Julia Frank

— 5th — (1978) Jimmy Carter

Since College I have survived medical school and most of internship. I will begin psychiatry residency next year, and look forward to resuming study of the history of medicine and also to having time for folk dancing, cooking, and perhaps learning an instrument. I came to college quietly cynical about politics and social problems but a professed liberal democrat. I'm a little more liberal and slightly less cynical — basically I haven't changed.

— 10th — (1983) Ronald Reagan

Having been in New Haven since 1973, I am now a sage interpreter of local tradition. I often find myself introducing arrivals from Cambridge and elsewhere to the indigenous culture. I know all the choruses and folk-dance groups within fifty miles and have connections with the local Sierra Club and groups working on issues like the nuclear freeze. Most of the week I am treating patients or teaching residents at the V.A. In the next decade I hope to get into psychoendocrinology research and also to find or found a family — both goals depend on finding the right collaborator!

— 15th — (1988) Ronald Reagan

After ten years in New Haven, I have just moved to Austin, Texas, where my husband teaches at the university and I work at student health. It was hard for me to leave academic medicine, but Austin isn't all that bad. The roaches don't fly but three months of the year, and the sting of the city-bred scorpion isn't fatal. Geographically, I'm dislocated and professionally I'm sort of stalled, but I am thrilled to have a family at last — sixty-five diaper changes a week notwithstanding.

— 20th — (1993) Bill Clinton

For the past five years I have been, professionally speaking, ever a bridesmaid, never a bride. Each year I've thought in December we'd be moving east in June. Jobs for professors of government turn over more slowly than those for psychiatrists, so we remain in Austin. With no medical school within easy commuting range, I have, of necessity, refocused my academic interests on medical humanities. This field I can pursue here as a very part-time graduate student in American civilization.

Austin remains a wonderful place to raise our daughters in blissful ignorance of such northeastern urban problems as schoolyard crime, air pollution, and snowsuits. Some extra-Texan culture occasionally seeps in. All three girls adore Gilbert and Sullivan. At Halloween Naomi was Iolanthe (nobody guessed) and three-year-old Rebecca switched at the last minute from being Aphrodite to Mabel.

Even for me, the city has its charms. We live in a Republican-free zone (all local elected officials are Democrats) so my sincere, if sporadic, environmental activism finds many allies.

— 25th — (1998) Bill Clinton

I LAST visited Radcliffe during our Tenth Reunion. In those four short days, I relived all four years of College. I was excited, impressed, and intimidated by the people around me, experienced moments of profound alienation and invisibility, came to unexpected insights about myself and the world, present and past, and heard splendid music. In the end, I felt intense gratitude that I had come, and that I was leaving.

Since then I have acquired a thick, somewhat unpolished professional carapace. (The carapaces I pick up at Second Hand Rose can't quite match the ones from Bloomingdale's). Right after Radcliffe, I attended Yale University School of Medicine. Due to Yale's ungraded curriculum, I graduated in 1977 with some serious skill deficits and an abiding interest in the history of medicine, cultivating the seeds planted by the history of science faculty at Harvard. My medical school thesis was a biography of Leona Baumgartner, an eminent woman in public health. At Yale, I learned more about Maimonides, body snatching, and the history of medical education reform than I did about molecular genetics, a trade-off I do not regret.

I survived an internal medicine internship at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, losing a houseplant but no toes to frostbite. After that, I returned to Yale for psychiatry residency and fellowship. The accident of being assigned to the V.A. for the first year led me to return following graduation for a five-year stint on the faculty. This was 1982-87, when the Vietnam veterans were finally seeking help, and I treated and studied traumatic stress disorders.

During those years I met my husband, Mark Graber, a political science graduate student with a serious interest in constitutional law and youth sports. By 1987 he had most of a Ph.D., and we had two daughters, Naomi and Abigail. Being a mother only confirmed that the life of a full-time medical academic was just out of my reach. I accompanied Mark to the University of Texas at Austin, where he had his first faculty post, and I became a student health psychiatrist. I extended my interest to the traumas of young people, especially young women, and began a degree I never finished in American studies.

