Letters
Review welcomes letters from readers and will print them as space permits. Letters may be edited for brevity and clarity. Unsigned letters cannot be used, but names of the writers may be withheld on request. Send letters to Rochester Review, 147 Wallis Hall, P.O. Box 270033, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0033; rochrev @rochester.edu.
“The percentage of women in the most powerful corridors of America is
still woefully deficient.” —Bob Dardano ’77
Debate on Susan B.
How sad, and how tiring it is, that here in 2006 we still find those who feel
that women have already come far enough. I refer to the letter by Marc Roemer
’88, ’97 (MS) (“Still Debating Susan B.,” Summer 2006)
in which he implies that since women “have outnumbered men in college
since at least 1983” that somehow their struggle for “equal rights”
must have been a success. He questions the need for a yearlong program about
Susan B. Anthony by stating, curiously in my opinion, that women hold the advantage
in some social respects.
Forgive me, but I thought that women have better health than men despite the
paucity of medical research on women’s health issues, not because they
control the medical community. And reproductive rights? I needn’t go there.
Well, the numbers do tell us something. In 2006, the percentage of women in
the most powerful corridors of America is still woefully deficient. Only 14
percent of the Senate is female, as is 19 percent of the House of Representatives.
There are only eight female governors among the 50 states and a scant 11 of
the Fortune 500 companies are headed by women. I can only imagine that the percentage
of female college presidents is equally embarrassing, despite the supposed advantage
women in education have had, in sheer numbers, since 1983.
Over the past 20 or 30 years, it seems to me that as straight, white men went
from controlling 98 percent of the levers of power in this country all the way
down to, perhaps, 90 percent (gasp!), the cry of “enough already”
could be heard coast to coast.
No, we need the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership to continue
educating us. As long as every other newspaper article about Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, two of our most powerful women,
seems to contain comments on their clothing or hairstyles, we know that women
are not yet equal.
Bob Dardano ’77
Washington, D.C.
A Medical History Lesson
The article entitled “A Cautionary Tale” (Alumni Gazette, Summer
2006) brings into focus Harriet Washington’s ’76 book, Medical
Apartheid; The Dark History of Medical Experimentation with African Americans
from the Colonial Era to the Present. The article includes the paragraph:
“It is a troubling history. Washington tells, for example, of how physician
James Marion Sims experimented on slave women, performing vaginal surgery on
them without the benefit of anesthesia.”
The statement is correct but must be placed in a historical perspective. The
“experiments” referred to took place in Montgomery, Alabama, from
1845 to May 1849. They were actually “therapeutic interventions”
rather than “experiments.” A more critical fact is that surgical
anesthesia was not formally introduced until October 16, 1846, at the Massachusetts
General Hospital, and its use did not spread throughout the medical profession
for years.
The slave girls that Sims performed his “experiments” on had disabling
vesicovaginal fistulas, or small, abnormal tracts that allowed urine to seep
into the vagina. The consequent soilage precluded the girls’ activities
on the plantations. They were desperate social pariahs.
Sims housed the women in a room above his office and provided their food at
his own expense. After many failures, Sims eventually employed fine wire to
close the fistulas. He achieved success where others throughout the world had
failed. He was widely praised for a major medical breakthrough in the treatment
of a devastatingly compromising condition.
Sims moved to New York City and established the Woman’s Hospital, the
first such institution in the world, if one discounts the Rotunda Obstetric
Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. Sims went on to become the president of the American
Medical Association and the American Gynecological Society. Rather than indict
him as an uncaring, if not diabolic, self-centered, self-aggrandizing surgeon,
it is appropriate that he remains memorialized by a monument on the grounds
of the South Carolina capitol, the state where he was born, by a statue on the
capitol grounds of Montgomery, Alabama, by a statue in Central Park opposite
the New York Academy of Medicine, and by the appellation, “The Father
of Modern Gynecology.”
As an addendum, the first successful elective operation within the abdominal
cavity was performed by Ephraim McDowell in 1809 on a white 45-year-old woman
in Danville, Kentucky. A 22-and-a-half pound ovarian tumor was removed “without
the benefit of anesthesia.” McDowell’s revolutionary procedure and
Sims’s seminal contributions are included among those highlighted in a
book that is being produced, By Their Hands; America’s Contributions
to Surgery.
