Katharine Harrison

Katharine Santos Harrison, MD, a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine physician specializing in infectious disease, died Monday, October 13 of lung cancer. She was eighty years old. "Kitty," as Dr. Harrison was known by her childhood friends, was a lifelong resident of Roland Park. She graduated from Calvert School in 1957 and Garrison Forest School in 1963. An outstanding team athlete, she lettered in field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse. Katharine married Robert Barker Harrison III of Baltimore in 1964. They were married for fifty-two years, until he died in 2017. While raising her daughter, Dr. Harrison graduated from Goucher College in 1969, majoring in chemistry. Her research in nuclear medicine and cardiology was published in numerous articles in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Dr. Harrison went to medical school and earned her M.D. from the University of Maryland in 1986, and did so while raising both her daughter and son. She completed a four-year fellowship in Medicine-Infectious Disease at Johns Hopkins University. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Dr. Harrison was an early advocate for compassionate patient care, conducting a range of clinical tests involving technology to measure patient hearing as well as memory loss. In conjunction with a team from the Johns Hopkins University Biomedical Engineering Department, Dr. Harrison was awarded the Maryland Biotechnology Center prize for the development of a portable tent to treat Ebola patients in 2014. From 1994 to 1997, Dr. Harrison worked at Mount Sinai Hospital as a full-time faculty member in internal medicine and infectious disease. She joined Johns Hopkins Community Physicians at the East Baltimore Medical Center in 1997. Until 2002, she was an attending physician on the faculty of Franklin Square Hospital, where she worked for twenty years. From 1998 until 2025, Dr. Harrison was also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she often worked with residents in the Osler Medical Service. Her wisdom and teaching have made a tremendous contribution to generations of medical students, medical residents, junior faculty, and senior faculty across the board. Her family and friends were everything to her. She was as passionate about them as she was about medicine. She never outgrew her friends. She was always adding more. Dr. Harrison is survived by her son, Barker, and his wife Pam, of Baltimore, and their two children, Caroline and Jack; her sister Anne Santos Paxson and brother-in-law Frank Paxson of Charlottesville, VA; her nieces Hevia Paxson and Tamar Hartman: and her nephew Alex Paxson. Her daughter, Anne Fenton Harrison, died in 2007. A memorial service in her honor will be held at Saint Ignatius Catholic Church located at 740 N Calvert Street on Saturday, Nov. 29 at 2:00 p.m., followed by a reception at The Eldridge Club at 4:00 p.m. Contributions in Dr. Harrison's memory can be sent to Garrison Forest School, 300 Garrison Forest Road, Garrison, MD 21117, and McDonogh School, 8600 McDonogh Road, Owings Mills, MD 21117.