Bernice Alvarez Brownson

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Bernice Alvarez Brownson (b. August 12, 1913) was born in San Francisco, California and is an American photographer, painter, writer and poet.

Her father was Walter C. Alvarez, the famed physician and researcher at the Mayo Clinic. He wrote more than a thousand medical papers and books, as well as a nationally syndicated newspaper column on medical issues, which led to him being dubbed "America’s Family Doctor". Her mother was Harriet Skidmore Smythe, and her siblings were Gladys, Robert and Luis Alvarez; the latter a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. She had a twin brother who died a short time after his birth.^[1]

Brownson's maternal grandparents were Methodist missionaries in Fouchow, China during the mid-19th century; her grandfather founding the first Anglo-Chinese college and her grandmother producing one of the first translations of the Bible into Chinese.^[2]

Brownson’s paternal grandfather was Luis F. Alvarez, a doctor in California and Hawaii who developed a method for the better diagnosis of macular leprosy. Her aunt was the famed California oil painter Mabel Alvarez. Her nephew (the son of her brother Luis) is Walter Alvarez, a noted Professor of Geology at the University of California, Berkeley.^[3]

At the age of 13, her family relocated from San Francisco to Rochester, Minnesota when her father Walter C. Alvarez joined the staff of the Mayo Clinic. She met and married Bradley Brownson, M.D., who worked at the Mayo Clinic, and they were together for forty years. The couple had four children and divorced in the 1970s. She is a graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota.^[4]

She is a world traveler, having visited more than thirty countries and nearly all of the national parks in the USA and Canada. Brownson has been an avid tennis player, swimmer and hiker. She started her own business as an artist's representative and marketed her own photography with photonote cards. This led to invitations to teach photography to local groups in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. Her work has been published in volumes including Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist by Luis W. Alvarez.^[5]

Brownson's book of anecdotes on her life, family and career is entitled Why Am I Sitting Here? - Recollections of a Long and Adventurous Life. The book co-written with Anthony Wynn and slated for publication in 2008. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

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