All Posts
My Precise Internal Clock
I describe my incredible internal clock in my memoir, but the story is of good length for a blog, so I’ll retell it here. First a bit of necessary background. My mother died at age 37. I was 13 at the time, the oldest of four children. Our dad, with his taste for alcohol and […]
Iberian Travels, Part 4
Pedro, Bruce, Ken, and Alvaro – Four lambs about to be clipped As I mentioned at the end of my last post, pleasure was blooming in our cabaret. Pedro, Bruce, Alvaro, and I, with our front row table right on the edge of the dance floor, were beaming. Background music was perking up, thumping with […]
Iberian Travels, Part 3
During one of the amazing lunches at our Madrid boarding house, Pedro and Alvaro struck up a conversation with a pair of Spaniards seated across the table. The friendly pair had been working in Madrid for some months and knew the city well. As I mentioned in my last post, Pedro had the better English, […]
Iberian Travels, Part 2
By the time our train stopped at the border between Portugal and Spain to be checked by customs officers (a hassle no longer required when traveling between countries of the European Union), Bruce and I had learned a bit about Pedro and Alvaro, the two young men we had met at the Lisbon train station. […]
Iberian Travels
The Iberian Peninsula is a vague corner of Europe for me. I’ve traveled there only twice, my trips decades apart. On the last one I jetted to Madrid and caught a high-speed train to Seville where I had been invited to participate in a conference on hypertension. The organizers had booked me in a room […]
Italian Holiday
As I mentioned here earlier, my Air Force assignment in Germany provided plenty of time for me to breeze around Europe. And, like all airmen of any rank, I had a precious perk, a sweet plum that allowed me to fly free on military aircraft throughout Europe. At the time, C-47 cargo planes crisscrossed the […]
Werner Forssmann, a Personal Tribute
When I wrote the story of Werner Forssmann catheterizing of his own heart, I ignored my more personal debt to Forssmann’s striking accomplishment. That personal debt was sparked some years ago, on one sunny morning as I tramped up a long hill. The hill was familiar, but what happened that morning was not. As I […]
Donald Trump’s Final Grade
A number of articles I’ve seen, along with opinions from certain syndicated columnists, make the case that the Covid-19 pandemic defeated Donald Trump. I have trouble swallowing that. The virus clearly shifted some votes, but I would argue that Donald Trump knocked himself right out of the Oval Office. The reason seems obvious. Trump never […]
Cardiac Catheterization, Part 3
Earlier, when I was teaching and discussing the cardiovascular system with medical students or nurses, I would at times tell them of Werner Forssmann’s epic experiment of self-characterization, but I knew of no other Forssmann until I learned a Dr. Wolf-Georg Forssmann was one of two German professors who had nominated me for a German […]
Cardiac Catheterization, Part 2
Life changing events, if they occur at all, often are difficult to pinpoint. Not so with Dr. Werner Forssmann. The arc of his life swerved abruptly on that day in 1929, when he stuck a catheter into a handy arm vein and eased the instrument forward until its tip entered his heart. He knew he […]
