In Memoriam
1960 - 1969
Scroll down to see obituaries, which appear in order of DMS class year. To go directly to any individual obituary, click on the name here, listed in alphabetical order.
Gerald R. Colman, DMS '64
Richard A. Garibaldi, DMS '65
Courtland L. Harlow, Jr. DMS ‘69
Edward D. Harris, Jr., DMS '60
Richard E. Knab, DMS '64
Robert E. Naylor, DMS '69
Barbara M. Osborne, DMS '67
William C. Sheehan, DMS ’62
Edward D. Harris, Jr
DMS '60
Edward (Ted) Harris, Jr., an internationally recognized rheumatologist and former professor of medicine at DMS, died on May 21, 2010 at the age of 73.
Dr. Harris was a member of the Dartmouth College class of 1958 and was awarded the Dean’s Medal while at DMS. In 1960 he met Sir George Pickering when the distinguished Oxford professor, known for his studies of hypertension and the physiology of blood vessels, participated in the Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine symposium at DMS. The following summer, he accepted Pickering’s invitation to do a summer clerkship in Pickering’s lab at Oxford.
He went on the complete his MD at Harvard, followed by residency training in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and two years as a clinical associate in the National Heart Institute at NIH. Returning to Mass General, he did a fellowship in rheumatology in the lab of Dr. Stephen Krane, where he investigated the mechanisms by which rheumatoid arthritis destroys joints.
In 1970, Dr. Harris was recruited to return to DMS as chief of the connective tissue disease section and an assistant professor of medicine, helping Dr. Joshua Burnett in building the rheumatology section. In 1977 he was made director of the Arthritis Research Center at DHMC and a full professor, and two years later he was named the Eugene W. Leonard Professor of Internal Medicine at DMS. He also served the school as a member of the Alumni Council, chair of the Medical School Curriculum Committee for five years, and chair of the Dean Search Committee to find a successor to Dr. James Strickler in 1980.
Among the scientists Harris recruited to DMS to do rheumatology research was Constance Brinckerhoff, PhD, now the Nathan Smith Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at DMS and Associate Dean for Science Education. By the time Dr. Harris left DMS in 1983 to become chair of the Department of Medicine at Rutgers, he had left an indelible mark on the school, and he remained a loyal alumnus and donor.
In 1987 he was appointed chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University, where he would spend the rest of his career, and the following year he was named the George DeForest Barnett Professor of Medicine. His tenure at Stanford also included serving as director of the Muscuskeletal Disease Center and director of International Medical Services. He retired to emeritus status in 2003.
Dr. Harris is widely recognized for his work in advancing the understanding of rheumatoid arthritis and the role that enzymes like collagenases and matrix metalloproteases (MMPs) play in its progression by degrading cartilage and other components of joints. In addition to the more than 200 journal articles, abstracts, reviews, and book chapters he authored, Dr. Harris co-authored the first edition of Kelly’s Textbook of Rheumatology—the leading textbook on the subject—in 1979, subsequently becoming its editor-in-chief.
In 1997 he was named executive secretary of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and editor of its quarterly journal, The Pharos, a position he still held at the time of his death. He was also secretary of the Stanford University Senate, where his minutes were legendary for their humorous touches.
Dr. Harris was a fellow of the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine and in 2001 was elected governor of its Northern California Region. He was also a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London and a fellow and master of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), serving as its president from 1985-86. In 2004 he was awarded the ACR’s distinguished rheumatologist award, and in 2007 he was recognized with the organization’s highest honor, the presidential gold medal.
He is survived by his former wife, Mary Ann Hayward; son Ned and daughter in law Edie Meacham and their children Andrew and Eliza; son Tom and daughter in law Kate Reavey and their children Maeve and Liam; and son Chandler.
A profile of Dr. Harris appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Dartmouth Medicine.
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William C. Sheehan
DMS '62
William C. “Bill” Sheehan, a prominent pulmonologist in southeastern Massachusetts, passed away at the age of 71 on July 11, 2011. Known for his dedication to improving patient care, he is credited with ushering in a new era of treatments in the Fall River, Mass., area that improved the quality of life for people suffering from asthma, emphysema, bronchitis, tuberculosis, and other lung ailments.
