Reunion 2002

Focus on women's health

Two honored for service

Reunion faces

Reunion reports

Public Health

Spotlight on Surgery

Alumni Notes

Reunion Faces

Catching up with classmates

Have you wondered what old so-and-so is up to these days?

We did.

More than 214 medical and 150 public health graduates returned to New Haven in early June for Alumni Reunion Weekend, and many of them picked up where old friendships left off half a lifetime ago. Jobs had changed, and in some cases specialties did too. Children were born. Children grew up. People moved. Marriages began and a few ended.

Contributing Editor Cathy Shufro spent part of the weekend talking to alumni about where they have been since graduation 5 or 50 years ago, and what they are doing now. Snapshots of a half-dozen of those conversations follow. For more class news, see the reunion reports.

Familiar Faces

A life in surgery, a new role in anatomy

Robert Chase, M.D. ’47, emeritus chair of the department of surgery at Stanford, has devoted himself to teaching human gross anatomy since retiring from active surgery 10 years ago. “I love first-year medical students,” said Chase. “They are unspoiled, bright as hell and wonderful people. The spectrum of students is so much broader than when I was here at Yale and it was 95 percent white males.”

He said the presence of women, who compose more than half the class at Stanford, has changed the atmosphere in the human anatomy laboratory. “In the old days, it was sort of a macho experience,” he recalls. “If you were disturbed by dissecting a human being, maybe you didn’t belong in medicine.” Now the human dissection is prefaced by discussions about the people who donated their bodies, and the conversations continue as the dissection progresses. Chase said the dissection teams bridge cultural and ethnic differences, each group of four becoming “a little family” that reduces “balkanization” of people with differences.

Stanford students conduct an end-of-the-course ceremony, reading poetry, performing music and even hearing from the families of those who donated their bodies. “They appreciate seeing the gift that it’s been to students.”

Besides teaching, Chase is also working to develop computer-assisted instruction for learning gross anatomy and surgery. Chase feels confident that nothing will replace the experience of doing hands-on dissection. Chase lives in Stanford with his wife, Ann. They have three children, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Like father, like daughter, for two New York doctors

Doris Wethers, M.D. ’52, recalls that when she was a child growing up in the Sugar Hill district of Harlem, her dolls quite often had one sort of medical crisis or another. She also remembers sitting in the family car as early as age 8 waiting for her father, a 1923 graduate of Howard University Medical School, to complete a house call. Those experiences and others led to her own career in medicine, which began when she enrolled in medical school at Yale in the late 1940s.

Wethers was inspired by her father but was not pressured by him to become a physician. It was “a calling” that led her to enroll at Yale in a class of 65 students that included only eight other women—among whom she was the only African-American. None of her three children chose to study medicine: one is a lawyer, one is developmentally disabled and one is a session musician with a large teaching practice. Wethers recalls that her musician son worried that his parents would disapprove when he announced his decision to pursue a career in music instead of science. “I told him, ‘The only thing I can do in music is turn on the radio, and you think I would discourage you? You’ve got this God-given gift.’ ”

She retired from general pediatrics in New York in 1995 and from sickle cell anemia research two years ago. She saw progress during her career in the diagnosis and treatment of sickle cell anemia, but “no final answers.” Among the advances: the illness is increasingly diagnosed at birth, 44 states now require newborn screening, children affected are given prophylactic penicillin until they are at least 5 years old, and infants with sickle cell anemia are now routinely given a new vaccine to guard against pneumococcal infections—particularly those of the blood and brain—potential killers of children with the disease.

Her husband, Garvall H. Booker, D.D.S. (also a Howard graduate), died in 1996. Wethers lives near The Cloisters museum in upper Manhattan, where she has a “minuscule” vegetable garden. She enjoys traveling (she recently visited southern Africa), visiting museums, attending the theater and reading. She highly recommends The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

At the FDA, seeking a more perfect union

Organizing and running a labor union isn’t exactly what he trained for, but Robert Young, M.D. ’67, Ph.D. ’69, clearly enjoys the job. For the past four years, Young has served as president of a newly formed chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union representing 3,800 employees at the Food and Drug Administration’s Washington headquarters (nearly a third of whom have doctoral-level degrees). “It goes to show that your career can take turns that you might never have imagined,” said Young, who jokes that he runs the employee “complaint department” at the FDA. The researchers in Washington are among 5,000 FDA employees represented by the union nationally. Young’s colleagues have elected him union president twice in a row.

