Feature

A Politician and Doctor shed insight on the issues

Scientists at Work

By Ellen Gilbert

Photographs by Benoit Cortet

“This is not a designer house,” says Rush Holt half-jokingly as he leads visitors through the several-hundred-year-old Pennington farmhouse he occupies with his wife, Margaret Lancefield, and indeed it is not. Like its two occupants — he a Congressional Representative for New Jersey’s 12th district since 1999, and she the medical director of the Princeton Charity Care clinic — it is solid, comfortable, and straightforward, with a treadmill stationed in a first-floor room, bowls of apples at hand for healthy snacking, lots of workspace, and a chicken coop out back.

An aide reminds Holt to comb his hair for the coming photo shoot and videotaped interview, and he keeps up a patter of instructions to her until Lancefield arrives after seeing patients.

Lancefield’s special areas of interest include older adults with complex medical issues, and this dovetails nicely with Holt’s recent campaign for the passage of the health care reform bill and his efforts to educate his constituency — particularly its older members — about the implications of the new law. The difference in their approaches, she notes, is that “mine is nitty-gritty; his is broader.”

We’re both scientists,” says the former head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. “A lot of it has to do with access. My job is primarily to listen to people and let them know what’s going on, while Margaret listens to her patients.”

“She’s a wonderful doctor,” says a long-time patient whom Lancefield has continued to see even after changing her focus to the charity clinic. “She doesn’t get excited about minor things, but if you have something major, she’s like a bulldog advocating for you to receive the absolute best, current treatments.”

Lancefield bristles at the notion of too much specialization. “I could never look at someone and see just a kidney,” she says, and her patients know it. “She’s a good internist who wants to know the whole person,” says one. “Everybody loves her; I’ve never heard anybody say anything negative about her.” In a description that could easily fit her husband, one patient notes that there is “no nonsense” about Lancefield. “She’s completely unpretentious.”

Lancefield has been in clinical practice since 1987 and has been with Princeton HealthCare Medical Associates since 1992. She graduated from Yale School of Medicine and completed her internship and residency at Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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