UFE STORIES AS CAREERS—CAREERS AS LIFE STORIES NANCY C. A. ROESKE* At the 1974 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Buckminster Fuller was a guest speaker. He had revolutionized our lives with the geodesic dome, which can cover enormous areas to house activities as varied as football and missile projects to Disney's Future World. He began his talk by telling how his early childhood perceptions were the stimulus for his wonderfully airy structures. When he was 3-4 years old he was always tripping, falling, and being scolded by his sisters and parents for appearing to be looking around and forgetting where he was going. When he was 5 years old it was discovered that he was markedly farsighted and astigmatic. After he was given glasses he saw the world as other people saw it. But he had grown to enjoy his personal visual distortions. Later these early perceptions found creative expression in the geodesic dome. His personal life became a career, and, in turn, his career shaped his life story. As I listened to Fuller, I identified with him, for I, too, had been tremendously farsighted and astigmatic as a preschool child. Thus, I began rethinking the interplay between my life story and career. Over the past decade I have discovered with a new intensity how my convictions about what is important have motivated my career as clinician, teacher, and researcher. The motivation is linked to a natural physical vitality, which in part results from social forces that emanated from my family, from the open-minded tone of my educational experiences, and from the many opportunities I have had as a professional woman living at a time when feminism and egalitarianism have resurfaced as concepts valued by society. This paper was presented as the Virginia Tarlow Award Lecture, Department of Psychiatry , Northwestern University School of Medicine, Chicago, June 14, 1983. ?Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, Riley Hospital, 702 Barnhill Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana 46223.© 1985 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/85/2802-0416$01 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 28, 2 ¦ Winter 1985 | 229 In some ways the preparation for my life began three generations ago, in 1871, when my maternal grandmother graduated from Normal School, the Victorian title for a teacher's college. Her Quaker fatHr said, "Anna, you are not well-educated. You must go east and complete your education." Four years later she graduated with a degree in Latin and Greek and returned to a town of 1,000 people in northwest Wisconsin . She eloped with my Irish immigrant grandfather. After losing a foot in a lumbering accident, and with an eighth-grade education, my grandfather had prepared for entrance to a university. At the time of their marriage he was a teacher, lawyer, and banker who shared my grandmother 's ideals about education. Latin, Greek, and, later, a kindergarten became required education in that community. It is not surprising that each of dieir nine children became eidier a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or a teacher. Another expression of my grandparents' concern for the well-being ofothers was an open-door social welfare attitude. Hence, my mother, the tenth child, was born into a family that extended into the community. Physically handicapped, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded people first sought shelter at my grandparents' house when they could no longer take care of themselves. Women with children abused by alcoholic husbands arrived sometimes in the middle of the night. Similar experiences became part of my childhood since my father shared this attitude. My mother decided at an early age to become a physician. During her adolescence her father died of cancer and her mother had had an ovarian tumor successfully operated on at the Mayo Clinic. Then my mother decided to become a gynecological surgeon. However, women were not allowed to be surgeons before World War I. The surgeon's attitude toward women medical students at the time is exemplified by the chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, who called in my father, the chief resident, and said, "We have had a woman medical student assigned to...