In Memoriam

Linda White Strout '76 Devoted to her patients By Lois Shea '95G

Linda White Strout '76 was the kind of doctor everyone hopes to have. "She was a really good diagnostician, but also a very caring and warm-hearted person. Her bedside manner was incredible," says Jackie Brooks, a nurse at Martin's Point Health Care in Portland, Maine. "If someone had a major diagnosis, she always made herself available —whether she was the on-call doctor or not," adds Brooks. "She would say 'call me anytime.'"

At UNH, Strout majored in medical technology. She worked as a microbiologist before enrolling in medical school in 1985 at the University of New England. She completed her internship and residency at the University of Buffalo. At Martin's Point, she specialized in internal medicine and volunteered at the Portland Free Clinic. Strout went on to become an internist and division director at Ohio State University Hospital, teaching clinical medicine. There she secured a grant to open a free clinic in Columbus.

Driven to improve general practice medicine, Strout worked to attract the best and brightest students to it. She persevered even after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. "She would have chemo on a Thursday, take Friday off and be back in the office on Monday," says her husband, Jeff Hammond. "She never played an instrument, but she was a true rock star," he says. "She was energetic, vivacious, compassionate and endearing."

Strout and her first husband, Michael, had three sons. In addition to Hammond and her sons, she is survived by two stepsons, her mother, a brother and a granddaughter, to whom she was devoted. "She loved her family. She was a wonderful grandmother," says her friend Michele McCann-Corti.

Strout was an exceptionally funny person. "Sometimes we laughed until we cried, and sometimes we cried until we laughed," says Brooks. She was adventurous, too: She took two of her three sons to Woodstock in 1999, and persuaded McCann-Corti to join them. The concert site ended up looking like a refugee war camp, says McCann-Corti, but Strout took it in stride. She even got a henna tattoo of the name of the band Metallica on her shoulder, which was supposed to fade, but didn't—much to her amusement.

Strout met Hammond through eHarmony. They married in 2004, and had almost eight years together. Linda died in his arms at home, two months shy of her 57th birthday. ~

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