Jennifer Reed Bakker, 53, doctor

"One of my dreams was always to be a doctor," Abram Bakker Jr. said his wife revealed to him one day in the 1990s.

She was almost 20 years out of college when, he said, she told him, "I really would like to give it a shot."

She did it well enough that in 2003 and 2004, he said, attending physicians at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia gave her their Guth Award for a resident physician "who displays compassion for the sick, a true sense of humanity, and a meticulous regard for human dignity."

On Sunday, Jennifer Reed Bakker, 53, of Shiloh, N.J., a surgical resident at Graduate Hospital, died of ovarian cancer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Bakker graduated from Princeton High School in 1973, attended Virginia Polytechnic College and State University, and earned bachelor's degrees in English literature and art history from Montclair State University in 1978.

That June, she married. She and her husband raised three children.

She was an art teacher at Shiloh Elementary School from 1990 to 1995, her husband said, before taking community college courses to prove her skill as an adult student.

After completing premedical studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, she received her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in 2001.

Dr. Bakker was a resident surgeon at Graduate from 2001 to 2006, when she became ill.

When chemotherapy was not effective, her husband said, Dr. Bakker became a subject of alternative treatments, about which she wrote.

"Not only did she research [medical] trials," he said, "she wrote papers and got in bed and was getting paid for the trials."

Before becoming ill, he said, she had published articles on other subjects.

In 2000, she was one of five authors of "Biopsychosocial Aspects of Prostate Cancer" for Psychosomatics, the journal of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine. In 2005, she was one of three authors of "An Unusual Cause of Gastric Outlet Obstruction" in the American Surgeon.

After marrying, her husband said, she had worked at Hasty Acres, a horse farm in Kingston, N.J., and from 1978 to 1982 competed in horse shows.

Later, she gave riding lessons on the Bakker family farm in Shiloh.

Besides her husband, Dr. Bakker is survived by her mother, Doris Reed; a son, Blair; two daughters, Hillary Barile and Lauren Carter; a brother; and three sisters. Her father, Robert, died in 2006.

A visitation was set from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday at the First Presbyterian Church, 119 W. Commerce St., Bridgeton, N.J., followed by a memorial there. Burial is to be private.

Donations can be made to the Jennifer Reed Bakker, M.D., Compassionate Care Award at the Jefferson Foundation, 925 Chestnut St., Suite 110, Philadelphia 19107.