The Class of 1961 enjoyed a wonderful 50th reunion dinner at the Quinnipiack Club. Here’s updates from the class:
Cassidy, Eugene: I have been retired for 12 years; went half-time at age 50. Now lead a quiet life. We were an apathetic class—never even got a graduation photo taken. Apathy is good. Regarding present day medical care—we are like leathery orange peels. Can pontificate, but no one gives a damn.
Frank, Robert: First of all, I want to say that Karni and I enjoyed the reunion immensely. What made it so enjoyable was that our relatively small group, from what had been a very small medical school class (and Dean Alpern made it clear that YMS would lose its character if it did not continue to have a small student body), had the opportunity to have several gatherings for personal conversations over the weekend, renewing the camaraderie that was such an important part of our medical school education. I can respond separately on the issues we discussed dealing with health care in America: an important topic, but one that won't be solved readily, even if Bernie is elected president (which he clearly won't be). There are issues in this country—control of firearms is another—that demand solutions. The solutions are obvious, but they are solutions that too many people, or lobbies, or whatever refuse to put into action. How we as citizens, and as senior physicians, can help to enable progress in these areas is a difficult problem that a single email won't solve, but that's for lengthy future discussions and considerations and letters to Congress and working on political campaigns, etc. But that's not the subject of this letter. I so want to say a few personal words about myself. I haven't retired yet, but the thought is increasingly imposing itself on Karni's, and my, thoughts. After medical school and a straight medicine internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, I did two years of research fellowship at Johns Hopkins, followed by three years of ophthalmology residency there. After that, I spent four years as a staff member at the newly formed (in 1970) National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health. There, I combined clinical research on diseases of the retina (mostly diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration) and basic research on photoreceptor biochemistry, which started in college and continued through my YSM research project. But eventually, I focused on basic and clinical work and clinical trials in diabetic retinopathy. I'm pleased to say that I've had a small part in the very considerable progress that has been made in that field. After four years at NIH I moved to Wayne State University in Detroit, where I had gotten a very nice offer. I've been there for 40 years as of this summer. I've held full professorial rank since 1980 and since 1999 I've held an endowed chair in the Department of Ophthalmology, and also a chair in the Department of Anatomy/Cell Biology. My research efforts have drifted to a close and I'm now seeing many fewer patients, but I still find myself reviewing research grant applications and manuscripts submitted to various journals but that, too, has got to stop. Karni's and my greatest pleasure now is our large family: four children and their "significant others," and 10 grandchildren. Three of our four children became physicians (two of whom are in the academic world), and one is a lawyer (a federal prosecutor, no less). I'm attaching a photo of our whole crew (together with the British parents-in-law of our older daughter), assembled last summer (2015) at a castle in Ireland where we all stayed for a very delightful week. Although we all got to talk a great deal at the reunion last weekend, Karni and I would certainly enjoy hearing about everyone else's activities now and over the years since graduation.
Houghton, Mary Alice: I’m gradually retiring from practicing adult psychiatry. I hope to reduce my office time to two days a week as of July 1, and maybe one day by the end of the year. We’ll see. Bill and I have been married 52 years this month. We have three children: Shelagh, 48, a 1990 graduate of Yale College, and a 1996 graduate of Yale School of Medicine, now living in Indianapolis with her anesthesiologist husband and three children of her own; Gabriel, 45, a lawyer, married with one child; and Gillian, 38, teaches high school English, married with two children). Both Gabe and Gillian live in Milwaukee, so we get to see them often. We have gotten quite involved in the disastrous state of mental illness treatment for the chronically ill here in Milwaukee and hope to have some small influence on how that is managed in the future. Currently, my favorite leisure time activities are: conversation, reading, gardening, and cooking. I’m a so-so gardener and quite a good cook.
Spouse (Bill Houghton, MD)
I don’t think you need my bio stuff (retired psychiatrist), but as a spouse I’m glad to say that your informal discussion of universal healthcare was terrific!! “Informal” is often better than ‘formal,’ and I was struck with the way many of the ‘66-ers came ablaze with thoughts about the financing of medical care. I got the impression that decades of watching and participating convinced these experienced docs that medicine is basically a charitable activity, not primarily commercial (sure, there should be some financial recompense, but it’s swung too far in that direction). Certainly it would be difficult to implement universal health care. We undoubtedly won’t live to see it, but it was refreshing to hear it discussed. Our American Psychiatric Association does not mention the subject. It was brave and enterprising of you to bring it up. I think it would be quite satisfying for the citizens to have overheard the discussion. I hope you, others, and me doing my bit can sneak it into the public dialogue.
