In Memoriam

Richard N. Abbott, M.D. ’43, died on January 26 in Tilton, N.H. He was 88. Born in Lewiston, Maine, Abbott lived in Gilmanton, N.H., after his retirement in 1987. He completed his internship and residencies at New Haven Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Boston Floating Hospital. Abbott was a captain in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, and served in the Philippine Islands and in the Army of the Occupation in Japan. He was the first pediatrician in Natick, Mass., where he practiced for more than 45 years. During that time he served as the school physician for elementary schools in Natick and Wellesley.

George R. Barnes Jr., M.D. ’47, HS ’50, died on October 22 in Tacoma, Wash., following a short illness. He was 84. After a pediatrics residency, Barnes served in the U.S. Army for five years. He subsequently entered academic medicine, teaching pediatrics at the University of Iowa. An interest in diagnostic medicine led to a second residency in radiology. In 1967 he joined a private practice in Tacoma, practicing radiology. Upon his retirement he joined the faculty at the University of Arizona Medical School in Tucson.

Arnold M. Baskin, M.D., HS ’57, assistant clinical professor of surgery and a sponsor of a lectureship in the Humanities in Medicine at Yale, died on January 9. He was 79. Baskin received his medical degree from Albany Medical College and completed his internship and residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH), where he trained in general surgery and urology. He entered private practice after completing his residency, and he founded the urology practice in New Haven and surrounding areas now known as the Urology Center. Baskin participated in YNHH’s Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World program, which collects opened but unused surgical supplies for distribution to hospitals in the developing world.

Francis L. Black, Ph.D., professor emeritus of epidemiology (microbiology), an expert in the biochemistry of viruses and the third scientist to use the measles vaccine in humans, died on January 27. He was 81. Black was born in Taipei, Taiwan, one of four children of medical missionaries. After receiving his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, Black completed a research fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation Laboratories and a postdoctoral fellowship under Joseph L. Melnick, Ph.D. ’39, a founder of modern virology, at the School of Medicine. Black went on to become a virologist at the Laboratory of Hygiene in Ottawa. In 1955, he returned to Yale to the departments of microbiology and epidemiology and public health, where he remained for 41 years.

Maurice L. Bogdonoff, M.D. ’52, died on January 15 in Wheaton, Ill., of complications from esophageal cancer. He was 80. Born in Chicago in 1926, Bogdonoff grew up in Connecticut. He took two years off from Tufts University to serve in the U.S. Navy in the Philippines during World War II. After graduating from the School of Medicine with top honors, he spent his entire 35-year career at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, where he was a professor of radiology and internal medicine. Bogdonoff was also a consultant for the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago and the U.S. Army’s Gorgas Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. He retired and moved to Maine in 1988 when macular degeneration began to affect his eyesight; nonetheless, he was a guest lecturer in nuclear power engineering at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine. He traveled the world, riding yaks along the Silk Route in Asia, visiting Tibetan monasteries and sleeping under the stars on the deck of a barge in Indonesia.

James M. Cary, M.D., HS ’51, died on February 8 in Simsbury, Conn. He was 85. Cary received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University. During the Korean War he served as a captain in the U.S. Army in Alaska and in a Forward Army Hospital Unit. After his military service he came to Yale to complete a residency in orthopaedic medicine. He then began an orthopaedic surgery practice in Waterbury, Conn. In 1969 he became the assistant medical director and director of education at the Newington Children’s Hospital, where he remained until his retirement in 1983. He enjoyed auto racing and was the racetrack physician at Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, Conn., in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Norton G. Chaucer, M.D., M.P.H. ’51, died on January 17 in Milford, Conn. He was 90. Chaucer graduated from Yale College in 1937 and received his medical degree from Columbia University in 1941. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy at several hospitals. After the war he became health director for Fairfield, Conn., and later served as health director for Hartford and West Hartford, Conn.

Henry M. Gewin, M.D., HS ’51, died on February 1 in Mobile, Ala. He was 85. A 1945 graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Gewin completed his internship at Yale. He then moved to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he was a U.S. Army medical officer. Upon leaving the Army, he returned to Yale to complete his training. At Yale he was a chief resident and instructor in medicine. In 1951 he moved to Mobile to begin practice at the Diagnostic & Medical Clinic, where he remained until his retirement in 1994. He was chair of the Mobile County Board of Health and served as president of the medical staffs of several local hospitals. Gewin was a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the specialty society for physicians in internal medicine and related subspecialties.

Dennis Gilbert, M.P.H. ’83, died on December 8 in Roseville, Ill. He was 54. Gilbert was a professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of the textbook Book on Health.

Herbert Goldenring, M.D., former associate clinical professor of pediatrics and director of the Newborn Nursery at Yale-New Haven Hospital, died on January 24, 2006. He was 84. Goldenring received his medical degree from New York University and trained in pediatrics before serving as a general medical officer in Korea. He set up practice in Branford in 1954, the first pediatrician in private practice on the shoreline. He cared for thousands of children in his practice before retiring to academia in 1990. He retired from Yale in 2000.

