Fredric Cantor, YC ’58, MD ’62, has traveled the world as a volunteer, giving of his time and talents on four continents. For the Yale Alumni Service Corps, he traveled to Brazil, China, Ghana, India, and South Africa to plan or assist with health-related projects—for example, organizing clinics in remote locations and connecting villagers with medical facilities that can take over when the volunteers leave.
One of his most memorable volunteer experiences was with his late wife, Jane, on a trip to Namibia in southern Africa. The Cantors teamed up with a group of veterinarians working for the AfriCat Foundation who were evaluating the health of a population of cheetahs on a game preserve and researching a puzzling outbreak of gastritis that occurred among the animals.
“We were glad to be able to participate,” Cantor recalls. “Jane became the assistant to a dentist treating cheetahs. I was an assistant to the anesthesiologist putting these animals to sleep in order to perform gastroscopies.
You never know where your Yale education will take you."
A lifetime of curiosity
For Cantor, who was raised in Waterbury, Conn., that kind of opening of doors was the product of his years at Yale College and Yale School of Medicine (YSM) from 1954 to 1962. “We believe in my family that one does not go to college to learn a trade, though you can certainly do that. The real reason is to learn how to learn, to be educated.” As a premed undergrad, he had the opportunity to study history and Shakespeare, and as a medical student, he enjoyed the freedom of the Yale System, which emphasizes self-directed learning over a preoccupation with exams and grades. Those years prepared him for a life of continued discovery, and it bolstered his desire to follow his curiosity, often in unexpected directions.
“It was such an incredibly friendly place and so devoid of pressure, just like Dean [Milton] Winternitz had envisioned when he started the Yale System in the 1920s,” Cantor remembers. “Unlike some of my college classmates who went to medical schools where they had quizzes every couple of weeks and the results were posted on the board—we didn’t have any of that. We didn’t feel like we were competing with each other. We were just there to learn.”
After leaving New Haven, Cantor trained in medicine and neurology at two Harvard hospitals—Beth Israel and Massachusetts General—and served in the Navy in Alaska before settling in metropolitan Washington, D.C. He was recruited to the faculty at Georgetown, moved to private practice for a time, then joined the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in 2005. Throughout his career he developed expertise in multiple sclerosis (MS) and chronic pain, as well as other neurological conditions, and engaged in research, teaching, and clinical work. He founded and chaired a professional advisory committee for the local chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society and led an MS advisory committee for the Veterans Administration.
Boost for medical students
Now, at age 89—Cantor fully retired from his post at the NIH only a few months ago—he has added philanthropy to his resume of service to Yale. He has made a major gift to establish a scholarship for medical students, bringing YSM closer to its goal of eliminating debt for students with financial need. Invested in the Yale Endowment, the gift will produce income each year sufficient to fund one or more students receiving financial aid. It also qualified Cantor for membership in Sterling Fellows, Yale’s honorary society recognizing the university’s most loyal and generous benefactors.
Cantor named the fund not after himself but for the Cantor family. His brother, Edward H. Cantor, is an attorney who graduated with the Yale College Class of 1961 and has been instrumental in class fundraising for Yale Cancer Center; he was also president of the Yale Club of New Haven. Ed’s late wife, Miriam, earned a master’s degree in anthropology in 2009. Fred’s daughter, Julie C. Cantor-Weinberg, graduated with the College class of 1989 and serves as a health policy consultant in Washington. She served on the Alumni Schools Committee of the Yale Club of Washington, D.C. Fred’s mother, Sophie Kramer Cantor, was the first in her family to attend college and studied music at Yale in the 1920s.
The Cantor Family Scholarship will have a preference for medical students who are interested in the health and social problems affecting North American indigenous peoples. Cantor chose this focus after observing during his travels that native peoples often were shunted aside and overlooked by their societies. He hopes that by supporting students interested in examining those challenges, the Cantor Family Scholarship may lead to change.
The next chapter
Now that he is fully retired and approaching his 90th birthday, Cantor has more time to pursue his varied interests. He loves music—he played clarinet and alto saxophone in the Yale Precision Marching Band as an undergraduate—along with travel, reading, and spending time with friends and family members, including two grandchildren. He plays tennis several times a week and recently added weightlifting to his routine. In late November, he was preparing for a five-day trip to New Haven for the Yale Alumni Association (YAA) Assembly and Yale Alumni Fund Convocation, which he has attended most years for the past three decades. His volunteer work for Yale dates back to the mid-1950s, when he was organizing blood drives at the College, and has included stints at the medical school as a class agent for the YSM Alumni Fund, member of the executive committee of the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine (AYAM), class reunion chair, and AYAM committee member. In 2017, he was recognized with the AYAM’s Distinguished Alumni Service Award.
His volunteer work and his philanthropy have brought more joy than anything. “I developed such wonderful friendships at the medical school and then when I got to the Alumni Service Corps, I met another bunch of friends, from all different disciplines,” he says. “It wasn’t so much that I was doing work, because I was getting so much out of it. I was getting easily as much out of it as anything I was giving.”