The Making and the Being of an Academic (Ambulatory) Pediatrician

Abstract

I t is a privilege to follow in the footsteps of two Armstrong awardees and Yale colleagues—Paul McCarthy, who is in the audience today, and Dr George Silver, who in 1967 received the very first Armstrong award. George was a health policy expert at the Yale School of Public Health and a tireless advocate for children’s health. I also want to mention my special link with C. Henry Kempe, the 1976 awardee, whose talk was about the prevention of child abuse; many years before others, Kempe was wise enough to focus on the prevention of this terrible problem. Kempe labeled and described the ‘‘battered child syndrome’’ in a landmark publication in JAMA in 1962. In so doing, he got American physicians to recognize a disease that had gone mostly undiagnosed and ignored. This work made us all much smarter. He also established and was the first editor of an academic journal focused on child abuse. I had the honor of being the fourth editor of that journal, and if I can accomplish one tenth of what Kempe did in the field of child abuse, I will feel privileged. During the last several weeks, I had the opportunity to read many of the previous Armstrong talks and learned that previous speakers have usually given what I would call a ‘‘vision’’ talk about an important topic in child health—preventive pediatrics, road blocks confronting general pediatrics, and childhood disabilities in the United States, to name just a few. I was struck, however, that an important topic—one that is less about vision but equally important—had not been addressed, maybe because it is often difficult to talk about oneself. Interestingly, none of the previous Armstrong speakers had talked about us— about you and me, about how we have developed, how we have evolved, and how, if we plan to continue, we get others to be like us. So my talk today is about a journey—my own and my evolution as an academic pediatrician and a child abuse doctor. As I speak to you, I would like you to reflect some on your own journeys and on your own careers as academic pediatricians. What paths have you taken and what