Two things stand out from our time in Austin. The birth of a third daughter, Rebecca, broke the family tie over whether or not to get a dog (we didn't) and convinced me that Naomi's infant colic was the result of her temperament, not my mothering. I also spent two years helping my father, Jerome Frank ('30, Ph.D. '34, M.D. '38) revise his book Persuasion and Healing, a high point of both professional and filial accomplishment.

Austin has many advantages, but no medical school, so in 1987, we moved to Maryland. Mark joined the faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park and I reboarded the academic train at George Washington University station. For two years, I struggled to run the residency program there, endured exile to the managed care clinic for two years, then worked into my present slot as director of the psychiatry clerkship for third-year students. Having worked with schizophrenic combat vets, college students, and congressional staffers, I can rightly describe myself as exhibiting "Multiple Professionality Disorder," an asset in my present job. I don't do research, but enjoy the opportunity to write about women, trauma, anxiety and managed care, occasionally all in the same article, for various publications, especially News for Women in Psychiatry.

I try to express my social justice concerns in my work and my environmental ones at home, with the hope to do more in a later phase of life.

Since we have never had all three girls in the same school on the same schedule, I spend my off hours helping Mark run the shuttle, searching for socks, and trying not to look clueless at soccer games. I still knit and read mysteries for fun, and my daughter and I sing together in an amateur opera company with a children's chorus. She, being already taller and more musical than I, gets the solos and keeps me on pitch.

Except for days when the computer goes down, the students complain about grades, or my patients don't seem to be getting better fast enough for managed care, I feel nothing but gratitude for the many doors which Radcliffe opened in my life.

— 30th — (2003) George W. Bush

Being a psychiatrist interested in trauma and living on the outskirts of Washington, I am busier than a one-armed paperhanger these days. It has been encouraging to work with the wonderful people involved in this field, but I would be happier if it didn't exist. Fortunately, I have other, more cheerful interests, like maternal depression and psychiatric education of medical students, to keep my professional life invigorating. Mark, bless him, continues to offer encouragement and support. My children are leaving one by one — by the time of the next Class Report, all three will be in college. To my astonishment, Naomi and Rebecca are mad for opera, after we were in community productions of The Magic Flute, Carmen, Faust, and La Boheme together. Abigail is more involved with stagecraft — she loves to slope around with tools hanging off her, muttering about actors who clutter up the stage. Their interests and activities bring us much joy, even in these darkening days. Here's hoping our Thirty-fifth Reunion takes place in a more peaceful and just world.

— 35th — (2008) George W. Bush

I am still at George Washington University, where I am director of medical student education in psychiatry. I take pride in having fired off roughly sixty graduates into my field over the past fourteen years, and I am equally proud of the other two thousand or so who are, I hope, doctors with kind hearts and good communication skills. In my own practice, my interest in disaster psychiatry allowed me to participate in the care of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina who were sheltered for a month in DC (Many came to Dulles expecting to fly to Dallas, creating considerable confusion.) This effort involved coordinating volunteer psychiatrists from three medical schools, for which I received the Psychiatrist of the Year award from the Washington Psychiatric Society in 2005. Feminism has taken me in odd directions. Although I am the faculty adviser for the local chapter of Medical Students for Choice, for example, I seem to be developing a minor specialty in treating the psychiatric problems of pregnant and post-partum women.

On the personal front, Harvard did not accept any of my girls outright, but all found colleges where they have been happy and inspired to learn. My husband is a scholar of constitutional law at the University of Maryland School of Law. In consequence, I know more about Dred Scott than I really need to, at least on a day-to-day basis. In the time freed up by having kids with driver's licenses, I have been acting in community theater. Favorite roles have been Dottie/Mrs. Clackett in Noises Off, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Aunt Sally in The Fifth of July. My interest in the history of medicine is reviving, and I will soon be giving a lecture on Leona Baumgartner, Elvis Presley, and the history of polio vaccination in New York City.

