![]() Rocco Orlando, a surgeon at Hartford Hospital who trained under Foster.įoster deplored the compartmentalization of his friend’s care, which he described as “medicine at its most effective, and at its worst,” and chided his fellow specialists for “the failure to always remember the most important needs of the human body,” said Orlando. He described the illness of a friend who was dying of colon cancer while surrounded by specialists of all types, recalled Dr. He later volunteered to be a “patient instructor,” who would describe hypothetical symptoms to medical students who were learning to take medical histories and diagnose illness.Ī speech he gave to the New England Surgical Society, of which he was a past president, captured Foster’s concerns about medical treatment. Jim Foster taught a popular segment in Kosowicz’s class on the principles of clinical medicine, where he challenged students to think about the many reasons behind a patient’s abdominal pain, an early symptom of many illnesses.įoster was the director of surgery education until he retired in 1993. “He didn’t believe that memorization of data was as important as knowing where data was and how to make judgments,” said Sara Foster, his wife. He discouraged the amount of memorization traditionally required of students. As a result, medical students began spending more time outside the hospital, working in small groups with self-directed learning and spending less time in surgical training, for example. In the early 1990s, Foster spearheaded a change in the clinical curriculum at UConn Medical School and was among the first to predict that patient care was going to shift from hospitals to clinics or doctors’ offices, Kosowicz said. “He modeled not taking the words of powerful people at face value, and trying to see the big picture.” “He was a free thinker, non-conventional,” said John Foster, one of the doctor’s three children. Air Force, providing medical care in Utah, but asked to be released from the reserves during the Vietnam conflict because he did not support the war. ![]() Over the years, he specialized increasingly in liver tumors, was an early advocate of surgery for liver cancer and co-wrote an influential book that is still quoted 25 years after its publication. After Haverford College, Foster went to Columbia University Medical School and became a general surgeon. In their backyard, Foster’s father jury-rigged a rope tow from a Model T Ford so they could ski down their hill, and the family spent vacations fishing in Maine. Jim Foster combined the scientific skills of a surgeon with the compassion of a humanist and was widely admired as a teacher, outdoorsman and friend.įoster grew up in Cheshire, the middle son of three boys whose father was a Yale surgeon, hiker and skier. ![]()
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