Francis X. Fellers ’44 died December 27, 2008.
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FRANCIS X. FELLERS, M.D. ’44
Francis “Fran” Fellers passed away peacefully from Alzheimer’s at the Maine Veteran’s Home in South Paris, Maine, on Dec. 27, 2009.
Fran was born in Seattle in 1922, and as an infant, his family moved to Amherst. He graduated from Amherst High School and joined the Class of 1944 at Amherst College. While at Amherst, Fran was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Lord Jeff Club.
In 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private first class, and the army sent him to Cornell Medical College where he became an M.D. He served the army in Japan, Tripoli, Paris, Johnston Islands and Hawaii until the mid-1950s, attaining the rank of major.
Following a pediatric residency program at the New England Medical Center’s Boston Floating Hospital, he was appointed staff physician at Children’s Hospital Medical Center, specializing in kidney disease in children. There, with colleagues, he published approximately 100 articles, which led to cures for childhood metabolic diseases such as Vitamin D resistant rickets and nephrosis.
While at Children’s Hospital, he was appointed as an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He trained physicians from around the world whose goal was to take knowledge home to help their country’s people. Fran ran a renal metabolic unit in Children’s Hospital until retiring to Maine in 1973.
Fran was an avid hiker, skier, fly fisherman, lover of nature, birds and flowers. He had a thirst for knowledge around him. He boasted that he had been around the world three times, but once nested in New Gloucester, he found peace there raising his family.
Fran is survived by his wife, Eleanor; two children and two stepchildren.
—Ted Haley ’44