Dr. Sheehan earned an A.B. degree from Dartmouth College, went on to Dartmouth Medical School, and graduated with an M.D. from Harvard in 1964. During a surgical internship at the University of Colorado, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis – an experience that shaped his life as a physician. With no modern medications, it took him two years to recover. He practiced general medicine at Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara, Calif., before pursuing further training in internal medicine and pulmonary disease at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
In 1976, Dr. Sheehan joined the Truesdale Clinic in Fall River as an internal medicine physician, with the goal of establishing a pulmonary practice where one did not exist. Under his direction, Truesdale grew to include a group of eight pulmonologists and was the first clinic in the area to offer patients with pulmonary disease access to 24-hour care. As an early advocate for pulmonary rehabilitation for those with chronic pulmonary disease, Dr. Sheehan was a driving force behind stopping smoking in the workplace. He presented radio and television programs about pulmonary care at a time when few physicians did and began a monthly medical conference to educate other physicians about pulmonary care.
In addition to his practice at the Truesdale Clinic, Dr. Sheehan served as medical director of pulmonary services at Charlton Memorial and St. Anne’s hospitals in Fall River and at Newport Hospital in Rhode Island. He also ran Fall River’s tuberculosis clinic with the Board of Health for 25 years.
Due to an advancing illness, Dr. Sheehan retired in the summer of 2004, much sooner than he would have preferred. He is survived by his wife, Ann; his daughters Alexandra, Erika, and Natalie; fourteen grandchildren; and his sister, Elizabeth.
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Gerald R. Colman
DMS '64
Gerald R. Colman ’64, a retired plastic surgeon, died on December 26, 2008 at the age of 68.
He graduated from Tufts University and DMS, then completed his MD at Harvard Medical School in 1966. After two years of surgical residency at Medical College of Virginia, he served with the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant-commander and officer in charge of the 400-bed South Vietnam Provincial Hospital in Quang Tri from 1969 to 1971. There, Dr. Colman was the only surgeon for 300,000 Vietnamese civilians and soldiers. His service earned him the Vietnamese Service Medal, the Republic of Vietnam Medal of Honor, the Cross of Gallantry, and the Public Health Medal.
Following his military duty, he completed his surgical residency at Medical College of Virginia in 1973, a residency in plastic surgery at Albany Medical Center in 1975, and fellowships in microvascular surgery and in surgery of the hand.
For over 30 years, he worked in private practice with the Plastic Surgery Group in Albany, NY. He was chief of plastic surgery at the former Child’s Hospital and St. Peter’s Hospital, an attending plastic surgeon at Albany Medical Center, and associate clinical professor of surgery at Albany Medical College. He was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and an active member of the Society of Plastic Surgery.
In 1991, Dr. Colman returned to Vietnam with Operation Smile to repair cleft lips and cleft palates in children and adults, thus helping to remove the great social stigma surrounding these deformities. He took great satisfaction in this work and participated in other Operation Smile missions to Vietnam as well as to Russia, the Philippines, China, and Thailand.
He is survived by his wife, Ruth; sons David, Jonathan, Adam (DC ’05), and Benjamin; a daughter, Rachel; and a grandson.
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Richard E. Knab
DMS '64
Richard E. “Dick” Knab, a general surgeon recently retired from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic in Manchester, N.H., died on February 17, 2011, at the age of 71.
Dr. Knab graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and after attending Dartmouth Medical School, earned his MD from Harvard in 1966. His residency training at Boston City Hospital was interrupted by his military service as a lieutenant commander, U.S. Navy, at the Naval Hospital at Camp LeJune, N.C. from 1986 to 1970. He then returned to Boston City Hospital to complete his residency, followed by a fellowship at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass.
