Med school 'mom' Mary Cutting, 88
By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Staff Writer
Mary Weaver Cutting, who acted as a mother to medical students at the University of Hawai'i, died of a stroke in a care home in Eugene, Ore., on Nov. 13 at the age of 88.
Formerly married to the director of Hawai'i's Pacific Biomedical Research Center at UH, who died in 1972, Mary Cutting took a job at the new medical school heading a program in which students spent at least two months in a preceptorship with a community physician and mentor.
The students went off to the Neighbor Islands and Micronesia, and Cutting made the arrangements like a mother caring for her brood, gently harassing the students about writing up their experiences.
At age 65, she learned to fly, received her pilot's license, bought her own airplane and flew all over the state. She was a meticulous pilot and did not stop flying until she decided she was too old to drive.
Cutting grew up in Taft, Calif., and enrolled in the Stanford University School of Nursing in the old Stanford-Lane Hospital in San Francisco. She loved nursing but was dismissed because of her marriage to promising young doctor Windsor Cutting.
She raised six children, as well as vegetables, fruit, chickens and a cow at their home in California in the 1940s. She also found time to play the French horn in Stanford's Symphony Orchestra.
Late in life, Cutting moved to a nursing home in Oregon because of memory failure.
She is survived by sons Cecil, David and John; daughters Anne Cutting, April Camelat and Susan MacEacheron; 12 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.
A family funeral was held in Oregon, and her ashes were scattered from the air in the ocean off O'ahu.
A memorial gathering in her memory will be held at 11 a.m., Sunday, Jan. 18, in room B103 in the Medical School on the UH campus.
Donations in her memory may be mailed to The Windson and Mary Cutting Memorial Lectureship Fund, UH Foundation, c/o Donna Bebbe, 1960 East-West Road, Biomed T-101, Honolulu, HI 96822.
Correction: The late Dr. Windsor Cutting's name was misspelled in a previous version of this obituary.
