The Other Dr. Dean

There's been a growing amount of mentions about Judy Dean in the news lately. Salon has a detailed profile on Dr. Judy Dean:

Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, M.D., the Vermont internist married to the state's former governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean, has been MIA on her husband's campaign trail, and is bold in her assertion that she will remain almost as absent from his presidency and instead keep up her full-time medical practice.

The quicksilver Dean campaign has already turned water into wine by making his just-folks country doctor act into the hip campaign with momentum. That fizzy, effortless Howard Dean magic may be at work on his wife as well, transforming the abstemious Judith Steinberg -- aka Judy Dean -- into the perfect foil for a new presidential millennium. An unlikely mating of rural career girl, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and Donna Reed, Dr. Steinberg could be the anti-Hillary, anti-Laura first lady that Americans have been waiting for: a cipher onto which every woman -- whether she has a high-powered career or is a stay-at-home mom -- can project herself. A woman who, like the rest of her husband's campaign, is almost too good to be true.

And the Des Moines Register attempts to inform its readers before the rapidly approaching primary:

"I love my practice and I have a commitment to my practice - I can't just leave my patients," Judy Dean, an internist, said in a recent interview with The Des Moines Register. It was one of the few she's given since her husband, also a physician, vaulted to the top tier of the nine-candidate field in the race for the nomination.

"That's my job, and Howard sees it that way, too," she said. "I don't plan on traveling unless I absolutely have to, just because it would really disrupt my practice, my life, my son left at home - that would be really difficult."