For many years, Dr. Knab practiced general surgery at Brockton City Hospital in Brockton, Mass., serving for a time as chief of surgery and as an associate clinical professor of surgery at Boston University School of Medicine. In 1993, he joined Dartmouth-Hitchcock Manchester, where he specialized in general surgery and gastroenterology. He was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
Dr. Knab is survived by his wife of 20 years, Janet R. Ceruti Knab; his father, Emil Knab; four children—Richard Knab, John Knab, MD, Sarah Knab Keitt, and Katherine Knab; and six grandchildren.
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Richard A. Garibaldi
DMS '65
Richard A. Garibaldi ‘65, an epidemiologist, died on September 3, 2009, at the age of 67. Dr. Garibaldi was a significant figure in the field of infectious disease whose early investigations of process errors in health care as causes of infection were direct antecedents of current ideas about improving outcomes through use of electronic records, error avoidance, reduced numbers of adverse events, and increased patient safety.
After graduating from Harvard College in 1963 and from DMS in 1965, he received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1967. He did his internship and residency at Boston City Hospital, followed by fellowships in infectious disease at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the University of Utah College of Medicine in Salt Lake City.
In 1973, he joined the faculty there, rising to associate professor of medicine and serving as hospital epidemiologist at both the University of Utah Medical Center and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salt Lake City. In 1981, he was recruited to the University of Connecticut Health Center, where he became a professor of medicine in 1982 and held the James E.C. Walker Endowed Chair. He was chief of the infectious disease division from 1981 to 1990 and vice chair of the department of medicine from 1981 to 1997, when he became the department chair. He held this position until 2006, when he returned to his work as UConn Health Center epidemiologist. Most recently, he served as Special Advisor to the Connecticut Department of Public Health, setting the state’s policy on mitigating the transmission of H1N1 type influenza.
He also directed the Internal Medicine Residency Program at the UConn Health Center from 1982 to 1997 and received many teaching awards from the program. Recently, the UConn School of Medicine dedicated the Richard A. Garibaldi Humanitarianism in Medicine Award in recognition of his contributions to medical education there.
Dr. Garibaldi held leadership roles in many of the professional organizations that shape academic medicine and graduate medical education. He was a diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners, a member of the American Society of Internal Medicine, a fellow of the American College of Physicians and of the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a founding member of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. He wrote more than 80 articles and 20 books and chapters on infectious disease, hospital epidemiology, and graduate medical education.
He is survived by his wife, Lorraine; daughters Karen, Christine, and Suzanne; son Richard; and nine grandchildren.
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Barbara M. Osborne
DMS '67
Barbara M. Osborne, a pathologist specializing in lymphomas, died on March 29, 2009. She was 65.
After graduating from DMS, she received her MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969. She served her internship and residency at Beth Israel Hospital and Mass General Hospital in Boston, followed by post-doctoral study in pathology at Harvard Medical School.
In 1975, Dr. Osborne moved to Houston for a fellowship in pathology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She remained there for the nearly 20 years, becoming a professor of pathology in 1988. In 1995, she was appointed professor of pathology at Columbia University.
Dr. Osborne was a member of the International Academy of Pathology and the Society for Hematopathology. She served DMS as a member of the DMS Board of Overseers from 1989 to 1995.
She is survived by a son, Jonathan, a daughter, Elizabeth, and four grandchildren.
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Courtland L. Harlow, Jr.
DMS '69
The following tribute was written by Mark B. Constantian, DMS ’70.
It did not take me long, as a first year student at Dartmouth Medical School, to notice that one of my schoolmates led a very ordered life. Every day at exactly 5:45 PM, after a full day of classes and afternoon of unbroken study, Courtland “Bud” Harlow would leave his room in Strasenburg Hall, run to downtown Hanover, New Hampshire, around the Green, and back to the dorm. He would put a frozen dinner into the floor’s microwave, clean up, eat dinner, and “book” till 11 PM. Every single day this ritual repeated itself. From there, a friendship began that lasted through our residencies, research years, practices, and families for more than 40 years. On June 20, 2011 Bud Harlow was killed in a single car accident near his home in Kingston, Massachusetts, sadly at a site where two other fatalities had occurred in the past three years, one just a month previously. The accident ended a life of remarkable self-discipline and devotion to his patients and family that might have been predicted by the way Bud managed his time as a medical student.