Young says that union representation for the researchers provides a safeguard in the same way that guarantees of academic freedom protect professors. The union helps to ensure that researchers get to “call the shots about the quality of the research being submitted” by shielding them from political, economic and bureaucratic pressures. Before taking on the union job, Young had worked as a researcher himself, first reviewing applications to market new drugs or to test them on human subjects and subsequently evaluating the reliability of drug data. His tenure at the FDA overlapped with that of David A. Kessler, M.D., who was the agency’s commissioner from 1990 to 1997, but by the time Young began his union duties, Kessler had moved to Yale as dean.

Young originally envisioned himself as a clinician. After an enjoyable summer working in the lab of Frank Ruddle, Ph.D., he decided to augment his medical degree with a doctorate in pharmacology, then spent two postgraduate years in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. It was when he worked at the National Cancer Institute that he discovered that as much as he enjoyed the doctor-patient relationship, he found research more compelling. Young also earned a master’s degree and a J.D. in labor law at Georgetown during the 1980s, collecting so many acronyms after his name that he does not use them all. A resident of Bethesda, Young is married to concert pianist and Department of Justice trial lawyer Virginia Lum. Their children are Justin, 9, Marielle, 11, and Colette, 13.

His career turn says much about the value of the Yale System, Young believes. “I do hope the students learn that a graduate and medical education can be used for medical careers in addition to clinical practice, research and teaching,” he says. “The values embodied in the Yale System can lead one into disciplines somewhat remote from where one started, and it can be a lot of fun. In my years on Cedar Street, I would have never thought I would be involved in the kinds of things I have done. It’s been quite an adventure.”

For EPH grad, a goal that is universal

As a child, Kevin Nelson, M.P.H. ’92, didn’t dream of growing up to be a health care administrator; in fact, he envisioned himself as a doctor. But 18 years out of college, he loves his job running a managed-care plan that provides government-subsidized health insurance for 40,000 New Yorkers who would otherwise probably go without insurance. As COO of Health-Source/Hudson Health Plan, which has members in Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Sullivan counties, he sees one of his company’s roles as nudging the United States closer to universal health coverage.

In part because he had a sister with cerebral palsy, Nelson began college intent on going to medical school and becoming a neurologist. He enrolled in science courses, worked in a hospital and played a role in the premed society and student government at the University of Pittsburgh. Nelson gradually realized that he liked running organizations more than he liked medicine, and he decided to wed his interests in health care and business. He worked in a community health center in New Jersey and then a large public hospital in Atlanta before going to Yale to study health policy and management.

During his 10 years at Health-Source, Nelson has watched the company grow from 19 to 200 employees. One of his company’s goals has been to advocate for legislation that would streamline the state-mandated enrollment and re-enrollment process for uninsured individuals. Re-enrollment, or “recertification,” is required annually for individuals and families who obtain their health insurance through Medicaid and other government-subsidized programs. He calls the application process “a nightmare … If you’re missing a piece of paper, you’re terminated.” HealthSource joined with similar organizations, successfully backing legislation that will simplify the certification process. “All the advocacy we’re doing is with an eye toward universal health insurance. It’s the only way,” he said. Nelson lives in Westchester County with his 1-year-old daughter, Cherie, and 7-year-old son, Adam Philip.

How managed care stacks up

Tracey Thomas, M.P.H. ’94, works as a research associate at Yale’s School of Public Health. “I never actually left,” jokes Thomas, who is contributing to a study of the variations in managed-care regulations from state to state. Working with faculty members Mark J. Schlesinger, Ph.D., and Karl S. Kronebusch, Ph.D., Thomas is helping to analyze and quantify how a state’s managed-care rules affect physicians’ satisfaction with the managed-care system in that state.

Thomas, who worked as the office manager for U.S. Rep. Bruce Morrison of Connecticut before earning her degree at Yale, says her work fits well with the job of raising three young children, but she misses politics. “I love politics,” says Thomas, who lives in Hamden with her husband, lawyer Marvin Bellis, and children, Morgan, 8, Jack, 5, and Ronan, 2.

A new derm professor, an interest in research

This summer Maryam Asgari, M.D. ’97, joined the faculty of the University of Washington, where she recently completed her residency in dermatology. Concurrently, she has been working toward a master’s in public health in epidemiology, for which she was awarded a fellowship by the Carl J. Herzog Foundation. She plans to continue research on the epidemiology of skin cancers along with clinical-outcomes research.

Asgari lives with her husband, Marc Marchiel, a lawyer, and their son Arman, who turns 1 this fall, in Seattle. By the way, Asgari thinks using Botox for cosmetic reasons is fine. “There are not a lot of things in our armamentarium that are effective and don’t have side effects, so I think it’s a good way to help people feel good about themselves. The patients are happy.”


			Originally published in Yale Medicine, Autumn 2002. Copyright © 2002 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.