June 25, 2010 - Remembering a Luminary: NH-VT Schweitzer Fellows Program Co-Founder Holly Field (1939-2009)
Visit Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH, and
in addition to standard medical buildings, you’ll notice a series of
nature paths along the campus’s western edge. Established in 1999 by
New Hampshire-Vermont (NH-VT) Schweitzer Fellow Tim Burdick, they’re
known as the Albert Schweitzer Trails. They’re intended to give DHMC
patients, visitors and staff the opportunity to rejuvenate themselves
during physically and emotionally difficult times—and one of them is
called “Holly’s Path.”
Appropriately so—as Holly Field, the path’s namesake, provided
exactly that rejuvenation and inspiration for scores of graduate
students as the co-founder of the NH-VT Schweitzer Fellows Program.
“As she did for many other Fellows, Holly became a mentor for me,”
says Wynona Ward, a member of the very first class of NH-VT Schweitzer
Fellows (1996-97) and the founder of Have Justice-Will Travel. “It was
Holly who was there each time I needed her. It was Holly who was there
each time I became discouraged or didn’t know which way to turn. And it
was Holly who was there each time to cheer me on and congratulate me
when I was successful.”
“For the longest time,” says ASF Board of Directors member Joseph
O’Donnell, MD, “she was just the glue that held the program together.”
It was O’Donnell—Senior Advising Dean and Director of Community
Programs at Dartmouth Medical School—who co-founded the NH-VT
Schweitzer Fellows Program with Field in 1995. The duo directed and
administered the program together until 2000, when current NH-VT
Program Director Rebecca Torrey joined the team.
“When you’re launching a program like this, you need a very special
energy and commitment to bring it into being,” says Torrey, who worked
closely with Field at the program’s helm for years. “Holly had that
energy and commitment.”
Field’s father, Henry K. Beecher, MD, was a key figure in the field
of medical ethics, and a strong advocate for patient-centered care.
When Field and her husband moved to Vermont, a friend of Field’s
father—former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop—put Holly in touch
with O’Donnell; the two hit it off, and when the opportunity to launch
a NH-VT Schweitzer program arose, O’Donnell knew who to call.
“I think she loved her role as Co-Director so much because it
brought her back to her roots and her family,” says O’Donnell. “Her dad
and all these big medical people were trying to change the world in the
1950s, and all of a
sudden, here she is working with these young idealistic Fellows trying
to change the world. They were inspiring to her, just as she was
inspiring to them.”
A high school English teacher before launching the NH-VT Schweitzer
Program, Field was an extraordinarily effective mentor. “She was a
lifelong teacher,” Torrey says, smiling as she recalls Field poring
over Fellows’ final reports with a red pen. “She really cared about the
Schweitzer Fellows, and went out of her way to mentor them well, and to
get involved in their lives and their projects.”
“She would get more out of these Fellows than they knew they had, by
the questions she’d ask and the connections she’d see between what they
were doing and bigger things,” says O’Donnell.
She also encouraged Fellows like Wynona Ward to pursue those
connections. Field helped Ward secure funding to launch Have
Justice-Will Travel, and served as a board member for the nonprofit
legal organization until her death in December 2009 after a battle with
cancer.
“Holly was happiest when she was helping others,” says Ward. “She lived life to the fullest and embodied Reverence for Life.”
“She lived a life that was very reverent—she was an incredible
gardener, adored children, and was devoted to her many pets,” Torrey
says. “She had a zest for life that was really just limitless—a sparkle
in her eye.”
And when ASF President Lachlan Forrow, MD, brought Field a stone
hippopotamus from the Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Africa and
presented it to her when she was named an honorary Schweitzer Fellow
for Life in 2005, that sparkle was in full evidence.
“You couldn’t have done anything in the world to make Holly any happier,” O’Donnell says.
“Holly meant so much both to the Schweitzer Fellowship as an
organization, and to the individual NH-VT Fellows whose lives she
touched,” Forrow says. “We are deeply saddened by her loss, but we are
so grateful to have known her while she was here.”
To make a gift to the New Hampshire-Vermont Schweitzer Fellows Program in honor of Holly Field, click here.
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