— 40th — (2013) Barack Obama

Completing a meteoric rise in academia, I celebrated my nineteenth year at George Washington University by becoming a full professor of psychiatry in 2012. Two books, The Psychotherapy of Hope: The Legacy of Persuasion and Healing (with Renato Alarcon) and The Behavioral Sciences and Healthcare (with OJ Sahler, John Carr and Joao Nunes) appeared the same year, with me as coeditor and multiple chapter author. While I was working on these, my daughter (now a law student) was an editorial assistant in a small firm publishing books by egomaniac psychoanalysts who can't spell. ("Perhaps," said her mother thoughtfully, drawing on her pipe, "the editorial job was a little too much like life at home" — but no, I spell just fine.) Since then, I have mainly been seeing patients and teaching medical students. Establishing the "Five Trimesters Clinic," a small perinatal mental health program, has been a lifelong professional dream fulfilled. I have also been making various forays into community theater and celebrating the accomplishments of my highly educated children. Finally, I claim credit for discovering the fourth law of Mommodynamics: the conservation of clutter. According to this law, every time a lost object reappears, an object of equal importance goes missing. I made this breakthrough discovery the day my watch turned up under some papers on a countertop, and my cell phone instantly disappeared from my coat pocket. The same sly switching goes on with my library cards and my driver's license, my home and office keys, my metro pass and my credit card — the minute one turns up, the other slips away for a giggle and a rest. I cannot think of retirement, because I can't simultaneously locate the ID cards and forms needed to apply for it.

— 45th — (2018) Donald Trump

I am still healthy and tiresomely proud of my children and husband. I mourn my brother David '71, who died last summer; he directed several members of our Class in productions at Lowell House and had recently retired from teaching high school English and drama. If you want your memorial service to be standing room only, teach high school. For myself, though now a professor emeritus, I foolishly decided to keep teaching medical students. It may be just me, but I sense a tectonic shift in the relations between educators and the yet-to-be-educated. With the burgeoning of social movements built around outrage, the democratization of knowledge through the internet, intrusive administrative oversight, the pressure of competition and exams, and an environment of constant evaluation, students seem to have become as self-righteous and intolerant as many of us were back in the 1970s.

Still, teaching keeps me writing and thinking. I dearly want to find a place for pieces I have written, like "How Doctors Don't Think" and "Psychiatrists Are from Mars, Neurologists Are from Missouri." My clinical time is mostly dedicated to community psychiatry. Beyond that, I recently played Almira Gulch/Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, entering on a bicycle and later roller skating across the Emerald City with a smoking broom. So now, though there seems to be a bit less luster in being able to list MD, DLFAPA, after my name, I am proud to present myself as J. Frank, MD, WWOW.

— Forthcoming 50th — (2023) Joseph Biden

For years now, I have lived by the laws of Mommodynamics:

1. Energy is finite.

2. Clutter, like entropy, tends towards an infinite maximum.

3. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is merely misplaced.

Now, to my amazement, I recognize a fourth law has been operating all along, behind the other three: the law of conservation of clutter. Every time I find a lost object, an object of equal importance will go missing. This weekend it was my watch, which turned up under some papers on a countertop, and my cell phone, which instantly disappeared from my coat pocket. I have noticed the same sly switching going on with my faculty id and my driver’s license, my office key and my house key, my metropass, and my credit card--whenever I have one of these ready to hand, the other one slips off into the shadows for a giggle and a rest. After a frantic search which rivaled the rummaging of a cocaine addict in search of a fix, I just found the missing cell phone, under a potholder in the kitchen. I can hardly rejoice--lord knows what has just gone missing in its place!