Walter refused what would have been his 9th hospital admission that year. “You run a great hospital, Doc,” he said to Bruce Leff, “but it’s a lousy hotel.” It was the ‘80s and Leff, a Johns Hopkins geriatrician who was then a resident, responded by working with his mentors to assemble everything that Walter would…Continue reading Making a normal day ideal for someone →

In grad school, I did a seminar on a paper proposing a novel kind of gene therapy. A doctor in the audience all but said that I was wasting my breath because the technology to deliver the treatment didn’t exist. I got confused: the whole point was that the idea was novel. Still, I didn’t…Continue reading Defer to imagination, not conditions →