Koss, Keal: Like everyone else, I entered internship (surgery) along with Medicare and the hordes did not arrive, although the hospital was prepared, and Medicare has survived, although I find it much more satisfying to receive care under the system than to provide it at drastically reduced rates. I was at Presbyterian in New York during that year, then two years in the Public Health Service in Washington, D.C., at a lab where our main project was computer analysis of EKG. So my knowledge of computers did keep me out of Vietnam. In 1969, I returned to Yale for a general surgery residency and met Tom Krizek, who had recently arrived to chair the new plastic surgery section. His charm, intelligence, and teaching ability convinced me to switch to plastic surgery. I became his first resident and I was able to combine the two residencies and save a year, finishing in 1974. I was able to sit for both boards which was a nice feature of the combined program. I remained on the faculty for the next four years and then decided to go into practice in California, a place I had always wanted to live. I had family in Los Angeles and my mother actually grew up there and went to Hollywood High School. Moving to California is a big shock to the system, but we got used to it and now can't imagine living anywhere else. We are in Palos Verdes, a beautiful suburb to the south of Los Angeles, not quite to Long Beach. I practiced plastic surgery in Torrance until retirement in 2004. I had also been on the clinical faculty at UCLA and spent time with residents at Harbor General Hospital. I was fortunate to be able to do the full spectrum of plastic surgery, and even ran our burn unit for several years until we hired someone full time. Since retirement from the practice, I dusted off the general surgery certificate and help in the OR with general surgery procedures, learning laparoscopic techniques along the way. It keeps me just busy enough, but not too much. Other hobbies include tennis, photography and I'm still into computers!
Thea and I got married in 1964 and spent our first two years in the married students' dorm (which seems to be all offices now). We had our first child in 1967 in New York, then in 1969, in Virginia, and the final in New Haven in 1972. We are fortunate that all three of them have chosen to remain in the Los Angeles area, so we see them and the five grandchildren often.
Kotler, Stuart: After leaving Yale in 1966, I entered the general surgery program at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York. Unfortunately, I developed dishidrosis, an eczema of the hands that is debilitating for a surgeon. After consultation with Aaron Lerner at Yale, I switched to radiology.
Following a two-year interlude with the U.S. Army at Ft. Myer, Va., I entered the radiology program at Albert Einstein. Four years later, I was in private practice in Perth Amboy, N.J., the sixth member of a small hospital-based group. I have been fortunate to live through a golden age of growth and innovation in medicine and particularly radiology. I started as a general radiologist, performing x-ray interpretation, basic fluoroscopy, radiation therapy, and the then developing fields of nuclear medicine and diagnostic angiography. All of our radiologists were interchangeable, as everyone did everything (the days of the giants). Over the next 40 years there were seismic changes in the science and structure of radiology. The new modalities of ultrasound, CT scanning, MRI, and interventional radiology completely changed our specialty. No longer could a radiologist remain proficient in all branches of our specialty. This led to sub-specialization and sub-sub specialization. At the end, I subspecialized in mammography and breast disease. Imaging studies were interpreted digitally on computers, rather than x-ray film. Computerized voice recognition systems replaced dictation and typists. Reports were instantly faxed to referrers' offices, rather than personal face-to-face consultation. Our six-man local practice grew to well over 100 radiologists, covering almost one half of the state. We had an overseas division in Israel to cover night call. Our mom and pop physician-managed practice became a large corporation, with professional management. Now I have been retired for two and a half years. Sheila and I divide our time between Monroe Township, N.J. and Boca Raton, Fl. Our three daughters are grown, married, and each has presented us with two wonderful grandchildren, three boys and three girls. I believe that Sheila and I have the distinction of being the only class members who have had a child attend Yale School of Medicine. Our oldest daughter, Lisa, graduated in 1993. She is a child psychiatrist and serves as the medical director of the NYU Child Study Center in North Jersey. Our two younger daughters went in a different direction, each attending Harvard Law School. Meredith is a partner at the Cleary, Gottlieb law firm in Manhattan and Sarah is the Chief Freedom of Information Officer at the FDA in Bethesda, MD. Sheila and I had a wonderful time at our 50th Reunion. It was nostalgic to revisit our first married home in Harkness Hall. We enjoyed reconnecting with old friends and classmates. We definitely plan to see everyone again at our 55th Reunion.
