Overruling My Father

When it came to offering medical interventions to severely ill patients with no hope of recovery, my father had a fiercely strong opinion: They were inappropriate. For decades as an infectious diseases specialist, he had been asked to treat infections in dying patients. Whenever possible, he said no. But when I approached my dad, who […]

Physician, Sing Thyself: A Doctor Checks Up on a New “Allegro”

Aside from Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Frankenstein, there are not a lot of doctors in Broadway musicals. Yet a show about father-and-son physicians was written by perhaps the greatest songwriting team in Broadway history: the composer Richard Rodgers and the librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. Considered by some to be their greatest flop, “Allegro,” which opened […]

When Medicine is Futile

MY father would have been thrilled to read “Dying in America,” a new report by the Institute of Medicine that argues that we subject dying patients to too many treatments, denying them a peaceful death. But he would have asked what took us so long. A physician from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, […]

When the Doctor Knows Best

I still remember the day my father told me the story of how, in 1996, he had single-handedly prevented other physicians from performing CPR on a woman whose heart had just stopped. He had actually laid his body on top of hers to ensure they couldn’t try. I was stunned and, frankly, appalled. As someone […]

Should Doctors Take Care of Their Relatives?

COVID

Modern physicians may give medical advice to their family members or, in a pinch, write them prescription for a low-risk medication. (They’re not really supposed to, but it happens.) But most would never take charge of a relative’s care, especially for a serious disease. The American Medical Association agrees, writing in its 1993 Medical Code […]

Sherwin Nuland and the Medical History Wars

Most of the obituaries for the physician-historian, Sherwin A. Nuland, who died on Monday, March 3, have rightfully emphasized his 1994 book, How We Die, which won the National Book Award. But Nuland held an interesting place in the world of the history of medicine, a torch holder for an older type of scholarship that […]

Searching for Semmelweis

My father’s hero was not a baseball player, movie star, or president. It was Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century Hungarian physician. For my dad, a professor of infectious diseases, choosing Semmelweis made a lot of sense. Not only had Semmelweis discovered the cause of outbreaks of deadly puerperal (childbed) fever among women, but he had railed […]