Grads

Grads

I have some sad news to share with you. Barbara Blough (MALS’74) died on July 1 at the age of 93. Barbara’s range of activities in Hanover was so wide that it would be hard to live here and never meet her. I came to know her through the Montshire Museum’s Magic Carpet programs of lunches followed by talks with slides of foreign places whose typical food the audience had just consumed.

After she completed high school, Barbara was working as a secretary when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. She tried to join the U.S. Navy but had to wait until she turned 20. She then went to work in naval intelligence and, when the war ended, she graduated from Syracuse University through the GI Bill. Barbara was called back to active duty during the Korean War and met her future husband, Marine officer Foster Blough, while attending officer training school in Boston. After spending nine years at various military bases, her husband retired and accepted a job at Dartmouth. After she received her MALS degree at Dartmouth, Barbara spent the next 15 years working for the Dartmouth Medical School. There she developed programs for collecting funds for the school from alumni, established the Dartmouth Medicine magazine, and set up a class reunion program as well as an alumni council. She also worked for a multitude of area organizations, such as the Fresh Air Fund, raised money for the Hanover-Norwich schools, and, after her husband’s death, founded a widows group at the White Church.

Barbara wrote a memoir mostly for her grandchildren. Her daughter, Diana Blough, believes that the last paragraph best expresses her mother’s philosophy of life: “So let me end these remembrances as I began them, with my recipe for a happy life and a happy family: love a lot and laugh a lot, and remember that we share this life and this planet with many other remarkable human beings. Make friends with as many of them as you can.”

Another remarkable woman, Dr. Lisa Schwartz (MS’96), died on November 29 at the age of 55. Dr. Schwartz and her husband, Dr. Steven Woloshin, were the directors at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice Center for Medicine and Media. Last year they received the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association for their work in illuminating “the trade-offs between too little diagnosis (missing problems that might benefit from earlier treatment) and overdiagnosis (harming people with problems that never needed to be found).”

—Jane Welsh, 175 Greensboro Road, Hanover, NH 03755; (603) 643-3789; m.jane.welsh.gr@dartmouth.edu