Melish, John and Marian: Like most of our classmates we value our experiences at Yale which set us up for still satisfying careers and gave us a benchmark for quality in academic medicine.We were married in our second year at Yale, John having come from a French major at Harvard and Marian from an English major at Middlebury. We both found our thesis experiences at Yale to be formative for our later interests and pursuits.John did atherosclerosis research with Dr. Levin Waters and Marian was privileged to work in Dr. Fred Kantor’s lab developing animal models of streptococcal infection in rats and rabbits and studying their immune responses.
Fate and the Match Program sent us to the University of Rochester which surprised us because like most New Yorkers and New Englanders we had no desire to ever go west of the Hudson River. Nevertheless, we found the experiences in Medicine and Pediatrics excellent for our further education and we did fellowships there as well.John continued his interest in atherosclerosis research in Endocrinology and Metabolism.Marian used her animal model experience at Yale in discovering a new staphylococcal toxin and defining the Staphylococcal Scalded Skin Syndrome during her Pediatric Infectious Disease fellowship.
By an odd quirk of fate the US Army and the Berry Plan sent John to Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu after first refusing him an Officer commission due to our anti-Vietnam War activities.Tripler was the best possible place in the Army Medical Corps for a newly minted endocrinologist and shielded him from direct contact with the war effort.Marian joined the University of Hawai‘i Medical School as it transitioned from a 2 year School of Medical Sciences to a 4 year MD granting institution.She became their first Pediatric Infectious Disease specialist and right away began seeing Kawasaki Disease which had never been described outside of Japan at that time.Kawasaki Disease has become her constant fixation since that time and is now recognized everywhere throughout the world.As with Yale Medical School, Marian and John fell in love with Hawai’i and after a three-year interlude in San Diego were thrilled to bring the family back to the Aloha State.
Currently we are still intrigued and amazed by the challenges that Medicine and the Medical School offer us.John runs the Clinical Skills program for the Medical School and clinical trials in diabetes care as well as a small practice in Endocrinology.Marian is still studying Kawasaki Disease and is now seeing and studying the impact of the Zika virus which is endemic in the Pacific Islands south and west of us.
We have 4 children: Heather, an architect in Los Angeles, Matt, a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines, Paul a builder in the San Francisco Bay area and Sara, working for a solar energy company also in the Bay area.These 4 come with 6 grandchildren aged 8 to 6 months.Fortunately, the lure of Hawai‘i and our pristine Kailua Beach bring them home often.We now have a large and comparatively empty house and would welcome any classmates to stay in our house and use it as their base to enjoy O‘ahu.We did enjoy our reunion and would truly love to see any of our classmates at any time.
Moores, William: Following my graduation from Yale, I went to Ann Arbor, Michigan where I completed eight years of postgraduate work at the University of Michigan in general and thoracic surgery.Immediately following my residency, I went into the Army and was fortunate to serve four years at the Letterman Army Institute of Research at the Presidio of San Francisco.
Perhaps inspired by the wonderful academic environment at Yale, I took a position at the University of California, San Diego.I enjoyed all three aspects of the academic life with participation in teaching, research and clinical practice.A change in the leadership of the cardiothoracic program at UCSD prompted a change in our location with a return to San Francisco and a position with an emerging cardiovascular surgery program at Kaiser, San Francisco.
This phase of my career ended after 10 years when, as a “whistleblower,” I helped expose a plan to certify that Kaiser’s chief of cardiovascular surgery was a fully privileged cardiovascular surgeon, even though a peer review committee had restricted his operating privileges. This surgeon worked out a deal to quietly resign and take a job in Wisconsin if Kaiser would abort the peer review, not report his practice restrictions to the medical board of California, and certify to the Wisconsin hospital that he was a fully privileged surgeon whose competence had never been questioned. For the better part of two decades, since my firing from Kaiser in 1999, I have been involved in litigation both with Kaiser and the medical board.
