Physician honors parents by establishing professorship fund

Legacies of love and achievement

As we mourn the loss of Dr. Bartley Frueh, many patients, friends, and colleagues have asked how they can best honor his memory. As shown below, Dr. Frueh and his wife, Cheryl, established an endowed professorship in honor of Dr. Frueh's parents. A gift to this fund in memory of Dr. Frueh would please the family.

While neither of Dr. Bartley R. Frueh’s parents attended college, they both valued education and knowledge—and they imparted the importance of both to their children. Dr. Frueh, a Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, and his wife, Cheryl, have decided to honor those values by establishing a fund to create the Lloyd and Virginia Frueh Research Professorship in Eye Plastics and Orbital Surgery at the University of Michigan. Dr. Frueh’s father, Lloyd, a business owner, passed away in 1994. His mother, Virginia, lives in Massachusetts.

“When I was growing up, I thought everyone’s parents were like mine, but I realized later that I was extremely lucky,” Dr. Frueh says. “My parents taught me values, integrity, and independence, and they always supported my decisions.”

“They wanted their children to be successful and happy,” adds Cheryl Frueh, an occupational therapist and a consultant with Vision Care, Inc.

Dr. and Mrs. Frueh will contribute to the professorship until it is fully funded. They hope it will then serve as a tool to enable the Department to recruit outstanding physicians who are interested in research, Dr. Frueh says. “One of the goals of academic medicine is to advance the field and ask, ‘How can we do what we do better?’ Only through asking questions and examining data to answer those questions can we push the boundaries forward.”

Dr. Frueh earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University before deciding to attend medical school at Columbia University. He completed his ophthalmology residency at U-M in 1970 and served as the Director of Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Missouri Medical Center from 1971 to 1979. He then returned to U-M to start the Eye Plastics and Orbital Surgery Service. Under his leadership it has grown to four ophthalmologists. His own research has sought to define the uniqueness and the properties of eye movement muscles, including the eyelid lifting muscle. Cheryl Frueh also has a long history with the Kellogg Eye Center. Hired as an ophthalmic technician in 1984, she later became an occupational therapist and added this new skill to Kellogg’s low-vision program.