Samuel Strober was born on May 8, 1940, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the oldest son of Lee and Julius Strober. Sam attended Public School 92 in Brooklyn and Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, and graduated from Columbia College, New York, in 1961, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, in 1966. While in high school, Sam won a…
James Franklin Fries was born on Aug. 25, 1938, in Normal, Ill. His mother taught middle school English and his father was a college business professor. Jim graduated from Stanford University in 1960 with a major in philosophy, and received his MD at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1964. He pursued internal medicine and rheumatology…
William “Bill” R. Palmer, MD, MACR, passed away on Aug. 5, 2021, from highly aggressive, metastatic thyroid carcinoma. He was surrounded by his loving family. Continuing a lifelong pattern, he was courageous, dignified and loving through his last moments. I first met Bill on July 1, 1974—my first day of my medical internship at Albany…
Currier McEwen, MD, was a truly remarkable rheumatologist, accomplishing more than even the best of us could imagine. He is even more recognized in the horticulture community as a hybridizer of flowers. He was born Osceola Currier McEwen on April Fool’s Day, 1902, in Newark, N.J., and died in 2003, at the age of 101….
One more prescribing rule [See “Rheuminations,” September 2009, p. 6], honored mainly in the breach, in our overspending climate: don’t prescribe an expensive brand when generics are as good or better, especially Nexium (which I have never prescribed) versus omeprazole, Lipitor versus simvastatin (which now costs the VA three cents a pill), and—for rheumatologists who are writing 80% Uloric—allopurinol except for the 10% who might need Uloric.
I am saddened to report that Jerome H. Herman, MD, died on August 30, 2009.
John Hardesty Bland, MD, professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington, died on March 15, 2007. He was midway through his 90th year, fulfilling the prescription of his last book, Live Long, Die Fast: Playing the Aging Game to Win, published when he was 80. A consummate rheumatologist and wonderful bedside doctor and teacher, Dr. Bland was also one of the genuine polymaths in the American medical world.