This is one of an occasional series intended to paint a cumulative portrait of our Jewish community. Individuals for this column are selected at random from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation database. The Chronicle does not have access to donor information, or contact members with regard to their giving habits.
Today we focus on Drs. Margaret and B. Lauren Charous.
Besides being partners in marriage and as parents, each of the Charouses is the other’s most important intellectual partner.
Lauren, who decided in his late 20s to go to the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago, became a specialist in allergies and asthma.
Margaret, after teaching high school and working as a parole officer, earned a doctorate in psychology at Marquette University in her early 40s.
“I was struck by the amount of distress I saw in the classroom and I thought I could study adolescents and maybe I could help them,” she said.
But an unwelcome project assignment and the influence of Lauren’s immersion in medicine helped lead her to specialize in health psychology and become a collaborator in her husband’s professional work.
Said Lauren, “When I have patients who don’t take their meds or who do things that don’t make sense, Margaret can help me see what is going on, on a psychological level.”
In about 1990, Lauren became involved in treating and researching a new allergy problem. Natural rubber latex (like that used in exam gloves) was causing serious and sometimes fatal reactions in young children and in health care workers.
But he was troubled by some unusual histories. “I told Margaret about how we were seeing some patients with latex allergy who had some serious reactions even in the absence of any real exposure. The reactions were real, but we could not identify the trigger,” Lauren said.
The allergy to latex seemed to be causing anaphylactic (extreme sensitivity to a substance) allergic reactions, with sudden severe drops in blood pressure, itching, swelling and difficulty breathing.
“These patients became quite frightened. They weren’t imagining things, and they couldn’t work. They felt their lives were falling apart,” Lauren said.
As was their custom, Margaret and Lauren discussed this issue at length during dinner conversations, with the full backing of their respective disciplines.
“The thing that characterizes our interplay is questioning,” Margaret said. “We will ask each other, ‘Why doesn’t that make sense?’ … We help each other refine our ideas. We couldn’t do our work as well as we do without this process.”
Margaret theorized that the people who had sensitivity to latex were mimicking attacks brought on by fear. Anticipatory panic attacks simulated real allergic reactions.
She started interviewing patients and improving her theory. Lauren saw that her understanding provided a valuable complement to that generated by physicians researching this new disease. He encouraged her to do additional research and to speak at medical conferences.
Ultimately, they became recognized experts in the field and collaborated on several publications.
Both Charouses described the homes they grew up in as secular, but very Jewish. Lauren’s neighborhood in Chicago was “a little Jewish ghetto,” and in his fourth-grade class he believes 30 of the 36 students were Jewish.
Margaret, who grew up mostly in New Jersey, said her parents “were kind of a funny hybrid. On the one hand they were, I think, very assimilationist, which was not unusual then …”
However, though her mother never used the words “Shabbat” and “kosher,” Margaret’s family always ate a special Friday evening dinner. “Never forget this. Friday night is different,” her mother would say.
She also told Margaret and her sister never to mix meat and milk — “It’ll make you sick” — and before cooking meat, to soak it to remove all blood.
Margaret “did grow up with a deep feeling for being Jewish” and she felt strongly that she wanted to raise her sons, Daniel, now 33, and Matthew, now 30, with formal Jewish educations, which they obtained at Congregation Shalom.
“Margaret pushed for that. I didn’t; and she was right,” Lauren said.
Margaret learned along with her sons and “thought back to all these little rituals that punctuated our household — they all made sense to me. They weren’t just my mother’s little mishegas. They really had a real basis and … I’d internalized them. To this very day, I keep many of these same traditions.”
Best of all, Margaret said, their sons, both of whom are medical doctors, have not only developed “a solid core identity as Jews” but they are proud of that identity, too.
“What an achievement we feel, that no longer do they have to deal with the overt and scarring episodes of anti-Semitism that their grandparents and forebears experienced,” she said.
Margaret and Lauren, who will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this July, met as students, in the fall of 1967 at an anti-war meeting at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lauren had started college at the University of Chicago and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he was a graduate student in economics. Margaret, a junior, had just transferred from McGill University, in Montreal.
Of that first meeting, Margaret said in a recent interview in their Fox Point home, “[Lauren] sat down next to me and he couldn’t stop talking.” They married the following summer and talking is still a central focus of their relationship.
In their travels, Margaret and Lauren developed an interest in antique Judaica and have built a collection. Some of their pieces were on display in their living room, including a graceful, Middle Eastern style laver from Damascus and another from Hungary, both of which they use at their family seders.
Margaret also enjoys theater and gardening. And following in her mother’s footsteps, she is a cook. “She’s absolutely sensational,” Lauren said.
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