Musing of a Contemporary Pathologist

Category Memoir

“Not guilty by reason of insanity”

January 4, 2026 By now, we should be accustomed to 2025 being made up of mostly terrible weeks. The last three weeks unfortunately, may qualify as the most terrible of all. The tragedy that is the awful story of the… Continue Reading →

Dudley

On June 30, 1969, I officially finished my four-year residency in Pathology at The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York. The last week was vacation time, enabling me, on July 1, 1969, to begin my two years as “Chief, Laboratory Service”… Continue Reading →

I dreamt about Ingrid Bergman

What are dreams? Many people would answer by saying “Dreams” is a beautiful song by the British American rock ‘n roll group Fleetwood Mac. Others would recall that Rebecca du Maurier begins her wonderful novel, “Rebecca,” with “Last Night I… Continue Reading →

The Troubled Air

I was in college, in the late 1950s, when I first read The Troubled Air, the book Irwin Shaw wrote in 1951 after the great success of his outstanding World War II novel, The Young Lions. The Troubled Air was… Continue Reading →

Shane! Come back – OR – Who will come over the hill and save us in 2028?

  Shane, a 1953 movie directed and produced by the great George Stevens, is a film about courage and honor and honesty. About the search of a heroic man for his identity. About integrity About community. And about love. Shane… Continue Reading →

About Christmas, my grandmother and Hillary Rodham Clinton

Christmas has always been a favorite holiday for me. When I was born, in 1939, at the end of the great depression, we lived with my maternal grandparents. My grandmother, Fannie (Feiga, originally) Levine, emigrated by herself from what was… Continue Reading →

Medicine in Literature

  The first known physician was the Egyptian Imhotep, who is thought to have been active in the years close to 2625 BCE. He was the chancellor to King Djoser, high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis and… Continue Reading →

Are We a Fearful People?

                      To be persuasive, we must be believable;  to be believable, we must be credible;  to be credible, we must be truthful.                 … Continue Reading →

Chanteuse: Karen Akers

I first visited Chicago in the late 1980s to attend a meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). The AASLD was founded in Chicago in 1950 by Hans Popper—my teacher, then colleague and friend, who… Continue Reading →

On Listening to Mahler’s 2nd Symphony for the First Time, Again

Classical music first became important to me when I was a student at Brooklyn College in the late 1950s, although I heard music, especially opera, which my grandfather loved, from childhood. My piano lessons, of course, included compositions by Bach… Continue Reading →

« Older posts

© 2026 Brooklyn Transplant — Powered by WordPress

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