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Challenge
for the eyes, even young ones I received the new Yale Medicine [Autumn 2001] yesterday, and the new format is nice. I would like to say, however, that the type is a little small. It is bad enough for me, a member of the Class of 2000. I can only imagine how blurry it must appear for your alumni who have lost the ability to accommodate. John Mahoney,
M.D. ’00 A classmate remembered, I remember Donald Cohen [In memoriam, Autumn 2001]. I recall our first meeting. September 1962. By the democracy of the alphabet, Donald and I were teamed for the first year on that special experience, our own corpse. We got on well. Donald was serious, but with dry humor. It came out that he was quietly religious, but took his Judaism with reservations and gentle banter. I had waved goodbye to the Pope a long time ago. Donald gave a shrug (he was good at shrugging) and never tried to sell me his package. From day one, Donald was interested in psychiatry, especially child psychiatry. I had a flirtation with shrinkery, and there was an informal student interest group, where we further met. The psychiatry department was then heavily into psychoanalysis; I decided I did not need more religion. In our final year as students, we met again on a general surgery rotation. Our resident, Nicholas Passarelli, M.D. ’59, was really cool and sharp. Dr. Nick immediately realized Donald and I did not have the “right stuff” to be surgeons, but as long as we worked hard and did not sass, we got along fine. For some reason we all decided, in that era of overhead paging, that Dr. Nick needed two Irish assistants. And for six weeks Don Cohen was “Dr. Quinn.” Like some 19th-century cavalryman in Austria-Hungary, I drifted to the fringes of empire, never to be heard from; remembered only by the alumni fund. Donald returned to the citadel in New Haven. Periodically, I saw mention of his work and growing academic rank. It gave a measure of reflected glory, for once we had been students in medicine and young, in rites of passage, together. We met briefly at class reunions. To my surprise, he was not at Reunion 35 earlier this year. His final illness explains the lapse. Tomorrow I go on a long auto trip. The audio book Swann’s Way from Remembrance of Things Past goes with me. I shall remember Donald and things past. … Eugene Cassidy,
M.D. ’66, HS ’68, FW ’70 A reminder of words
from Though tired after replacing a hip and intertrochanteric fracture that afternoon and evening, I was surprised to see an excerpt from my long-ago article—An African Summer—in the Winter 1966 issue of Yale Medicine. My only concern was seeing the article being carried in the Archives section [Autumn 2001]. Instead of an excerpt from my article, I was expecting something from the 1740s. But I’m flattered just the same. Your fellow archivist, Robert L.
McRoberts, M.D. ’66
From the editor New paths, new knowledge Ten years ago, when I was editing Karen Schmidt’s articles at the small newspaper where we both worked, I wouldn’t have guessed that someday I’d be fielding her dispatches from Africa. But life’s events brought me to Yale as an editor in 1994, and a few years later Karen enrolled as a master’s degree candidate here at the School of Public Health. Now she is living in Kenya and working for a nonprofit organization devoted to AIDS prevention. As her career has shifted full-speed into international health, Karen has retained her reporter’s eye; she has both a knack for quick-sighted observations and a gift for articulating them with style and a sense of humor. Her cover story—the second in the “Letter from …” series that debuted last spring with Sharon Chekijian’s report from Armenia—offers a glimpse of life in a major African city and a look at the challenges facing health professionals trying to stem the global advance of HIV. Also probing unexplored territory this issue are the Yale scientists pushing the boundaries of microarray technology in search of new therapies [“Targeting Cancer by Subtype”], as well as the alumni and faculty experts who are wrestling with the threat of bioterrorism [“Lessons from Anthrax”]. As with Karen, their sense of intellectual adventure has led them down new paths. All three areas of inquiry promise to make a lasting contribution to medicine and public health around the world. Michael Fitzsousa
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Originally
published in Yale Medicine, Winter 2002.