Hartford on the Brain

Start at 193 Arnoldale Road

Fanny Radom is second from left in this photo

Dr. Fanny Radom (second from left in photo) was born in the Ukraine on December 28, 1878. She came to Hartford in 1893. At the time there were only about 2500 Jews in Hartford. She graduated from the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She was one of the first licensed women pharmacists in the state of Connecticut. This is especially impressive given that there were unspoken quotas to exclude Jews to medical schools and residencies and there were only 28 Jewish physicians in Hartford overall. Despite being one of the few women doctors at the time, she was one of the founding physicians of Mount Sinai Hospital in 1923. At the time Jewish doctors were not permitted hospital privileges at Hartford Hospital or Saint Francis Hospital. Most were forced to practice in smaller community hospitals outside the city even though most of their patients lived in the city. There was no place where Jewish patients felt welcome and Jewish physicians could practice a full range of specialities. Dr. Radom first lived and practiced at 336 Windsor Ave in Hartford. She then had a practice at 2094 Main Street in Hartford and lived at 193 Arnoldale Road in West Hartford. She died September 12, 1948 and is buried at Zion Hill Cemetery.

The Practice of Medicine and Prejudice in a New England Town: The Founding of Mount Sinai Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut

Dr. Fanny Karp Radom

Walk north on Arnoldale Road until you cross Farmington Avenue. Enter the West Hill Drive loop.

56 West Hill Drive was the home of Edward Lorenz

Edward Lorenz

Edward Norton Lorenz: The Butterfly Effect
Almost everyone is familiar with some notion of the “the butterfly effect”, but few outside the scientific community know the name Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008), born in West Hartford, Connecticut. Edward Lorenz was an American meteorologist and mathematician who was the first to recognize chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems which sparked a scientific revolution called chaos theory. This became known as the “butterfly effect” after a 1972 talk at the annual meeting of the AAAS given by Lorenz that was titled “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas.”

A simplified explanation of “the butterfly effect” is that small initial conditions, even far away, can have significant impact on large events through non-linear dynamics. We know very little about Ed Lorenz’ early childhood at 56 West Hill Drive, West Hartford, Connecticut, but we do know it was here that he first became interested in mathematics, chess and astronomy, and … weather. Perhaps these “initial conditions” ultimately resulted in his discovery of a fundamental “chaos theory” underlying much of modern science. This marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted the fields of virtually every branch of science: mathematics, biology, physics, sociology, etc.

“…the advent of chaos theory in the second half of the twentieth century has brought about a revolution in science; hardly any scientific discipline (whether on the physical or biological side) has been untouched by it. In its essence, this revolution has been brought about by a paradigm shift to rival that of quantum theory, or relativity theory.”

While his discoveries impacted science more broadly, much of Lorenz research centered around weather. After helping the US Army Air Corp pilots forecast weather in the Pacific during WWII, he continued applying mathematics to his pioneering work on weather and climate theory. The ensemble forecast methodologies he created are now being utilized in predicting climate change.

In honor of 100th birthdayl

Biography of Lorenz

Continue east on Farmington Ave to Highland Street and turn right to 17 South Highland. This was the home of Nobel Prize Winner John Enders.

John Enders

John Enders was born in West Hartford, CT in 1897. He went to the Noah Webster School at Hartford and St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. He attended Yale University for one year and left to pursue a career as a pilot in the Air Force in 1918. After fighting in World War I, he returned to Yale to finish out his degree. He then went on to study English, German, and Celtic Literature. To finish out his education, he earned his Ph.D. in bacteriology and immunology.

In 1946, after years of research Enders established an infectious disease lab at the Children’s Medical Center in Boston, MA. In 1954, Enders was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He had successfully cultivated the poliomyelitis virus in non-nervous tissue. Enders and his colleagues found changes in cell tissue under a high-powered light microscope. They were able to detect the poliovirus growing which became the new way to confirm the presence of the virus.

In 1961 he was named one of Time magazine’s Men of the Year

He has been called the father of modern vaccines

Nobel prize information

John Enders biography