Charles Kennedy

Charles Kennedy, MD
Member Since 1976
Date of Death: October 6, 2015

Charles Kennedy, neuroscientist and child neurologist, died on Oct. 6, 2015, after a brief illness, at the age of 95. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., he attended Nichols School and later Deerfield Academy. He prepared for medicine at Princeton University where he was a member of the choir, glee club and Nassoons, graduating with honors in chemistry in 1942. He went on to receive his MD degree at the University of Rochester while in the Navy V-12 program.

World War II ended during his internship at Yale New Haven Hospital following which he was on active duty in the Navy and assigned to the Veterans Administration psychiatric hospital in Canandaigua, N.Y. At the end of his two years of military service he became a resident in Pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Buffalo and later was a fellow in Neurology at the Neurological Institute in New York. He was then appointed Chief of Neurology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. During a sabbatical in 1967 at the Laboratory of Cerebral Metabolism at the National Institutes of Health he pursued a research career simultaneously with an appointment as professor of Child Neurology at Georgetown University School of Medicine. 

As author of many papers in both clinical and experimental neuroscience, he played an important role in the research for determining the locations in the brain of its various function activities. He is survived by his wife, Eulsum Kennedy, a talented sculptor and painter; his sister, Florence Davidsen of Iowa City, Iowa; and three children by a previous marriage, Allen Kennedy of New York City, Jacqueline MacMillan of Somerville, Mass., and Carol Radmer of Valley Park, Mo.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2015, at Brackett Funeral Home, 29 Federal St., Brunswick, with Reverend Dale Morell officiating. Private interment will be held in Blanchard Cemetery, Falmouth.

Published in Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram from Oct. 8 to Oct. 9, 2015