| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
In Memoriam |
Dr Royal Jay Bartrum, Jr, MD, died April 28, 2006, at his home in East Montpelier, Vt.
|
After graduation, Dr Bartrum married Jane Chamberlin in Keene, NH, and they moved to San Francisco, Calif, where he held a surgical internship at the San Francisco General Hospital. After a year working as a general physician, he returned to Boston as a clinical academic fellow and resident in radiology at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. There he served as chief resident from 1974 to 1975 before moving with his family to Hanover, NH, where he was a staff radiologist and a member of the clinical faculty at Dartmouth Medical School. He was an associate professor of radiology at Dartmouth until 1987 when, eager to do more direct clinical service, he moved with his family to Montpelier. As a member of Green Mountain Radiology, he practiced at Central Vermont Medical Center from 1987 until an illness forced his early retirement in January 2006.
Dr Bartrum trained in medical ultrasonography (US) in Denmark in the early 1970s, and he was one of its pioneers in this country. While at Dartmouth, he was the principal author of three seminal books on US: Gray Scale Ultrasound, Case Studies in Ultrasound, and Real-Time Ultrasound. I still use the classic physics chapter in the "green book," Real-Time Ultrasound, as the best introductory chapter on US for beginning residents and medical students in our radiology elective.
Later, along with Stuart Young, MD, of Stanford University (Stanford, Calif), Dr Bartrum coauthored two books on financial independence for physicians. In addition to these texts, he was the author of more than 30 medical journal articles and served on the consulting editorial boards of eight journals and publications. He presented numerous guest lectures around the world and received a number of academic fellowships. In his final years at Dartmouth, he was the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Health grant on breast cancer screening.
Dr Bartrum was curious, thoughtful, and systematic and, consequently, he was an excellent teacher. He was a medical maverick of sorts, always pushing medical students and radiology residents to perform at their best and always keeping the interest of the patient before all others. He encouraged his students to question conventional medical wisdom or practice; he was an early proponent of what is now referred to as evidence-based medicine. In the mid-1970s, he was among the first to demonstrate the utility of US in demonstrating gallstones and helped to establish that modality as the premier tool in the evaluation of the gallbladder, now standard practice everywhere. Soon thereafter, he recognized the extraordinary power of the so-called real-time as opposed to static scanning and became a leader in spearheading the changeover to the new generation of scanners, which enabled US to become the important clinical tool it is today.
Dr Bartrum had many interests outside of medicine. He was an avid reader and a Boston Red Sox fan. Music brought him a great deal of pleasure. He had his own band in high school called the Downbeats; he was an accomplished classical and jazz pianist; and he played the clarinet, saxophone, and flute. In the recent past, he served as organist as St John the Baptist Church in Hardwick, Vt, where he and his family were members.
Dr Bartrum loved spending time with his family and thoroughly enjoyed summers at their camp on Peacham Pond. He loved the outdoors. He taught both of his sons to fly fish, and he and his son Nathaniel climbed all 48 mountains of 4000 feet or higher in New Hampshire before Nathaniel's 11th birthday. He also was involved for several years as a facilitator in parent programs at the Hyde School in Bath, Maine, from which his son Ian graduated.
We will all miss Dr Bartrum, whose passing was far too soon. In his shortened though productive life, however, he demonstrated the power of an extraordinary intellect coupled with energy, curiosity, and a well-rounded personality—ever an inspiration to all who came into contact with him.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
| RADIOLOGY | RADIOGRAPHICS | RSNA JOURNALS ONLINE |
