Profiles in Giving

Dr. Sylvia McKean DMS '77: Breaking Down Barriers

Dr. Sylvia McKean

Throughout her life, Dr. Sylvia McKean has broken down barriers. In the late 1960's, when Yale moved to coeducation, she was among the school's first female students and graduated with the Yale Class of 1972. Following Yale, and despite her family's strong objections, McKean decided to become a physician. After putting herself through medical school and graduating with the Dartmouth Medical School Class of 1977, McKean embarked on a distinguished career that has included practice in such diverse areas as internal medicine, emergency medicine, and vascular medicine at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, MA. And in 1995, McKean joined Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital to practice hospital medicine—a year before a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine introduced the public to the terms "hospitalist" and "hospital medicine."

Today, Dr. McKean is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and medical director of the BWF Hospitalist Service at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston as well as Faulkner Hospital, a 150 bed non-profit, community teaching hospital in Jamaica Plain. Her responsibilities are many: she oversees a group of 21 physicians and six physician assistants, as well as administrative staff; coordinates all aspects of care for hospitalized patients, from admission through discharge; and teaches residents and medical students and contributes to curriculum development. She is also a devoted wife and proud mother of three grown sons, demonstrating that a woman can have both a rewarding career in medicine and a rich, fulfilling family life.

McKean credits Dartmouth Medical School with "setting me on a track of lifelong learning that has made my medical career sustainable and professionally satisfying." To honor the education her alma mater gave her, McKean makes annual gifts to the Fund for DMS. Recently, she made an additional generous gift in support of the C. Everett Koop Medical Science Complex.

The Complex will bring state-of-the-art medical research and exceptional academic programs together in close proximity to clinical and patient care areas, forming a unique community of researchers, doctors, and others who are focusing on finding new cures, advanced therapies, and better outcomes for patients. Construction for the facility will begin later this year.

Especially satisfying to Dr. McKean is the fact that, with its spacious, open labs expanded classroom and study areas, and numerous connected, collaborative spaces for research and education, the Koop Complex will greatly enhance the educational experience of future generations of DMS students. McKean notes: "I am very grateful that Dartmouth Medical School gave me the opportunity to practice medicine and this gift is one way of supporting this wonderful medical school."

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