Seymour I. Schwartz ’57M (Res)
Distinguished Alumni Professor of Surgery
University of Rochester
More Glee
I was one of the two tenor soloists in the club that won the Fred Waring National
Glee Club contest held in Carnegie Hall and later on the same trip sang in the
East Room of the White House for Eleanor, not Franklin, Roosevelt.
Much credit for our success should be given to our director Arthur (Buck) Whittemore
’36E (Mas) and our accompanist Jack Lowe ’38E, ’39E (MM),
who shortly thereafter formed Whittemore and Lowe, a twin-piano team that achieved
national acclaim and published a number of recordings.
Newt Thomas ’42
Akron, Ohio
A Missed Metaphor?
In the article “A Cancer Vaccine is Born” (Spring 2006), the author
wrote “proteins . . . are made up of spaghetti-like strands of genetic
material.”
First, the statement is wrong. Proteins are made up of amino acids, not any
sort of genetic material. They contain no nucleotides.
Second, the metaphor is not useful. “Spaghetti-like” implies something
uniform in composition. Proteins are made up of any of 23 amino acids in an
almost infinite variety of sequences. How about saying something like “multicolored
strands of Mardi Gras beads”?
Dan Keller ’72, ’80M (PhD)
Glenside, Pennsylvania
Eastman Prep Alumni?
Are you a former student of the Eastman School’s Preparatory Department
or Community Education Division (now Eastman Community Music School)?
If you are, we want to reconnect with you. This fall, we are starting a new
effort to locate our alumni and former students, in order to keep you informed
about all the great things happening in our school.
If you would like to find out more about this effort, or would like to update
your contact information, call the Eastman Community Music School at (585) 274-1400,
or visit esm.rochester.edu/ community.
Howard Potter
Director, Eastman Community
Music School
Goodbye ‘Gee’
The University lost a good friend last April, when Dick DeBrine ’58 died.
Those who knew “Gee-raffe” will always remember his friendship
as a classmate at Rochester and in the years since graduation. When we first
met Dick back in the early 1950s, some of us wondered whether he was for real.
He was so “down home” open, friendly, kind, and considerate, with
never a bad word for anyone. But as the years proved, what you saw is what you
got with “Gee.” He was a good friend and fraternity brother who
inspired admiration and respect, especially for his relationship with his “gal,”
Joan.
And if you knew him half a century ago, then you should know that we think
the man in business and retirement was pretty much the same man we first met
as a teen at the University.
Dick’s fondness for the University was evident half a century later as
well: He always expressed the opinion that the engineering faculty formed the
boy into the man he became. We will miss our friend Dick—for the positive
influence he had on us in our younger years as well as our later years.
Joe Steinman ’59
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida
The letter was also signed by Bob Standfast ’59; Gilbert, Arizona;
Bob Greeves ’60; Bethesda, Maryland; Bill Martin ’58; Lenoir, North
Carolina; John Rathbone ’58; Hamilton, New York—Editor.
Poem to the Editor
I enjoy reading Review each quarter, and I had this reaction after
reading the fall 2005 issue:
Reflections on Alumni Magazines
Four times a year I receive an alumni magazine,
No doubt due to an efficient office mailing machine.
A change in address hardly a problem,
Just call the office to notify them.
Nary an issue is ever missed;
I’m always on their class year list.
The magazine arrives with a cover so attractive,
I take the time to open it wishing to just relive
Some of those college years, a memory,
With favorite classmates, each a story.
First, pages of university news,
Then alumni notes each by class, who’s who.
But the sobering truth to all of this
Is that year by year, there’s something amiss—
News is stranger, harder to understand,
The numbers of classes each year expand,
Class notes more toward the front now, shorter now.
News not of work, marriages, families now,
More retirements, travels, and grandkids now.
And last, and the most disturbing of all,
Classmates who’ve answered the final roll call.
John Thatcher ’59
Charlotte, North Carolina
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