Before the ballroom fills to capacity, Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell and his daughter Dr. Nalani Blaisdell-Brennan are sharing several minutes alone together, looking up, watching a large screen filled with faces he knows so well.
Dr. Blaisdell, the John A. Burns School of Medicine’s founding Chair of Medicine, is revered by virtually everyone connected with the University of Hawai’i’s medical school.
But in the images from that evening, you can see the love that flows back in the other direction, from physician-teacher to his students. One by one, the photos show every graduating class of the medical school since its first MD graduates posed in 1975.
Along with Nalani, a psychiatrist and UH medical school graduate, Dr. Blaisdell points with delight at the sons and daughters of Hawai’i whose embraced his philosophy–that doctors must treat each patient with a knowledge and appreciation for the patient’s upbringing, a respect for his or her culture and that intangible, magical element of aloha.
The event was the 50th Anniversary Scholarship Fundraising Gala at the Sheraton-Waikīkī, on July 18, 2015. The photographer is Amanda Shell. And the images tell the story of how the lives of all of us who have doctors who were trained at the UH medical school are being touched everyday, through lessons taught by Professor Emeritus Blaisdell and the faculty colleagues who continue his work at the John A. Burns School of Medicine.
–By Tina Shelton