| Anne Cole Brown came to Bates
from Portland, where her parents were both teachers and her
father an organist — Anne’s first exposure to Bates was
sitting in the chapel with a book while her father had a lesson
with Professor Marion Anderson. She graduated as a Dana Scholar in
Chemistry, two-year co-captain in indoor and outdoor track and
field, one-time holder of the school records in the long jump and
triple jump, and she was part of the team that, 20 years after her
graduation, still holds the school 4x100 relay record. A student
athletic trainer at Bates, she made steady use of the Career
Discovery Internship Program from OCS, and gradually moved her
career direction toward medicine. She earned her Medical Degree
from the University of Vermont, did her residency in
internal medicine in New Orleans, and now practices at St.
Mary’s Medical Center in Lewiston. She
has been a very active provider of the OCS shadowing and volunteer
opportunities of which she made use as a student. As a student,
Anne took much encouragement from her professors and coaches. The
daughter of two humanists, she loved the sciences, doing research
with Tom Wenzel in chemistry, but carrying German to multiple years
of study with Craig Decker. A lot of what Anne did at Bates was
characterized by that sense of taking a deep breath and jumping
into the unknown — some jumps were physical, some
metaphorical. What she learned from Bates, and what has
characterized her medical practice and community involvement in the
years since, was discipline, scientific excellence, human decency,
and as she has said, “a general sense of fairness,”
where no one was excluded and there was a commitment to social
justice. How that sense of fairness and social justice has played
out has helped to change Lewiston-Auburn, and many people’s
lives. Anne helped to found, and then served as the medical
director of, the Bates Street Clinic, now often called the B Street
Clinic. She organized teams of volunteer doctors, nurses and staff
to serve the clinic, and turned it from a small night-time
operation into a major source of medical treatment for mostly
low-income people with limited or no medical insurance, and often
with language barriers to even understand doctors. Anne recruited
Bates students to come work in the clinic, often making use of
their language abilities to help translate with patients. One of
those students, Jenny Blau ’02, a Spanish major, is now
finishing her medical degree at Georgetown. Some time ago St.
Mary’s gave Anne one of their special awards to a member of
the staff for compassion — and people noticed that she was
the only physician as opposed to staff member in the history of the
award to receive it. But Anne also thinks about systems for
fairness, and serves on the Board of the Maine Health Care Access
Foundation, and on the Androscoggin County Committee of the Maine
Community Foundation. In her contribution to the Bates Oral History
Project, Anne commented that she was most struck upon returning to
Lewiston-Auburn by how much more involved the Bates students and
faculty were with serving this community, taking it seriously, and
living “with a general sense of fairness.” Very few
people have lived that mantra of fairness more consistently than
Anne Brown herself, and the Bates Scholar-Athlete Society is
honored to welcome her into membership. |
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