I was so very surprised, humbled (and delighted) by this story about my life written by Lauren Harkawik published in the Cracker Barrel Spring 2023 supplement of The Deerfield Valley News. Feels so great to share why I adore my life here…and why this land, my home for more than 53 years is where our tap root is so deeply planted.
In 2003, upon stepping down as president of the William T. Grant Foundation and moving to Vermont, “in order to be true to what I was trying to do as a doctor and a human being,” Karen Hein’70 cited the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “My life is my message.” It’s a principle she has been applying all her life.
She brought her newborn baby to introduce him to her incarcerated young patients at the Spofford Juvenile Center, an “infamous” correctional facility for adolescents in the Bronx. She hauled a spinning wheel into her office in the U.S. Senate, where she served as a health policy fellow on the professional staff of the Senate Finance Committee, to help her unwind
Karen Hein, M.D., a founding member of the Dartmouth Medical School Board of Overseers from 1973 to 1978, also established the world’s first adolescent HIV/AIDS education program in 1987. To do so, she worked closely with New York City’s Board of Education to expand HIV/AIDS education to approximately one million students in the city’s public school system.
Karen Hein was born in New York City in 1944, and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1966. She attended Dartmouth Medical School from 1966 to 1968, and received her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1970.
On a Friday morning in late February, Karen Hein leads her 12 American Cashmere goats through the woods that surround her 19th-century farmhouse in southernmost Vermont. In the afternoon, she and her husband, Ralph Dell, wade through knee-deep snow at a cemetery in the town of Whitingham to show a visitor one of their favorite local sights: a quirky headstone that never fails to tickle their funny bones.
In the hours between these slices of Vermont life, Hein explains why she regularly interrupts her rural idyll to drive three hours to Montpelier, the can’t-get-there-from-here capital city of Vermont, where she spends three days of each week poring over white papers and grant proposals and sitting through public hearings and conference calls with the Green Mountain Care Board.
“The Shepherdess Path” painting on my white coat by artist and activist, Regina Holliday who depicts doctors’ stories as a way to further unite physicians with patients in her project, “The Walking Gallery of Healthcare”. My painting shows me with my Shepherdess staff, holding hands with my husband, Ralph in his hospital ‘johnny’ as we lead a herd of goats with children on their backs along a path lined by parting waves with spiral clouds above. Among the many times I have worn this symbolic jacket, was my presentation of The Armstrong Lecture in Vancouver.
Hein K: APA George Armstrong Lecture: Outside looking in, Inside looking out–Expanding the concept of health. Academic Pediatrics (2015) 15:117-127
