Suzanne Stensaas

When I think of Suzanne Stensaas, I picture her with a brain bucket.

Every Friday around lunchtime during the years I worked at the University of Utah, the staff, residents and medical students in the Neurology Department of which I was a part would gather up their lunches and head to brain cutting--literally--where various interesting brains from (yes) dead patients would be sliced for viewing and scientific research.

Suzanne was the neuroanatomist in the department. Brains were her thing. Neurologists thought nothing of doing this over lunch.

Parkinsons brains. Alzheimers brains. Brains with bleeds. Normal brains. Abby Normal brains.

Suzanne was well known as an enthusiastic, larger than life character, extremely proficient in her field.

Suzanne Stensaas.

In 1986, a few years after I knew her, Suzanne gave up scientific research for teaching, and in 1990, she left the University of Utah, where she had been since 1969, and headed to New York City to teach at Cornell. She served on the medical college faculty at Cornell University until 1999, when she returned to the University of Utah to direct the neuroscience block in what was then the new curriculum of the medical school. She has remained in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah Medical Center since.

Suzanne was instrumental in the creation of the Slice-of-Life project, a multimedia medical education and information sharing project spearheaded at the University of Utah, and for over twenty years travelled the globe giving Slice-of-Life workshops to multimedia developers and medical science educators. She is also on the board of directors of the Health Assets Education Library (HEAL).

Over the years she has published numerous articles in medical journals on neuroanatomy, neuropathology, medical education and multimedia, and is well known and respected internationally as an authority, educator and speaker on the same. She has made an enormous contribution to the University of Utah health care system and neurological education, as well as the use of multimedia in the health care sciences.

Me, I always think of her at lunch. On Fridays.

Anne Osborne

Shortly after college, I worked for two years in the early 1980's in the Department of Neurology at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where I met and worked with a number of fascinating people who had an impact on my life.

One of them was Annie Osborn.

A graduate of Stanford Medical School, Anne Osborn was a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah, and as such, had a lot of overlap with the Neurology Department. She was at the time a single woman in her mid-thirties and a rising star in her field, well respected by her colleagues and by the medical students who trained there. She had a memorable persona, and a singular laugh that would echo down the hallway. Although not particularly old by any means, one wondered if she was likely to marry, and simply thought of her as being single, and very much a professional. The fact that she was an LDS woman, a professional, and single, was at the time somewhat noteworthy, and she was included in LDS Church publications writing on the very subject of being single in 1977.

Anne went on to write the definitive textbook on the subject of neuroradiology, and became the first female president of the American Society of Neuroradiology.

Anne G. Osborn.

Annie Osborn, the well respected, dynamic, neuroradiologist later married a General Authority of the LDS Church, Ronald Poelman, after the death of his first wife, and went on to have a successful career as an author, not just of numerous medical texts, but of religous and autobiographical works as well. Her book, The Simeon Solution: One Woman's Spiritual Odyssey, is her own account of her life and journey.

She continues to be on the staff at the University of Utah, and is well respected as an educator and author.

Jocelyn Matsuo

The last time I saw Jocelyn Matsuo, she was a toddler in arms, the firstborn child of the neurologist I was working for at the University of Utah at the time, Fred (Fumisuke) Matsuo and his wife, cardiologist Ruth Ann Smith. I probably have a photo somewhere of me holding her at their then beautiful new home up in Summit Park outside Salt Lake City.

But that was over twenty-five years ago. Jocelyn was a beautiful child.

In March of 1999, a news item caught my attention. A Utah teenager, on a school trip to Costa Rica, had amazingly survived an attack by over 250 killer bees. The fifteen-year-old hiker who had stumbled upon the next of Africanized bees and lived to tell the tale?

Jocelyn Matsuo.

Her life spared from the bees' potentially fatal wrath, Jocelyn Matsuo is now a professional actor, performance artist and mime.