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 […]
Not So Simple: The Breast Cancer Stories of Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller
Forty years ago, when two women — Betty Ford and Margaretta (Happy) Rockefeller — went public with their diagnoses of breast cancer, it was historic. In contrast to our modern era, which encourages women with the disease to tell their stories, breast cancer remained a quiet subject in the 1970s. Yet despite these women’s courageous […]
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 […]
Guns, Cars and Too Much Liberty
It is not hard to be moved by Richard Martinez’s emotional public calls for gun control in the wake of his son Christopher’s death during the recent shootings in Santa Barbara. But they hold special resonance for me and my family. In January of this year, my 9-year-old nephew Cooper Stock was killed by a […]
Should Doctors Take Care of Their Relatives?
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 […]
When Doctors Act on Tradition and Emotion Over New Science
A series of new studies published in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association underscore the complicated nature of new recommendations that could potentially change the basic ways that doctors treat high cholesterol and high blood pressure—two major risk factors for heart disease. They also raise a subject that we physicians don’t like to […]
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 […]
Alcoholism Through a Doctor’s Eyes
When I teach medical students about alcoholism, it is never easy. Students arrive with preconceived notions and stereotypes obtained from books, television and films — and their personal upbringings — about the subject. So I am especially glad that medical, nursing and other graduate students from my institution, New York University, have been attending the […]
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 […]