Lexikon Psychologie sold over 600,000 copies and became the definitive German-language psychology reference. He received the Konrad Adenauer Prize in 1984 for his contributions to German intellectual life.

The parallel between the two families runs deep. A Viennese gynecologist's granddaughter married an Arizona gynecologist. Two medical traditions, separated by three thousand miles and nearly a century, converged in a single family. When Nadina and Clifford built MomDoc together, they wove together the rigorous clinical culture of the Vienna Medical School with the community-rooted, frontier-born healthcare ethos of the American Southwest.

Nadina proved to be far more than a physician's spouse. She became a co-builder of the practice, managing the growing enterprise while raising their six children. She brought the intellectual discipline of a family where academic achievement and medical service were baseline expectations, along with a fluency in German-language medical culture that broadened the practice's worldview. The MomDoc enterprise carries the imprint of both lineages.

The Making of a Physician

Born on April 11, 1943, in Washington, D.C., while his father was completing medical studies, Clifford James Goodman Jr. was seemingly destined to inherit the family's medical mantle. Displaying early intellectual rigor, he skipped the eleventh grade and graduated as salutatorian of Chandler High School in 1960.

Earning an academic scholarship, he initially enrolled at the prestigious University of Chicago. However, following the sudden death of his father, immense familial pressures necessitated a return to Arizona. To be closer to his grieving mother and seven younger siblings, he transferred to the University of Arizona and later Arizona State University.

Between 1963 and 1965, his academic trajectory paused when he elected to serve a full-time LDS mission in Germany. This period in Europe cultivated a lifelong fluency in the German language and, fatefully, introduced him to Nadina Hofstätter in Hamburg, where her father held the Chair of Psychology at the university. The couple married in August 1966.

Following his father's footsteps with deliberate intention, Dr. Goodman Jr. attended George Washington University School of Medicine, the same institution where his father had trained a generation earlier. He earned his M.D. in 1971. His profound aptitude for women's healthcare was recognized early: during his senior year, he received the Kane-King Obstetrical Society Award, distinguishing him as the outstanding senior student in Obstetrics and Gynecology. He remained in Washington to complete his specialty residency at GWU Hospital, finishing in the spring of 1974.

Military Medicine and Operational Discipline

Following residency, Dr. Goodman fulfilled a commitment to the United States Navy, serving as a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Medical Corps stationed at Marine Corps Base Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Military medicine demands maximum efficiency, optimal resource management, and strict adherence to a chain of command. For a newly trained obstetrician, this environment provided early opportunities for independent practice and leadership far earlier than the civilian sector typically afforded.

Even during his military service, Chandler pulled him back. With every leave, to pay the bills for his growing family, he covered a practice in Mesa from June 1974 to June 1976. Much of that time was spent at Chandler Regional Hospital, where his own father had served as the hospital's first Chief of Staff when it opened.

The rigors of military discipline, synthesized with the academic excellence of his GWU training, forged Dr. Goodman into a formidable clinician. It reinforced his ability to maintain exceptional composure during crises, a trait absolutely essential for an obstetrician managing emergency cesarean sections, sudden fetal distress, and complex delivery complications.

His Navy service forged the clinical composure and operational discipline that would define his entire career.

The Chandler Boom (1976–1990s)

In 1976, his military obligations fulfilled, Dr. Goodman returned to the arid landscape of his youth. The promise to care for his community, forged in the wake of his father's death, manifested when he officially founded his solo OB/GYN practice on June 23, 1976.

The timing represented an extraordinary convergence. In 1976, Chandler was a transitional zone of roughly 20,000 residents, still reliant on agriculture. But the late 1970s marked the dawn of the "Silicon Desert." Intel located its operations in Chandler in 1979 and 1980, followed by Northrop Grumman, Microchip, and NXP Semiconductors.

This massive influx of high-tech manufacturing brought thousands of young, reproductive-age families to the East Valley. The cotton fields rapidly gave way to subdivisions. Dr. Goodman positioned his practice perfectly at the crest of this demographic wave, transitioning from being simply a doctor in the town to the doctor for an entire generation of families.

Under his guidance, the practice achieved numerous clinical firsts. Members of the practice performed Chandler Regional Medical Center's first vaginal delivery, first C-section, and first general surgery in 1984. They hold the unique distinction of delivering the only two sets of triplets ever born at the facility.

Carrying the Torch

On the evening of May 29, 2022, Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr., MD, FACOG, passed away peacefully in Show Low, Arizona, surrounded by his wife Nadina, his six children, and many loved ones. He had retired from active practice in 2016 after forty years of clinical service, but he never stopped being a doctor. His passing closed a remarkable chapter, but the values he built the practice on continue to shape every MomDoc clinic and every patient interaction.

"Dr. Goodman was one of the most compassionate Doctors I worked with in my years as a nurse at Chandler Regional Hospital."JoAnn Street, RN | Chandler Regional Hospital Nursery

As MomDoc approaches its 50th anniversary on June 23, 2026, the organization spans 17 locations, 65+ providers, and 360+ team members across the Valley. What Dr. Goodman started in a single Chandler office has become Arizona's largest women's healthcare group, serving hundreds of thousands of families across three generations.

The roots of this practice stretch back to a frontier doctor in the Gila Valley, through a Mesa pharmacy, a hospital founding in Chandler, a medical school in Washington, a chance meeting in Hamburg, and the intertwining of two families who, across two continents, chose the same calling. The cotton fields are long gone. The promise remains.