“My vocation is my vacation”

AYAM Vice President Donald E. Moore, M.D. ’81, M.P.H. ’81, practices family medicine in Brooklyn, N.Y., concentrating on diabetes, aids, asthma and hypertension—“the diseases of our population.” He even makes house calls. Moore describes reunions with senior faculty at alumni events as “a contemporary connection to the giants in medicine because they really have a lot of collective wisdom and individual wisdom.” Moore says the old-timers know that medicine has not always been—and will not always be—governed by the “contemporary wisdom” of efficiency above all.

Moore is interested in cultural differences—“how the culture of the individual you’re treating impacts on their health and their care and the relationship you are about to have. It’s very important. ... Half of medicine is an art. That takes time, you know. You can’t push the artist.” Moore enjoys family activities with his wife, Christine Moore, and their two daughters, but otherwise, he says, “my vocation is my vacation.”

Francis M. Lobo, M.D. ’92, AYAM secretary, hasn’t really left New Haven since medical school. He did his residency at Yale and is now an assistant professor of medicine at Yale, doing basic research on gene activation in the immune system. He also works at the Dana Clinic, where he treats patients with allergies and immunological problems.

Lobo considers his Yale classmates “the nicest, smartest, kindest and gentlest people I’ve known.” He says the medical school manages to admit high achievers “who can adapt to an environment in which you’re asked not to compete, but to work together and to help one another, within a mature, graduate school ethic.”