Medicine@Brown
Date
October 15, 2025
The Golden Years
Members of the MD Class of 1975 reflect on Brown, medicine, and the lives they’ve led 50 years after their graduation.
“Pioneers.”
That was the buzzword invoked many times this past Reunion Weekend to describe the 18 members of the MD Class of 1975 who gathered in Providence. It was another first in their long legacy of primacy at Brown: the first time The Warren Alpert Medical School celebrated a 50th reunion.
Roughly a year of planning went into the class’s events. Pardon Kenney ’72 MMSc’75 MD’75 RES’80, P’03, had the idea to create a memory book: a collection of career retrospectives submitted by his classmates, tributes to deceased members of the class, and recollections of favorite faculty.
“I expected about a dozen entries,” Kenney says. He bolstered submissions with hours of internet research (with the help of his wife, Kendra) to track down missing alumni and faculty obituaries. He spent a morning in the John Hay Library, scanning photos a librarian had located for him. All told, there were 22 entries, most consisting of a full career and life summary of the submitter, and lengthy memories of deceased classmates and faculty. The result was a 250-page tome representing the most complete history of that first class and the faculty who taught them.
In 1975, the graduates didn’t get a typical yearbook; the results of Brown’s “experiment” in medical education were published as an article in the Rhode Island Medical Journal. This memory book, Kenney says, is the yearbook they never had. But instead of reporting the graduates’ plans, this yearbook documents what actually happened to those intrepid few who took a chance on a new medical school: successful careers in academia and private practice; stints in the US Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control’s Epidemic Intelligence Service; kids and grandkids and retirement living. It’s all the things they could only dream of in 1975, and many they could never have imagined. Here’s a selection of those memories and tributes.
My road to dermatology was a circuitous one.
I was so grateful to join the 12 MMS students at Brown University’s Program in Medicine in 1970.
I was in the second year that women were admitted to [Yale's Ob/Gyn] residency.
Thoughts in Brief
“ Our faculty was supportive in a way not known to most medical students. Our class was never told that there was anything we couldn’t do— and so, in our professional lives, many of us have achieved far more than we would have ever predicted. Our Brown Medical School experience, as the first class, was unique and empowering in a way we could only later appreciate. My hope for future classes is the same legacy. ”
As a newly minted Brown MD in 1975, I moved on to Rochester, NY, for a medical residency at Rochester General Hospital. …Classmate Tony Caldamone also headed to Rochester for a pediatric residency centered across town at Strong Memorial Hospital. Onememorable night in 1977, he just happened to be on call at RGH when my wife gave birth there. So, by chance, the first pediatrician to examine our newborn daughter was Tony—my good friend, cadaver mate, and apartment mate at Brown.
On Brown's impact on their lives
“I was a bit of a smart aleck in medical school. One night I met the most amazing nurse in the Coronary Care Unit of the Roger Williams General Hospital. Kathy had long ginger hair, dimples, and Irish green eyes. I quickly learned that intensive care nurses have little use for smartaleck medical students. She hated me right off the bat, reported me to the head nurse, and said she never wanted to see me again. We were engaged to be married three months later and are still very happily married 51 years later.
“ We had the ego to say we need a different medical oath from the Hippocratic Oath, and Hippocrates needed some updating. We made a particularly ‘Brown’ oath. It was consistent with the principles that Brown really stands for. ... It was about inclusiveness and valuing others. ... We were way ahead of the curve in ’75. ”
Notable Faculty
ELIZABETH LEDUC, PHD
Dean of Biological Sciences
Dukie, as she was affectionately known, was at the forefront of her roles as a teacher, administrator, and internationally renowned scientist. In 1964, she was appointed a full professor of biology—the third woman to attain that rank in Brown’s 200 years of existence, and the first in biology. She was dean of biological sciences from 1973 to 1977, co-taught a large course in histology, and continued her research on the pathology of the liver, pioneering an important new methodology: cytochemistry. Toward the end of her tenure as dean, she was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the President’s Committee on Science and Technology—the only woman on the nineperson committee charged with reviewing the entire structure of federal science.
LEO STERN, MD
Professor and Chief of Pediatrics, Chair of the Section on Human Growth and Development
Stern oversaw the development of a program in pediatric oncology that would be among the first to achieve distinction on the national level. “What I am proudest of,” Stern once said, “is being able to develop people who came here and cast their entire career lot with us, who understood that good academic medicine has to be based on good clinical care. To have good clinical care you have to have good research, and the reverse is true.”
BORIS ROTMAN, PHD
Professor of Medical Science
Rotman was an immunologist-molecular biologist who taught microbiology for the medical program. He is widely recognized for performing the first single-molecule experiments in biology. These early experiments remained obscure for more than 30 years, but they are now recognized as pioneering and highly influential.
HENRY RANDALL, MD
Chair of the Section of Surgery
Randall’s involvement in enteral nutrition and in the development of elemental or chemically defined diets started soon after his arrival at Rhode Island Hospital. His work not only supported and promoted the applicability of enteral nutrition in surgical patients but did so while providing meticulous metabolic balance data that gave solid scientific basis to his clinical observations. His dictum “If the gut works, use it” became a driving force for the expanded use of enteral nutrition support. He became widely known as “the father of enteral nutrition.”
FIORINDO SIMEONE ’29 SCM’30, MD
First Chair of the Section of Surgery
During the Second World War, Simeone and his research unit colleague Michael DeBakey made lasting contributions to knowledge of the effects of war wounds and the management of traumatic shock, arterial trauma, and cold injury. “What stands out for me among all the incredible faculty relationships was the generosity and mentorship of Dr. Fiorindo Simeone,” Anthony Caldamone ’72 MMSc’75 MD’75, P’06, says. “In the summer of my freshman year, I received a research grant to work in the lab of Dr. Simeone and Dr. Robert Hopkins at The Miriam Hospital. It was through their guidance and patience that I learned to respect laboratory investigation, animal surgery, and the rigor to detail. Though at the time I did not appreciate it, this opportunity laid the foundation for me to end up in surgery, medical education, research, and academic medicine.”