Henry Greenberg

My new book, No Ordinary Doctor; No Ordinary Time, describes a career that is no longer possible as the corporatization of medicine has made it difficult to practice medicine, do serious clinical research and take advantage of opportunities to explore many of the nooks and crannies of health care that occur off the beaten track. It was my good fortune to be able to wander off the path from the second year of medical school until retiring from clinical medicine and research and migrating to the Epidemiology Faculty at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. The book exploits those experiences to tell the story of medicine in the late 20th century into the early years of this century.

I have to thank the current pandemic for offering a wonderful opportunity for writing. Throughout history, pandemics have been powerful disrupters of social structures, COVID-19 being no different. Perhaps we will look back to these times and be grateful that the changes wrought by this plague brought a healthy construct to our, and the world’s, health care systems