A Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95 He used medicine to take on poverty, racism and the threat of nuclear destruction. I’ve heard about Jack Geiger for decades – but didn’t know what a picaresque life he led!  After reading his obit in the 12.29.20 NY Times, I can’t wait for the movie starring Harrison Ford to screen. Excerpts: NY Times Obit. Dr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors groups that shared in Nobel Peace Prizes, died on Monday at … Continue reading →

A New Year Greeting The poet, W.H. Auden, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1925 with a scholarship to study Biology. This poem should interest physicians, especially dermatologists. Had Auden become a biologist, think what the world might have lost! Osler quotes Lowell: “We reward the discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him a member of all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect into the small Academy of the Immortals.’” (from John Keats: The Apothecary Poet, in The Alabama Student.) This poem was published in Scientific American in 1969 On this day tradition allots         to taking … Continue reading →