From doctor to lawyer—and now the presidency

New alumni leader hopes to build bridges across gender, the generations, and from academe to the community.

When Francis R. Coughlin Jr., M.D. ’52, decided to quit surgery at age 58, he reinvented himself as a medical malpractice lawyer. He gets some grief about it from other physicians, but Coughlin has enjoyed learning how lawyers think. And medicine remains his first love.

As the new president of the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine (AYAM), Coughlin hopes to investigate how medicine can incorporate the needs and perspectives of women, who constitute more than half of the current first-year class at the School of Medicine. Coughlin, who succeeds Past President Gilbert F. Hogan, M.D. ’57, also hopes to strengthen ties between Yale and community hospitals in Connecticut and to foster links between new graduates and older alumni.

Coughlin trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon, taking part in the first open-heart surgeries at Massachusetts General Hospital in the late 1950s. He spent 25 years in private practice in Stamford, Conn., raising eight children with his wife, Barbara Blunt Coughlin, M.D. ’52, a medical school classmate. When a cataract in one eye marred his depth perception in 1985, he left surgery.

Since graduating from the University of Bridgeport School of Law at age 61, Coughlin has consulted with Connecticut attorneys for insurance companies that defend physicians and advised a New York law firm that prosecutes them. He evaluates cases for their merits and plans strategy but does not litigate. Since 1990, he has been vice-chair of the Connecticut Commission on Medico-legal Investigations, which oversees the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. When he became an attorney, Coughlin was intrigued by the different modes of thought used by doctors and lawyers. He says doctors make decisions based on a “convergence of probabilities,” discarding facts that seem irrelevant. Lawyers, on the other hand, “align all the facts in parallel lines of argument—the prosecution argument and the defense argument. ... A lawyer could move from the plaintiff’s side to the defense side and not miss a beat.

“I think of myself as a physician first and always,” says Coughlin, 75. “Medicine is a very fine way to spend a lifetime. It makes a real difference in the lives of people. In the law, in the civil justice system, the remedy for legal wrongs is monetary.” Yet, he adds, “The medical malpractice system is very important, and it is important that it be used properly.”

As AYAM president, Coughlin plans to study how women are affecting medicine. “We are going to have to design the curriculum and develop expectations of physicians based on those who serve as physicians, so let’s find out about the role of women in medicine,” he says. Coughlin believes that women have taught men new approaches to teamwork. From women, he says, “we have learned more and more how we depend on each other. We have learned that it’s important to share information, to arrive at consensus.”

“My vocation is my vacation”

AYAM Vice President Donald E. Moore, M.D. ’81, M.P.H. ’81, practices family medicine in Brooklyn, N.Y., concentrating on diabetes, aids, asthma and hypertension—“the diseases of our population.” He even makes house calls. Moore describes reunions with senior faculty at alumni events as “a contemporary connection to the giants in medicine because they really have a lot of collective wisdom and individual wisdom.” Moore says the old-timers know that medicine has not always been—and will not always be—governed by the “contemporary wisdom” of efficiency above all.

Moore is interested in cultural differences—“how the culture of the individual you’re treating impacts on their health and their care and the relationship you are about to have. It’s very important. ... Half of medicine is an art. That takes time, you know. You can’t push the artist.” Moore enjoys family activities with his wife, Christine Moore, and their two daughters, but otherwise, he says, “my vocation is my vacation.”

Francis M. Lobo, M.D. ’92, AYAM secretary, hasn’t really left New Haven since medical school. He did his residency at Yale and is now an assistant professor of medicine at Yale, doing basic research on gene activation in the immune system. He also works at the Dana Clinic, where he treats patients with allergies and immunological problems.

Lobo considers his Yale classmates “the nicest, smartest, kindest and gentlest people I’ve known.” He says the medical school manages to admit high achievers “who can adapt to an environment in which you’re asked not to compete, but to work together and to help one another, within a mature, graduate school ethic.”

New committee members

New members of the executive committee are Cynthia B. Aten, M.D. ’81; Sharon L. Bonney, M.D. ’76; Joseph F.J. Curi, M.D. ’64; David H. Lippman, M.D. ’71; and Harold R. Mancusi-Ungaro Jr., M.D. ’73, HS ’76.

