Anne Brewer: Priest, Physician, Ice Hockey Player
By the Rev. Carole Johannsen
She sees patients and blesses animals, teaches medical students and celebrates the Eucharist. And in her spare time, she plays defense for a women’s ice hockey team. She is the Rev. Anne A. Brewer, MD, and she’s new to the Episcopal Diocese of New York and its Cathedral — where her husband happens to be the Dean.
Brewer is pleased to be in the Diocese of New York and living on the Cathedral close. She explained, “Living in Morningside Heights is fun for a couple of ‘empty nesters.’ [Their two children are both in college.] There are at least 10 restaurants and five bookstores within walking distance.”
Choosing not one, but two vocations has always seemed perfectly natural for Brewer. Plus, the combination comes in handy. “Clergy come to me as their physician, and I can hold people’s feet to the fire when they’re not taking care of themselves and blaming it on the stress of their work as clergy,” she explained.
As a priest, Brewer helps out at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, most recently by blessing some of the dozens of animals at the Feast of St. Francis, and she also does supply work by filling in for absent priests on Sundays.
At the same time, Brewer continues her work as a physician in Stamford, CT, where she is the associate director for the Family Practice Residency Program at Stamford Hospital. New York City, she noted, is “a hotbed of specialization,” with not many family medicine practices. Since “no one seems to want me to go,” she happily continues her work as a teacher to residents and a doctor to her patients in Connecticut.
Brewer is a “cradle Episcopalian
with a lifelong interest in the Church. But when I was a kid,”
she explained, “options included altar guild, singing in the choir,
becoming a nun or marrying a priest.” In her senior year at Brown
University in Providence, RI, she attended the 1970 General Convention
as a youth observer. There, for the first time, she heard people talking
about women’s ordination, with some going so far as to say there
was “no theological reason why women should not be ordained.”
It was then that the seed was planted.
The Rev. Anne Brewer, MD, not only works as a priest and physician, but plays ice hockey as well.
Photos by The Rev. CAROLE JOHANNSEN
Brewer’s interest in medicine began in high school when she realized that the human body fascinated her. After college, she worked a couple of years and then applied to medical school. Since that process takes a year, she decided to go to seminary at Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Boston to further her education as a Christian. “I got a taste of this and loved it!” she said. “I worked at chaplaincy, and it was transformative.” She also met her future husband, now Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Rev. James A. Kowalski, during her first year in seminary, and they were married in 1976.
When she was accepted into the medical school at the University of Vermont, the seminary offered Brewer a leave of absence. After two years of medical school, Brewer returned to seminary and completed her divinity courses in just one additional year by keeping up the intense pace she had become used to in medical school. The following year, she completed medical school and took her General Ordination Exams, both formidable tasks. “The deans at both schools cut me a ton of slack,” she noted, giving the impression that she is glad she doesn’t have to do that again.
Although ordained to the transitional diaconate in 1979 and the priesthood in 1980 in Vermont, Brewer moved to Connecticut when Kowalski was appointed curate at Trinity, Newtown, and then rector of Good Shepherd, Hartford. It was in Hartford that Brewer established her own practice in family medicine — a combination of internal medicine and pediatrics — after working part time in other practices for several years. Four years later, Kowalski was called as rector of St. Luke’s in Darien, CT, too far from Hartford for Brewer to commute to her practice. Acknowledging that the move was difficult, she said, “It forced me to re-evaluate where I was going to go in medicine after that.” That’s when Brewer decided she “wanted to try my hand at full-time teaching.”
In her current position
at the Family Medicine Residency, Brewer oversees the education of the
medical residents and supervises them in both the William Pitt Family
Medical Center and Stamford Hospital. Her work includes designing curricula
and, to a lesser extent, lecturing.
Even with the demands of both professions, Brewer still finds time to
practice her favorite pastime — ice hockey. As with her other pursuits,
this, too, has a genesis that goes back many years. With experience only
in field hockey and “some pond skating,” Brewer helped form
the first women’s ice hockey team in the country at Brown University.
“We had to sell candy bars at the men’s ice hockey games to
support the team,” she noted, but by the time she left Providence,
there were several other women’s teams in the city.
Brewer played intramurals in medical school but then didn’t play for 20 years, until her 9-year-old son wanted to play in Darien and she agreed to help coach his team. A casual conversation with a woman lawyer who also was a skater, led her to the Westchester Wildcats, a women’s recreational ice hockey team. The team of women, who range in age from 17 to 50-plus, is now in its eighth season, playing teams in the tri-state area and traveling as far as Washington, DC, and Montreal for tournaments.
Brewer plays defense and at the first game of the season on October 13, she helped her team skate to a clean 7-0 victory over the Brooklyn Blades on the Wildcats’ home ice in Elmsford, while being cheered on by the enthusiastic stomping and yelling of husbands and kids, friends and relatives in the bleachers.
“I have a blast!” Brewer said with enthusiasm. “I think it’s important for everyone to have something to focus on other than work, preferably something that includes physical exertion. For me it’s sports. And I love the camaraderie.”