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JUANITA CASSELMAN, a long-time member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, died peacefully on 5 August in London, Ontario, at the age of 92. Raised in poverty and confined to a tuberculosis sanatorium while she was in high school, she emerged determined to understand the disease that had stricken her and to become a doctor to help others. She first earned an honours degree in bacteriology and preventive medicine at the University of British Columbia and subsequently an MD from the University of Toronto, graduating in 1952. I understand that she was one of two women graduates in her class, a testimony to her ambition and the times.
While at the University of British Columbia she met and married Bruce Casselman, who also entered medicine, specializing in public health. Pursuing her career in parallel with her husband while also raising two children, she trained in neurology at Queen Square in London, England, and the Montreal Neurological Institute before doing a psychiatric residency in New York. She was accepted for training at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, completing her training in 1961. After several years of practice in New York, she returned to Montreal, where she practised psychoanalysis and served on the staff of the McGill University Mental Health Service, where I first met her. She was a gracious colleague and an astute psychoanalyst who related compassionately