In Memoriam
Arthur W. Boylston II
Arthur W. Boylston II ’64 died on October 15, 2025.
As remembrances, here are posted two essays that Art wrote on the occasions of two Yale reunions. If an obituary should be published we will add it here.
Essay, 60th Reunion Book
by Arthur Boylston
May 2024
Art Boylston
1964 Yale graduation
Well, five years on we are still in our old mill in Oxford. Our sons' careers move on. Tom is an anthropologist at Edinburgh University. Nick is now at Harvard as a tenure-track assistant professor in Islamic philosophy and culture.
We can't travel to the US because of the extraordinary cost of health insurance for anyone over 75 — particularly if you have any health issues.
Otherwise all is well with us. We spend whatever time we can with the family in Scotland. Cassie is a force of nature. Sam a quiet but deep observer of the natural world. They are great fun.
Thanks to Bill and Sam for sorting out this link.
Best wishes to you all.
Cheers,
Art
Essay, 50th Reunion Book
by Art Boylston
May 2014
Art Boylston
50th Reunion
I went to Harvard Medical School. Between second and third years I went to London on an NSF fellowship and inadvertently changed the course of my life. I fell in love with England and the then lack of red tape surrounding medicine and research. I also decided that pathology was the way that I could combine an experimental program with clinical service. After graduation, an internship at the Brigham, and two years in the P.H.S. in Bethesda I returned to London to do a two-year fellowship in transplant pathology. Then another unforeseen game changer in the shape of my boss’s secretary came along. We are still married, and I am still here.
Anthea and I have two sons whose talents and careers have surprised and delighted us. Tom read Chinese at Oxford, hated China, and switched to Anthropology for his Ph.D. Along the way he learned to speak Mandarin, Tibetan, Japanese, Amharic, and French. He is now a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at the L.S.E. Nick, Tom’s little brother, took himself off to Harvard and won a traveling scholarship to do an M.A. at the Univ. of Tehran. Now he is back in Washington pursuing a Ph.D. in Persian poetry and Islamic philosophy. He speaks Farsi, Arabic, and Sanskrit. (I’m not kidding, he was the only Sanskrit major in the U.S.) Where did the languages come from? Not me. My wife says I can’t speak proper English, and not her. The great genetic gene scrambler has been at work. Both boys got married this summer to lawyers. As one of my friends said “at least they won’t starve.” Actually they are both great women and a happy addition to the clan.
One of the beauties of the British academic system is obligatory retirement at 65. Hanging up my microscope gave me the time to finish a project that I had been working on for years. My book, Defying Providence, is a re-examination of many myths about smallpox and 18th century medicine. It’s now available from Amazon as a paperback and an ebook; read it, you’ll be amazed. We also decided that we needed to be nearer Anthea’s sisters and aunts as well as being nearer our son in London. We wound up buying an 18th century water mill on the edge of Oxford. The machinery and water are gone but it is still possible to see how it worked as a mill. It comes complete with two species of deer, foxes, owls, pheasants, and some great neighbors.
When we moved I found the records of the first 50 post mortems that I did at the Brigham in 1969. Medicine has progressed so fast that many of them would have survived today. Breast cancer is mostly curable, heart attacks get stented, statins prevent strokes, and we have all given up smoking. Now all we have to do is make sure that the benefits of all this federally funded research get to everyone. Socialized medicine won’t kill you, or the U.S.