![]() ![]() The Allen family said Loeff’s “open-mindedness and the coexistence of an exacting diligent mind with a constant need to keep learning and broadening her horizons” speaks to her extraordinariness. This interplay between work and family is what humanizes her even further, and what informs her work.” “I would sit outside her office door waiting for her to finish with a patient, and when she introduced me, her patients already knew who I was. “Her work is so completely who she is, but in a way that includes her family,” Sanett said. Loeff’s granddaughter Ariel Freeman Sanett said Loeff was her first best friend. She hopes her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will see it so they can be noble and brave about what they believe in and pursue it. It’s a legacy of compassion and resilience that she would like to pass on. Sitting in her study with her pearls and Italian brown and ivory brogues on, Loeff said she wants her legacy to be one where she helps people look into troubling things without being destroyed by learning from them, instead coming out wiser and stronger. Loeff is recuperating from a recent fall that left her with a broken left ankle, but you can’t tell. I’ve had that privilege of watching to see what time does bring, and that’s a blessing in its way, because it helps me to understand what I’m dealing with or what the depth of something is.” After years and years of seeing what the outcome is, I watch people grow up and go through it and get old. I’m thinking much better than I ever did before. “It took 60-some odd years before I had the maturity of understanding. “If I pull out an appointment book from five or 10 years ago, you’ll find that I’m busier now and I see more patients,” she said. She says it’s “a rewarding kind of thing.” She’s had clients who have been with her since their 20s and 30s who are now grandparents themselves. She’s seen the profession change with the introduction of more medications, but she still prefers digging for a patient’s reality through an in-depth, in-person, holistic approach. ![]() She says that’s necessary to get to the root of the person’s concerns. With over five decades of experience in psychiatry, Loeff says what separates her from other practitioners is that she spends an hour with each client to learn about who they are as a person, going back as far as their grandparents to get a decent history. ![]() I was surrounded by ambitious people … and very early on I began to admire what being a doctor meant. “I sort of give myself credit for keeping my hope that I could do something. “He was the one who seemed to recognize that I had a certain kind of potential,” she says. She read a medical book at the age of 9, and while she couldn’t tell what it meant, the idea of what she could do with her life was there. Loeff said Asher exposed her to many cultural things like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and gave her books. He was the dentist of the late Mayor Richard J. Harry Asher, a dentist who practiced in Chicago for more than 60 years, doing so for his last 35 years with only one arm. She was also inspired by her late uncle, Dr. Loeff earned her medical degree at the age of 22. Phyllis Loeff is still practicing her profession of psychiatry at 96. That’s a major philosophy for me: I took my chances and found my way,” Loeff said. ![]() “I really didn’t know how I was ever going to be able to manage getting trained at that time of life and taking care of my family and I had no idea I could do it, but I took my chances because I felt like if I ever got to be 60 years old and had never used my medical training, I wouldn’t forgive myself. She remembers being a 39-year-old first-year resident at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute. She picked up her profession when her youngest, Thomas, was 9 years old. She would later take a 17-year break from her career to have her three girls and one boy. She married Harold Loeff, a war veteran and OB-GYN physician at Michael Reese Hospital, the day before she started her 1 ½-year internship at Cook County Hospital. A native of the Austin neighborhood, Loeff graduated with a medical degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Medicine at the age of 22 - she was one of 33 women in the medical school class. ![]()
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