Tributes

John Stone III 68MR, Walter Strauss 44C, Robert Rohrer 39C 42G

BONUSHEAD

By Mary J. Loftus

Professor of Medicine Emeritus John Stone III 68MR, award-winning poet, cardiology professor for nearly forty years, and associate dean for admissions at the medical school, died on November 5, 2008, at seventy-two. The grandson of a general practitioner, Stone founded and directed Grady’s residency program in emergency medicine, which since has become a department at Emory. Stone’s anthology of literature and medicine, On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays, coedited with Richard Reynolds, has been issued to nearly every first-year medical student in the United States since 1991 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He started Emory’s first course combining literature and medicine in 1993.

Emeritus Professor of Humanities Walter Strauss 44C died on February 5, 2008, at eighty-four. Born in Mannheim, Germany, Strauss was sent by his parents in 1936 to live with relatives in Atlanta to escape the Nazi regime. Strauss graduated from Emory then enlisted in the U.S. Army near the end of World War II. On a mission to track Germany’s progress toward an atomic bomb, he translated German documents about biological and chemical warfare. In 1954, after teaching at Harvard, he returned to Emory, where he taught until leaving for Case Western Reserve University, where he was the Treuhaft Chair in Humanities.

Professor of Nuclear Physics Emeritus Robert Rohrer 39C 42G died on December 12, 2007. His daughter, Katherine Rohrer, vice provost for academic programs at Princeton, serves on Emory’s Board of Trustees. “Dr. Rohrer was the most inspiring teacher I have ever had,” said Debia McCulloch 79C 87G. “His wide smile and continued enthusiasm for teaching even introductory physics classes were contagious.” Rohrer received the Emory Williams Teaching Award in 1973.