Dr. Frederick H. Lovejoy Jr. ’55 has trained thousands of Harvard pediatricians and cared for sick children from all over the world.
BY KRISTIN DUISBERG
As the oldest son of a prominent family in the steel business in Concord, Massachusetts, Frederick H. Lovejoy Jr. ’55 could have taken the obvious path: attending Concord’s Middlesex School for his secondary education, as many of his grade school friends had done, and entering the family business after college. That he chose an untried route — the only member of his family to attend St. Paul’s School, he’s also the only one to become a medical doctor — speaks to the qualities that have made him an exceptional physician, and a fitting recipient of a 2023 St. Paul’s School Alumni Association Award: a strong sense of purpose and an appetite for hard work.
“My parents instilled in all of us, me and my brother and sister, the importance of service,” he says. “When I told them I was going into medicine instead of business, they said I should pursue the career I wanted. But the expectation was that whatever I chose, l do it well.”
After St. Paul’s, Lovejoy attended Yale, where he majored in history. A varsity athlete who played both soccer and squash — he was on the 1959 squash team that won the national championship — he completed much of his pre-med coursework during summer breaks (“afternoon labs and varsity sports didn’t really mix,” he explains.) and earned his M.D. from the University of Virginia in 1963. He completed an internship in pediatrics at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital and then in 1965 was given the choice of doing his residency either at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore or Children’s Hospital in Boston. He chose Children’s, and aside from a two-year stint in Morocco in 1966-68 treating soldiers who were returning home from Vietnam, has remained there ever since. He spent four years as chief resident to physician-in-chief Dr. Charles Janeway, considered one of the foremost pediatricians of the 20th century, and worked with John Enders of the Form of 1915, winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Today, at the age of 85, Lovejoy is the associate physician-in-chief and deputy chairman of Boston Children’s Hospital and the William Berenberg Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
In the 1970s, Lovejoy served as the director of the Boston Poison Information Center and in 1978 founded the Massachusetts Poison Control System with then-governor Michael Dukakis. He also contributed foundational research to the understanding of fevers of unknown origin in children and helped develop the classification and staging system for Reye syndrome, a disease that can develop in children with flu or chicken pox who are given aspirin products.
“It was our work that led to the warning labels you see on medicines that contain aspirin today,” Lovejoy explains.
But it’s his 27-year leadership of Harvard’s residency program — from 1980 to 2007 — that Lovejoy says is his most meaningful contribution to medicine. “That program has trained over a thousand pediatricians who have gone on as faculty at the hospital and throughout the country. They have furthered the care of sick children, created new knowledge in pediatric medicine and assumed major leadership roles in academic pediatrics. Today, they are the legacy of the residency program training the future academic pediatric leaders,” he says.
Lovejoy met his wife, Jill, during his own residency. The couple married less than six months after their first date and share three children, their spouses and six grandchildren.
Beyond his clinical and administrative duties, and with a nod to his undergraduate studies, Lovejoy has found time to write six books — all histories of various aspects of Boston Children’s Hospital. His dual interests in science and the liberal arts also have been felt at SPS, where he established the Lovejoy Science Prize in 2004. The prize is awarded at Graduation to the Sixth Former “who has best integrated science into a liberal arts education as demonstrated through academic performance, independent project work and enhancement of science in student life,” and also funds a speaker series to bring practicing scientists to the SPS grounds.
“I loved St. Paul’s,” he says. “But during my time there, science practically didn’t exist in the curriculum.” Instead, he says, what most influenced him was the School Prayer and its exhortations to be unselfish in friendship, thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves, and eager to bear the burdens of others. That, and his parents’ expectation that he do well in his chosen career path.
“If I have to choose one thing I’d say I’m most proud of, it’s contributing to the success of the best pediatric hospital in the world,” he says. At the same time, of the Alumni Association Award, he says, “It is remarkably meaningful, profoundly cherished and humbly and deeply appreciated.”