Francis M. Forster

Francis Michael Forster was an eminent physician and neurologist, a former dean of the Georgetown University School of Medicine, and an internationally recognized expert on the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy. Forster was born on February 14, 1912, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Michael Joseph and Louise Barbara (née Schmidt) Forster, and he died on February 23, 2006, also in Cincinnati.

Education Forster attended St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, garnering there an education in the classical languages of Greek and Latin. In the 1940s, training in neurology was paired inextricably with psychiatry, and Forster completed his postgraduate education in the latter discipline at the University of Pennsylvania. A Rockefeller Research Fellowship in neurophysiology followed thereafter at Yale University.

Academic career Forster's first academic appointment was as an instructor in neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, where he joined the faculty in 1941. Two years later he moved to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where an interest developed in patients with epilepsy which would last for the rest of his career. Frank's skills as an administrator were increasingly recognized by his peers at Georgetown, and when Paul McNally, the dean of the medical school, became ill with coronary artery disease in 1952, Forster was chosen as his replacement. He presided over a steady expansion in the curriculum and the physical facilities at Georgetown over the next five years. Even though Forster's style was conversational and collegial, he was extremely adept politically and saw a tripling of extramural grant funding at Georgetown during his deanship. He remained on the active teaching and research faculty of UWMS for the next 20 years, and was subsequently the director of the Forster Epilepsy Center at the William Shainline Middleton Veterans Administration Hospital in Madison until 1982. Forster then retired to Cincinnati, where he remained active in public affairs and in alumni activities at Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati until shortly before his death from congestive heart failure in 2006. During the course of his long career, Forster trained over 100 academic neurologists, 16 of whom went on to become university departmental chairpersons on an international scale. and the Francis Forster Fund at the AAN now honors Forster's contributions to the organization. He served as President of the AAN from 1957 to 1959, and was also President of the American Epilepsy Society and President of the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology. Forster was a consultant to the surgeons general of the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Public Health Service. He was next in the public eye in 1964, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the murder of Kennedy's probable killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby in November 1963. Ruby's attorney, Melvin Belli, developed a premise for the defense wherein his client's aggressive behavior was explained by the presence of psychomotor-type temporal lobe epilepsy. Forster examined Ruby, as well as electroencephalograms that had been taken from him, and testified against Belli's hypothesis along with other neurologists. Forster also participated in 1958 in an international medical-exchange mission to the Soviet Union, visiting hospitals and clinics in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, and Sokhumi and conferring with Soviet physicians in those cities. That effort helped to improve Russo-American medical communications during the 1960s and thereafter. The Forsters are buried in St. Mary's Cemetery in Cincinnati.