Dr. Charles Lester Marlow III

1941 - 2021

Dr. Charles Lester Marlow, III
Dr. Charles Lester Marlow, III, of New Haven, Connecticut, died on October 14, 2021, at Connecticut Hospice in Branford, following a brief illness. Dr. Marlow was born on July 23, 1941, in Baltimore, Maryland, and was predeceased by his loving parents, the late Charles Lester Marlow, Jr. and Doris K. Marlow. He graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1959, following which he attended Yale University, graduating with an B.A. degree in English in 1963. After one year of graduate study at Yale, he taught English at Arkansas A&M, Bethune-Cookman College and Calvert County Senior High School (Maryland). He returned to graduate school at S.U.N.Y Stony Brook, where he was admitted into the doctoral program in English, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the United States Army in 1967. He chose to serve as a medic, attended one year of basic training as a Clinical Specialist, and saw active duty in Vietnam from May, 1969 until May, 1970. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal in 1970 and received an honorable discharge from the Army. He attended the University of Sussex in England during the 1971-72 academic year, and later earned a D.Phil. degree in 1977 after completing his thesis. Based on his Army service as a medic, he took an interest in medicine, which led him to study the required pre-med subjects in the hope that he would be admitted to medical school and become a physician. During this time, he worked as a Licensed Practical Nurse and then became a Registered Nurse. He enrolled in the Post-Graduate Pre-Medical Program at Columbia University in 1973 and took employment at St. Luke's Hospital as a registered nurse, where he was employed for several years. In the mid-1970s, he sought admission at American medical schools but was told that he was too old to enter their programs. Not deterred, he was eventually admitted to Kasturba Medical College in Manipal, Karnataka State, India, in 1979. He finished his studies there in 1984, completed an internship in Rural Community Medicine in India and passed the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination in the United States. Thereafter, in 1987-88, Dr. Marlow attended one year of supervised clinical training at St. Vincent's Medical Center in Bridgeport and then completed an appointment as an Intern in Internal Medicine at the Hospital of St. Raphael in New Haven from 1988-89. From 1993-96, Dr. Marlow was a Resident in
Psychiatry at Elmhurst Hospital Center and successfully completed the requirements to be board-eligible in psychiatry. He never again practiced medicine. In 1997, he was hired as a Registered Nurse at the Yale Psychiatric Institute, where he worked for a period of time. He was also employed as a nurse at other health care facilities in the New Haven area until his retirement. He was a tremendous movie buff, an avid reader of a great many literary, philosophical, historical and scientific works and a lover of classical music and opera. His ambition was "to give real help where it's really needed"; he liked "people who talked about ideas" and disliked "people who talk about other people." He wrote that "[t]he measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he would never be found out." In this spirit, Dr. Marlow lived a modest and ascetic life, but left behind a generous legacy for the cities of Baltimore and New Haven.
Arrangements with Beecher and Bennett Funeral Home, Hamden, Connecticut. There are no services.