Raymond Alexander ’60

IT IS HARD to accept that Ray has left us. He died Feb. 23, 1992, after a three-and-a-half-year battle with cancer. In January 1991, after surgery to remove three-quarters of his liver and part of the lung, Ray lapsed into a five-month coma. But by last fall, a series of experimental treatments, largely directed by his brothers James and George, seemed to have rid his body of cancer. Ray himself was medical director of the trauma program at the Univ. Medical Center and chief of surgery at the Univ. of Florida Health Science Center in Jacksonville. He also served as medical director of Florida's Emergency Medical Services office. His classmates will remember a sensitive, caring, and cheerful man, and will not be surprised to learn that during treatment he said, "When you're in those circumstances, you need tender loving care. As a physician, it's hard to realize how vulnerable your patients really are, how fragile their feelings are. They need to feel constant reinforcement." Ray's colleagues recognized him as a technically excellent surgeon and a medical innovator, becoming one of the first board-certified vascular surgeons in Florida.

At Princeton, Ray was a freshman rower and member of the Undergraduate Council staff and Undergraduate Schools Committee, He was president of Orange Key in his senior year and was a member of Cap and Gown. His medical training came largely at Duke, where he received his M.D. in 1963 and took a medical internship. Following military service in Thailand, he moved to the Univ. of Florida Dept. of Surgery and was named professor of surgery in 1986.

Ray has two daughters, Cara and Evyn '92. The suffering of the past three years is now over for Ray, but it is just beginning for those of us who cherish his memory. The Class of 1960 sends its warmest wishes to Cara and Evyn, and to the rest of Ray's family.

The Class of 1960