Lighting Up a Room

One evening six years ago Steve Brosnihan ’83 was saying goodbye to a teenage patient. Looking out the window at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, where he’s resident cartoonist in the healing arts department, Brosnihan noticed his route to the bus was visible. He spontaneously told the boy to watch outside later for a sign. When he signaled to the boy with his flashlight on his way home, Brosnihan was surprised and pleased to see the boy flicking a light in response. So Brosnihan made it his routine to flash goodnight to his patients, many of whom told him it was the best thing that happened all day. “A feeling of loneliness is alleviated,” Brosnihan says.

Since 1991, Brosnihan has logged thousands of hours drawing at the bedside of seriously ill children. He helps young patients with their fears and anxieties and he’s called in like a specialist, with the goal of getting a smile or laugh from a child deep in the doldrums. He devised a method, “Cartoonagrams,” to quickly teach children to join him in cartooning, using letters of the alphabet. Last year Brosnihan expanded his Goodnight Lights idea, asking local businesses, including tugboats and a bar with a large neon sign, to communicate with four blinks for “Good Night Hasbro Hospital” each night at 8:30. Businesses and patrons, who use phones or other lights, have been eager to participate. He’s working on involving buildings in the nearby downtown skyline. “People are feeling the thrill that someone is thinking about them in a free will, goodwill gesture,” Brosnihan says.

When the former visual studies major, who also teaches at schools and camps for children with medical and other special needs, walks the halls of the hospital, he carries a clipboard. Taped to its back is a talisman—a worn copy of a handwritten note from a fellow Dartmouth alum, Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel ’25. “He was wonderfully supportive of me becoming a cartoonist,” Brosnihan says. Months before he died, Geisel wrote to wish Brosnihan luck for “six years, hell, make it the next six decades.”

Noel Rubinton