Edward H. Hon, M.D., HS ’55, died on November 6 at his home in Bradbury, Calif. He was 89. Hon worked with Orvan Hess, M.D., to invent electronic fetal heart rate monitoring at Yale in the 1960s. Born in China to Australian parents in 1917, he grew up in Australia and came to the United States in 1945 to attend Loma Linda Medical School, then known as the College of Medical Evangelists of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Hon completed his residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Yale, hoping to return to China later as a medical missionary. After publishing a landmark paper with Hess on fetal electrocardiography in the journal Science in 1957, Hon wrote more than 150 scholarly papers and received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Service Award of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the 1999 Order of Australia Gold Medal.

Francis J. Kalaman, M.D., M.P.H. ’68, died on January 25 in Palm City, Fla. He was 93. Kalaman came to the United States from Hungary at the age of 8. During World War II he was a physician in the medical corps of the U.S. Army and received the Bronze Star for setting up and commanding two hospitals on different fronts. In 1947 he began a private practice in Norwalk, Conn., where many of his patients came from the city’s Hungarian community. He served as health director for the city and physician for the police department.

Aaron B. Lerner, M.D., Ph.D., the founding chair of Yale’s Department of Dermatology and an internationally renowned scientist, died on February 3. He was 87. Lerner, who was born in Minneapolis and received his graduate and professional degrees from the University of Minnesota, was one of the world’s leading authorities on skin pigmentation. He guided dermatology at Yale from its inception in 1956 as a small new section within the Department of Internal Medicine to its later status as a free-standing department in 1971. Lerner was the first dermatologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is well-known for his 1958 discovery of melatonin, a hormone secreted by the pineal gland that regulates circadian rhythms, and for his work with melanocyte-stimulating hormone, which he completed with colleagues at Yale and elsewhere. Previously he and a fellow graduate student, G. Robert Greenberg, Ph.D., had isolated the first monoclonal antibody, known as cryoglobulin. Lerner was a pioneering “translational scientist,” tightly coupling scientific insights with clinical advances.

F. Eugene Martin, M.D. ’41, died on December 16 in Dayville, Conn. He was 90. During World War II Martin was a flight surgeon and lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. He practiced medicine in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after his discharge from the military in 1947. In 1961 he became chief medical officer at the Mansfield Training School, an institution for the mentally retarded in Mansfield, Conn. Martin retired in 1975. Ernest L. Sarason, M.D. ’39, died on November 28 in Syracuse, N.Y. He was 92. Sarason completed his internship and residency at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City and served during World War II as a major in the U.S. Army. Upon his return to Syracuse he practiced surgery. He was best known in his community as a donor and fundraiser for hospitals, charities, museums and the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. For his contributions to the community he received numerous awards, including the President’s Citizenship Award from the Medical Society of the State of New York.

Lewis S. Solomon, M.D. ’67, died of a brain tumor on January 31 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 65. Solomon worked in Sonoma County for almost three decades as a pulmonologist and critical care physician. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1963, he was a research student there and later received a research fellowship under Willard F. Libby, Ph.D., who won the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the use of carbon14 to date archaeological artifacts. After medical school Solomon served in the U.S. Air Force and was a researcher in the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. In 1976 he moved to Santa Rosa to join a medical practice.

Mattie L. Wade, R.N., M.P.H. ’59, died on November 30 in Atlanta. She was 94. Wade was a private-duty nurse in South Carolina and Florida before she moved to Atlanta to work as a public health nurse. After receiving her public health degree from Yale she became the assistant to the director of public health nursing in Fulton County, Ga. She later became the county’s director of public health nursing.

William J. Waskowitz, M.D. ’57, died of congestive heart failure in Kensington, Conn., on December 4. He was 75. Born in New Britain, Conn., Waskowitz followed in his father’s footsteps to Yale College as well as the School of Medicine. He completed a residency in orthopaedic surgery at the University of Oklahoma, and then returned to his home in New Britain to join his father’s practice as a sports physician and orthopaedist. He cared for children with hemophilia at Newington Children’s Hospital, as well as treating high school and college athletes. He was given the Moyer Award, the top honor of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, for his work in sports medicine in the 1980s. An expert in treating knee injuries, Waskowitz pioneered the use of arthroscopy at New Britain General Hospital, where he was chief of orthopaedic surgery. He collected piano sheet music from the early 1900s and played the piano regularly, particularly the music of Porter, Gershwin and New Orleans jazz composers.

Send obituary notices to Claire M. Bessinger, Yale Medicine Publications, 1 Church Street, Suite 300, New Haven, CT 06510, or via e-mail to claire.bessinger@yale.edu