Aten is a pediatrician who served as chief of undergraduate medicine at Yale for seven years. She is now studying how to augment the treatment of adolescent eating disorders using Reiki, an ancient system of healing touch. As a medical student, Aten appreciated the school’s flexibility, which allowed her to extend her clerkships over two years to see more of her two young children. She lives with her husband, Raymond Aten, in Hamden, Conn.

After studying engineering at Duke, Bonney used the Yale System to get the liberal arts education she’d missed. “I like to say I minored in English in medical school. ... I adore the Yale System and I adore Yale.” Currently at Pfizer in New London, she is running trials of a cardiac drug. Bonney lives in Old Lyme, Conn., with her husband, James Beattie, and has three stepsons.

For 32 years, Curi has taken care of children and teenagers in the small city of Torrington, Conn., practicing solo. He likes preadolescents, “because you can still communicate with them.” He and his wife, Susannah Curi, have four children (two of them Yale College grads). Curi says that “because of the Yale System, I was really able to become a human being,” with time for sports and volunteer work. He’s served the AYAM off and on for 20 years. “Working for Yale is not a chore, believe me,” says Curi.

Lippman has practiced psychiatry for two decades in Great Barrington, Mass. He worked as a doctor in Africa for two years in the mid-70s, and six years ago he and his wife, Honey Sharp Lippman, took their three children around the world (See Books). Lippman valued the noncompetitive atmosphere at Yale. “You were all in it together.”

Mancusi-Ungaro had planned to join his father as a pediatrician in New Jersey until his first clinical rotation, when he observed a surgeon repair a child’s fusion defect of the head. “What I saw was instant gratification,” recalls Mancusi-Ungaro. He was sold on surgery from that moment. Now he does plastic and reconstructive surgery in Beaumont, Texas. A “Texan by choice” (with pickup truck), he does come East to visit his two children at Yale College. “Yale is never out of your bloodstream,” he says.

New representatives to the Association of Yale Alumni are Arthur Ebbert Jr., M.D., and Betty R. Klein, M.D. ’86, HS ’91. Ebbert studied medicine at the University of Virginia and came to Yale in 1953 as an instructor. He served as deputy dean of the medical school beginning in 1973. The AYAM made Ebbert an honorary alumnus when he retired in 1988. He sold his sailboat, Goose, last year, but still sails with friends. Klein is an ophthalmologist in Danbury, Conn., specializing in the retina. She and her husband, Eric Yale Brown, have two children.

A Yale couple, facing polio, found themselves “called to rise”

“The city streets were deserted at 11:30 p.m. It was a balmy spring night in 1945 when my husband, Larry, and I set out for a walk after work [at the New Haven Hospital]. Larry was a surgical intern and I was a student nurse and I had just come off duty on the evening shift.”

So begins Called to Rise: A Journey Through Disability, Madeleine Crowley’s memoir about a life changed by polio. A little more than three years after this spring stroll, she lay gravely ill in the hospital where she had worked, fearing for her life and for the future of her husband, a 1944 graduate of the School of Medicine, and their two-year-old son. In the months and years that followed her hospitalization on Thanksgiving Day 1948, Crowley overcame most of the obstacles presented by the disease. She decided to write the book, published last May by Western Book/Journal Press in Reno, Nev., to inspire others with disabilities.

Lawrence and Madeleine Crowley met as students on the medical ward on Fitkin 1 during the war years. In mid-November 1948, their only child, Lawrence Jr., became infected with the polio virus but recovered fully. Madeleine’s case was much more serious. After a week of intermittent consciousness, she awoke to discover that she had lost the use of her arms and legs. Despite several weeks of difficult breathing, she managed to avoid the iron lung, and early the next year began rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Ga., in a hospital designed by its most famous patient, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The book’s title refers to a line in the first stanza of an Emily Dickinson poem: “We never know how high we are/Till we are called to rise;/And then, if we are true to plan,/Our statures touch the skies.” During that balmy spring walk in 1945, Madeleine Crowley told her husband that she wanted to live life to the fullest, and it was a promise that she kept. She regained partial use of her limbs and learned to walk on crutches before post-polio syndrome required her to use a wheelchair years later. She gave birth to two more children, Suzanne and Stephen, and ran the household as the family moved first to California, then Wisconsin. When the children grew up and left home, she went back to work, first as a hospital volunteer, then as a career counselor.