Born in Whitman, Massachusetts, Bud became a child prodigy on the trumpet, and as a teenager performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops, and for President Kennedy at the White House. Bud entered the New England Conservatory of Music, but as a sophomore he experimented with a new embouchure and “lost his lip.” No longer able to play well, he returned to school to study mathematics, but under the encouragement of a nurturing teacher, entered medical school.
General surgical and plastic surgical residencies at Boston University followed, during which time he spent two years as a National Institute of Graduate Medical Sciences Fellow in Academic Surgery in endocrinology research, and also became a commercial pilot. After his residencies, Dr. Harlow took three, six and nine month fellowships each with Drs. Harold Kleinert, Ralph Millard, and Paul Tessier, respectively, following which he accepted an academic appointment at Stanford University to head the Craniofacial Clinic. Several years later he returned to South Weymouth, Massachusetts, where he opened a private practice that lasted for 25 years.
Dr. Harlow made some 30 medical missionary trips with Interplast, Por Christo, and Solidarity Bridge to Jamaica, Lithuania, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Vietnam, and China. On one occasion he was kidnapped, on another held at gunpoint. Several of his fellow surgeons on these trips have remembered Bud as the most gifted cleft surgeon that they had ever seen.
Dr. Harlow was planning a mission trip with his wife to India in 2003 when he was diagnosed with plasmacytoma. Many courses of chemotherapy followed, but Bud determined exactly how many hours he would feel well before the side effects occurred, and so with sheer, single-minded determination he continued to work for several years more. A bone marrow transplant first worked, then failed. Chemotherapy began again. When I last spoke to Bud on Memorial Day, 2011, he told me that his oncologist had never seen any patient complete eight courses of his most recent experimental treatment, until Bud did. I wasn’t surprised. Bud had an amazing ability to hyperfocus, one characteristic that made him a gifted musician, and an abiding reverence for life, which colored his whole surgical practice.
Dr. Harlow was a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, The American Society of Maxillofacial Surgeons, the American Cleft Palate Association, the New England Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, the Northeastern Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons, and the Development Board of My Brother’s Keeper, a Massachusetts charity.
Dr. Harlow leaves his wife of 31 years, Patricia, and three children, Courtland, Daniel, and Christine.
Although he was a year ahead of me in school, I always felt like Bud’s older brother: He was so diffident, trusting, and honest that he sometimes couldn’t understand the actions that he saw around him. During his long illness, we spoke many times. I once asked him how he dealt with such a serious prognosis. “My mother used to tell me, ‘Don’t ask questions to which there are no answers.’ That’s what I do.”
Rest peacefully, my friend.
Mark B. Constantian, MD, FACS
19 Tyler Street
Nashua, NH 03060
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Robert E. Naylor
DMS '69
Robert E. “Rob” Naylor, a retired cardiologist and colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, died on June 9, 2011, at the age of 64. As an active and reserve veteran, Dr. Naylor practiced aerospace medicine and served in Vietnam and Desert Storm.
Dr. Naylor earned a degree in biology from the College of the Holy Cross in 1967 and after graduating from Dartmouth Medical School, received his MD from Harvard in 1971. He then trained at the University of California San Diego, where he completed an internship in internal medicine and a residency and fellowship in cardiology. He went on to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons for a research fellowship in cardiology, specializing in cardiac electrophysiology and pharmacology, in 1980.
Following his post-graduate training, Dr. Naylor was appointed assistant professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center and affiliated with the Audie L. Murphy Veterans Administration Hospital, both located in San Antonio. In 1985, he returned to California, where he spent 25 years as a cardiologist in the Sunnyvale area and was an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
Dr. Naylor was a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and a member of the American Heart Association and the Aerospace Medicine Association. He served on the DMS Class of 1969 10th Reunion committee.
Dr. Naylor is survived by three brothers, Michael, William, and Mark; one sister, Martha; 14 nephews and nieces; and other extended family.
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