Gerald Haines ’42, MD’44 hones his skills during a 1976 workshop in Professor R. M. P. Donaghy’s microsurgical laboratory at the University of Vermont. The lab was the first of its kind in the world. Photos courtesy of the Haines family.
When University of Vermont benefactor James B. Wilbur died unexpectedly in 1929, eight-year-old Gerald Haines was living on the family farm in Cabot, Vermont. Gerald’s parents, who cared deeply about education, may have read the newspaper stories about Wilbur’s $1.5 million bequest to create a scholarship fund at UVM, but they could never have known the impact that gift would have on their family, or the impact their family would have on the world.
Fast forward a decade. The farm has failed and the Haines family has moved down the road to the city of Barre, but Gerald is the valedictorian of his high school class and has his eye on UVM. They are getting by, but with his brother Carleton ’41, MD’43 already pursuing higher education as well, the family will need help. So Gerald writes to UVM and applies for a scholarship from the Wilbur Fund. In late July, a letter arrives from UVM President Guy Bailey explaining that Gerald has been awarded a $75 scholarship. It wasn’t all that he had hoped for, but by adding some modest support from his family and picking up work—including scrubbing bedpans at the Mary Fletcher Hospital—Gerald was able to cover the costs of his UVM education.
Gerald excelled as a student and followed his brother into the College of Medicine, pursuing an accelerated course of study necessitated by the pressures of the Second World War. While enrolled, he met the woman who would become his wife, Frances Whitcomb, a nursing student at the Mary Fletcher Hospital School of Nursing.
Gerald ’42, MD’44 began his career as a transport surgeon and neuropsychiatrist in the United States Army, then embarked on further medical training and earned a PhD from the University of Minnesota. While not uncommon today, earning a research doctorate was a rare choice for a surgeon at the time. Gerald and Frances settled their young family in Schenectady, New York, where he developed a deep and abiding commitment to his community and served the neurosurgical needs of families throughout northeastern New York for 30 years.
Gerald’s ability to throw himself into this important work was due in large part to Frances, who sacrificed her career as a nurse to focus on raising the couple’s three sons: Stephen MD’75, David, and Jonathan. Working together, Frances and Gerald gave the boys a stable, prosperous upbringing where education was a central value. Today, all three acknowledge the profound influence that their parents had on their educational path. “We all have advanced degrees,” points out Jonathan, “and that all came from the environment that we grew up in.”
Stephen, MD’75, Gerald ’42, MD’44, Jonathan, and David Haines in Thatcher State Park near Schenectady, New York.
For Stephen’s part, he arrived at Dartmouth College intending to become a high school teacher, with no intention of following in his father’s footsteps. But he just couldn’t shake his fascination with the nervous system, so before long he too found himself studying at the UVM College of Medicine. The head of neurosurgery at the time was the renowned surgeon Pete Donaghy, who introduced the use of the operating microscope into cerebrovascular surgery. One day, Dr. Donaghy was operating and invited Stephen to take a look through the microscope. “And I looked through the scope, and that was it,” Stephen recalls. “It was impossible to think about doing anything else after that. I had modified my initial plan to be a high school teacher; now I wanted to be a teacher of brain surgery.” In 2017, he retired as the Lyle A. French Chair in Neurosurgery and head of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota—a position he had held since 2003.
David (also retired) was ultimately drawn not to medicine, but to computer programming, earning a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts. At first he worked on natural language processing and then information retrieval (think Google, before Google), writing a dissertation titled Adaptive Query Modification in a Probabilistic Information Retrieval Model. He spent the last several years of his career programming for the University of Michigan’s educational software platform, helping enhance the educational experience for literally hundreds of thousands of students.
Inspired in part by his father’s interest in research, Jonathan pursued a PhD as well, also at the University of Minnesota. Today, he is the Mary W. Sheldon, M.D. Professor of Genomic Sciences and Chair of the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. For the past 30 years, he has worked in the field of genetic epidemiology building the foundation on which scientists can begin to understand the biology of complex diseases and then translate that understanding into treatments, preventions, and cures.
There are many data points one could use to measure the ripple effects of that $75 scholarship in 1939. The lives saved or improved in the operating room, the transformational scientific discoveries, the junior colleagues mentored and encouraged, the students empowered. Frances’s freedom to invest herself into numerous causes that served the public good. Then there are Gerald’s grandchildren, who are now making ripples in their own fields: higher education, arts and culture, technology.
No matter how you choose to calculate it, clearly the impact has been immense. Inspired by this, in 2017 the Haines brothers combined resources from Frances and Gerald’s estate with resources of their own and established the Haines Family Scholarship Fund at UVM. The fund, in recognition of the Wilbur Scholarship that “made it possible for [Gerald] to pursue a career in neurological surgery from such modest beginnings,” will help students from Vermont and New England attend UVM’s Larner College of Medicine. Additionally, Stephen recently documented a significant bequest that will ensure even greater assistance for future generations of medical students. As with the Wilbur Fund, the ripple effects of the Haines Family Scholarship will be incalculable.
“From our father growing up on a central Vermont dairy farm in the Depression to where we all are now is an extraordinary thing,” observes Stephen. “And we hope that the scholarship will help other families accomplish that same kind of transformation.”