From time to time, she said in a phone interview from her home in Cupertino, Calif., “I would feel a flood of sadness come over me and I’d wish life had been different. But there were so many things I wanted to do and the world was out there waiting. I’d say, ‘Oh the heck with it. I’m not going to let it stop me.’ ”

The same was true for her husband, who thrived despite the initial interruption in his career as an academic surgeon. Lawrence Crowley, M.D. ’44, HS ’51, scrambled to find a fellowship at Emory while Madeleine was in Warm Springs, then returned to Yale for two years to serve on the faculty. In 1953, the harsh New England winters drove the family to the easier climate and lifestyle of California, and Lawrence briefly left academic medicine for private practice in Los Angeles. Before long he joined the faculty at Stanford, rising to become dean of the medical school and vice president of the university. From 1974 to 1978, he served as dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

“It turned out to be a very wise move,” Lawrence Crowley said of the difficult decision to leave New Haven. “If things had been different, I might well have stayed at Yale and still be there today. But Madeleine was much more independent in California. And we had a great time.”

Notes

1940s

John L. Cannon, M.D. ’47, of West Simsbury, Conn., who retired from active practice in 1998, writes to say that his 43-year-old daughter, Cecily, a paramedic and firefighter, entered the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine in Biddeford, Maine, in August. He also has two sons: Jack, who works in the Hartford office of the New York investment firm Roosevelt & Cross Inc., and Andy, who teaches marketing at the University of South Alabama. Cannon has nearly completed the restoration of a 50-year-old wooden sailboat and writes that he has two others yet to do, as well as other projects too numerous to mention.

1950s

Dean Emeritus Gerard N. Burrow, M.D. ’58, HS ’66, has been named president and CEO of the Sea Research Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that oversees Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration. Burrow will work to extend the foundation’s mission of “education and research, with entertainment at the center” by supporting new technologies to bring the experience of the sea to people on land. Burrow was an intern and resident in internal medicine at Yale, and a fellow here in endocrinology. He served on the Yale faculty before becoming the Sir John and Lady Eaton Professor and chair of medicine at the University of Toronto, then vice chancellor and dean of the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. Burrow was dean of the Yale School of Medicine from 1992 to 1997.

1970s

George J. Dohrmann, M.D., Ph.D., HS ’78, a neurosurgeon at the University of Chicago Medical Center and a member of the faculty at the Brain Research Institute in Chicago, received the 2001 Bucy Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to neurosurgical education, both nationally and internationally. The award honors teacher and neurosurgeon Paul C. Bucy, M.D., who lived from 1904 to 1992. Bucy collaborated on research in neurophysiology with John Fulton, M.D., at Yale before returning to Chicago, where he led the neurosurgery departments at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

This fall Donald L. Kent, M.D. ’72, HS ’76, of Great Neck, N.Y., encountered symptoms never seen before in his nearly three decades as an otolaryngologist. Beginning a week after the trauma of September 11, a total of nine New York firefighters who had been part of the rescue operation in Lower Manhattan presented in his Long Island office with “a sandpaper-like inflammation” of the airways. The injuries did not seriously impair breathing, and they dissipated after several days of moisturizing therapy to reverse the effects of smoke and cement dust. “Let us hope,” Kent writes in an e-mail to Yale Medicine, “that no physician sees these physical occurrences again!”

Lawrence V. Meagher Jr., M.P.H. ’76, of Garland, Texas, president and CEO of International Hospital Corporation, was selected as a 2001 Wheeling Jesuit University (WJU) Distinguished Alumnus for his work in bringing health care to Third World countries. He is co-founder of the Dallas-based company, which specializes in developing and managing acute-care hospitals and other health services in Mexico and Latin America. Meagher said “lessons learned at WJU were central to [his] approach today—a concern for people and energy, persistence and integrity, in an atmosphere of constant challenge to the status quo.”

1980s

The Tulane University Health Sciences Center has named Tyler Curiel, M.D., M.P.H., HS ’86, as the new chief of the section of hematology-oncology at its school of medicine. Curiel, who holds the Henderson Chair in Medicine at Tulane, studied medicine at Duke and public health at Harvard and completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at Yale. He has an interest in developing therapies for cancers and infectious diseases by boosting the body’s immune system. He holds four patents and has more pending for novel therapies in these areas.

Also in Alumni:

From doctor to lawyer—and now the presidency  |  A Yale couple, facing polio, found themselves “called to rise”  |  Alumni notes

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