“Pay attention to what is inside,” Commencement speaker urges Class of 2000

Richard Belitsky, M.D., remembers the day during his residency that he had to change the dressings on a badly burned boy. “If you are my doctor, why are you hurting me?” the boy asked him, and for Belitsky, the question opened an emotional vein. “I burst into tears,” he recalled in May, standing at the podium at the Class of 2000’s Commencement exercises. “The attending came over. He wanted to console me. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘if you are going to be a doctor you just can’t let it get to you like that.’”

Belitsky, now an associate clinical professor of psychiatry and the students’ choice as Commencement speaker, had different advice for the 111 graduating physicians.

“I wish he had said, ‘Richard, you are a doctor, of course you feel that way. We all feel that way sometimes,’” Belitsky told his audience. “You are going to feel these extraordinary things: fear, wonder, thrills, excitement, even terror, sadness, exhilaration. Whatever it is you feel, I want you to hear a voice inside that says, ‘You are a doctor, of course you feel way. We all feel that way sometimes.’”

He urged the new physicians to maintain their spiritual equilibrium by staying in touch with their own hearts and reaching into the hearts of their patients. Talking to patients, he said, will help in their treatment. “It is through the telling of your stories and the listening to the stories of others that you will form the relationships that will allow you to bring your own individual humanity into this work.”

In his closing words he offered more advice. “Take a vacation,” he said. “And I don’t just mean go on a vacation. A vacation is not a time to get caught up on journal reading. It is not a time to write grants. Take a book you’ve been dying to read and, more importantly, take your loved ones with you. Pay attention to what is inside. It is what makes you you.”

The following prizes were awarded to School of Medicine faculty and students at Commencement:

Bohmfalk Prize
Michael J. Caplan, M.D., Ph.D. ’87, professor of cellular and molecular physiology and George Lister Jr., M.D., professor of pediatrics

Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey Humanism in Medicine Faculty Award
Nancy R. Angoff, M.P.H. ’81, M.D. ’90, HS ’93, associate dean for student affairs

Leah M. Lowenstein Prize
Robert H. Gifford, HS ’67, professor of medicine and Lynn Tanoue, M.D., associate professor of medicine

Francis Gilman Blake Award
Richard Belitsky, M.D., associate clinical professor of psychiatry

Betsy Winters House Staff Award
Judd W. Landsberg, M.D., chief resident in medicine

Parker Prize
Karin L. Andersson

Miriam Kathleen Dasey Award
Royce C. Lin

Norma Bailey Berniker Prize
Azita G. Hamedani

Dean’s Prize for Community Service
Tanya E. Smith

Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey Humanism in Medicine Student Award
Joanna B. Sheinfeld

Campbell Prize
Julie A. Davis

Perkins Prize
Julie V. Schaffer and Sereena C. Tamburri Coombes

Merck Book Awards
Elizabeth V. Harrold and Masha Huseinovic

Lange Book Award
Patricia Nez Henderson

M.D./Ph.D. Award
Amy Y. Jan

Connecticut Society of the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Prize
Leslie R. Boyd

New England Pediatric Society Prize
Lisa R. Eiland

Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Award
Arvind Venkat

Connecticut Chapter of American College of Surgeons Prize
Jose M. Prince

Peter A.T. Grannum Award
Leslie R. Boyd

Lauren Weinstein Award
Jakub Svoboda

Connecticut Academy of Family Physicians Award
Angela J. Rubineau

Endocrine Society Medical Student Achievement Award
Megan C. Lisska

The Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed Award
Dirk C. Johnson

ACP-ASIM Internal Medicine Award
Maya J. Salameh

National Health Service Corps Certificate of Recognition
Leslie R. Boyd and Jennifer B. Griffiths

Idealism, inequity and public health

As a young woman in her native India, Geeta Rao Gupta saw her dream of graduate studies in the United States dashed because of her gender. The men who ran the scholarship program told her she would be a poor investment; she would probably marry, have children and stop working. “I had lost a chance to pursue graduate studies because I was a woman,” said Gupta, who now holds a Ph.D. and heads the International Center for Research on Women, a Washington-based non-profit organization that studies the roles women play in developing countries.

Discrimination against women around the world is a public health concern, Gupta said in her Commencement address to the School of Public Health Class of 2000. Women of color between the ages of 15 and 25 are at greatest risk for HIV/AIDS, she said. Ailments related to pregnancy and childbirth claim half a million women each year, despite knowledge of how to prevent such deaths. And domestic violence is a “devastating reality” in the lives of women around the world. “Clearly there is an unequal power balance in society,” she said, “a power balance that is determined by gender as much as by class, race and other identities.”

Gupta urged the new graduates not only to recognize but also to attempt to redress these social inequities. “They will undermine your work unless you incorporate them into your analyses and interventions,” she said. To achieve this, Gupta argued that idealism is essential. She suggested that public health workers’ efforts subscribe to three truths. “The first truth is that empowerment of women, the poor and minorities is not a zero-sum game,” she said. “More power to one does not mean less power to others. More power to one means more power to all.

“The second truth is that cultural and social structures are not cast in stone. When cultural practices cause health damage, they must be adapted, changed, or even cleverly co-opted. To feel, for example, that female circumcision is a cultural practice that must be tolerated because the culture cannot be changed, is unacceptable.

“The third truth: Remember that individuals in communities, no matter how disempowered or marginalized, are actors and agents of change in the drama of their lives. If you include them, if you take the time to listen with humility, if you do not presume to know, you will be rewarded with rich insights and new realizations.”

Gupta’s emphasis on the idealism fundamental to public health echoed that of student speaker Jacob Harley Creswell. “So what is public health?” he asked. “The question could be, ‘What isn’t?’ There are so many different fields we will be entering, so many ways to improve health, no matter how daunting a task this may seem. … Over the last 21 months we have heard all kinds of stories, some saddening, some uplifting, some horrifying and some enlightening. We have learned about death and disease. We know what the world has to offer, and yet if I didn’t believe the world could be healthy, I would not be here.”

The School of Public Health awarded master’s degrees to the 123 members of the Class of 2000, and one doctor of public health degree. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences awarded 12 doctor of philosophy degrees.

The following prizes were awarded to faculty and students of the School of Public Health at Commencement:

Award for Excellence in Teaching
Susan T. Mayne, Ph.D.

Dean’s Prize for Outstanding Thesis
Artemio Miguel Jongco III, for Gonorrhea and Chlamydia Screening Among Jail Entrants in Rhode Island

Rowena Kerrebrock Richter, for A Public Health Analysis of Herbal Medicine in the U.S.

Kelly Jen-Yi Yu, for Patterns of Comorbidity and Familial Aggregation of Cocaine Abusers

The Courtlandt Van Rensselaer Creed Award
Kathryn Ann Finney

Wilbur G. Downs International Health Student Travel Fellowships
Jacob Harley Creswell, Erik Hett, Laura Anne Krech, Pamela A. Matson, Douglas Andrew Newton, Hilary Elizabeth Rosen and Shilpa Sayana

E. Richard Weinerman Fellowships
Subuhi Asheer, Nita B. Bellare, Rebecca A. Dodge, Kathryn Ann Finney, Nisha Gupta, Reshma Rani Mahendra, Benjamin K.S. Piper, Angela Denise Rogers, Gina N. Shin, Vivian Faye Wu and Alexander S. Zusman

Union School of Public Health China Internships
Amy L. Arnold and Eugene E. Lee