What has kept me sane during all of this time is my ability to pursue my passion for listening to and playing classical music. My four years at Yale were pivotal for this significant part of my life.While a medical student I participated in two string quartets, one that included Philip Bondy as our cellist, and one that included two classmates (Bob Bazemore and Peter Gibbons), as well as the spouse of another classmate (Linda Mourelatos, now Linda Open).An additional Yale musical plus was that I was able to take weekly lessons from the Yale cello professor, Aldo Parisot and through his efforts I was also able to attend the Yale School of Music and Art at Norfolk during the summer of 1964.
While I am no longer a practicing cardiothoracic surgeon, I have combined both medicine and the classical humanities in a non-profit venture that promotes wellness, and the creative aspects of the humanities.We have a website at: http://apolloacademy.org. In the summer of 1965, I was married to my wife Margaret.We have one son, Bradley, an attorney in San Diego, and this past year Margaret and I had our 50th anniversary. Our son remains unmarried and without children, so we can’t yet join so many of you in sharing the joy of being grandparents.
Robbins, Anthony: When I graduated from YSM in June 1966, I had little idea where my career in medicine would lead. I had matched for a good internship in internal medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and planned to do two years to get some clinical experience. As luck would have it, based on a recommendation from Dick Weinerman, my thesis advisor at Yale, my wife ended up working in the dean’s office at Harvard Medical School, helping to set up the country’s first university-based prepaid group practice–Harvard Community Health Plan. I ended up in a health services research fellowship at the Harvard Center for Community Health and Medical Care, working with Rashi Fein on what we called health manpower issues (workforce, today). In 1970, I took a job at McGill in Montreal, determined to learn how to operate a national (or provincial) health insurance program. After all, national health insurance in the United States was just around the corner! I returned to the United States and Vermont in 1972 to work with Jack Wennberg and Alan Gittelsohn at the Regional Medical Program. Less than a year later, after the Democrats had captured the governorship, I became the Vermont State Health Commissioner (still the best job I ever had). In 1976, I moved to Colorado to run the state health department, but my political roots were forever planted in Vermont. I survived a firestorm around my hiring of a friend from Yale, John Froines, an acquitted member of the Chicago Seven, to run the occupational health division. When President Carter, and his Secretary of Health Education and Welfare replaced the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, I was selected and moved to D.C. It was a short stint running a national research institute, as the new President Reagan fired me promptly at the urging of the Chamber of Commerce–my mistake apparently was to believe in protecting workers. While investigating my firing from NIOSH, Chairman John Dingell of the House Energy and Commerce Committee offered me the job of professional staff member for health for the full committee. From my focus on workers and the environment, I reverted to being a health generalist, and stayed in the job for six years. Vaccines captured my attention as I linked molecular biology and genetic engineering (my undergraduate interests) to policies to develop new vaccines and public health efforts to prevent additional diseases. My firing had also resulted in my election as president of the American Public Health Association. With the death of my wife, and both boys enrolled at Harvard College, I moved to a job in environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health. In 1993, I returned to Washington in the Clinton Administration to run the National Vaccine Program that was created by legislation I helped draft. Caught in a typical government bind—I didn’t want to move to Atlanta with my program—I found myself jumping at the job of editing Public Health Reports on the condition I could move its office to Boston. It worked and I found out how much I enjoyed being an editor—both of my parents had started out in life as journalists. I exiled myself from government in 1999, and became the chair in public health at Tufts University School of Medicine. But I guess I wasn’t meant to be an academic administrator. I stepped down in 2003 and not long after my wife, Phyllis Freeman, and I became the co-editors of the Journal of Public Health Policy, a global quarterly. I had started medical school at Yale following a summer working in laboratories in Paris and returned to Paris after my first year. I love the city. Now, with no “day jobs,” Phyllis and I have a little pied-a-terre close to the Seine and spend about four or five months each year based in Paris. I feel ridiculously privileged.
- William Moores