Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 4, 1994 TAG: 9409070008
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
David Hellerstein is a psychiatrist. His sisters Susan and Elizabeth are an obstetrician and pediatrician respectively. Brother Daniel is a urologist. Both parents are physicians. So are uncles on each side of the family. Their maternal grandfather and his father before him were physicians and, in the generation preceding that, in Civil War times, there were three more physicians. Five generations of physicians!
The wonder of it all might be that another brother and sister in the current generation escaped medicine for other endeavors.
Hellerstein weaves a warm and gentle family memoir from personal reminiscences, family stories and a priceless 19th-century journal "Obstetrical Notes" that his great-great-grandfather's brother kept in the last quarter of that century.
Hellerstein's father, Herman, was a dominant figure in American cardiology in the post-World War II era. Some of the once-radical ideas he championed are now cornerstones of physicians' advice (if not part of their patients' practice). If there is a dominant character in the book, it is he, a man who took his children to rounds in the hospital, on house calls and to his laboratory.
There is a great worry abroad today about some issues in health care. One cannot help but feel after reading this family's story that the foundation of medicine still remains on bedrock. Temporary issues relating to financing may bedevil society for a time, but a tradition of compassionate, competent and curious physicians endures.
That guarantees we remain in the hands of true healers.
Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.
by CNB