About Me

I’m a native New Yorker, pediatrician and health care executive who reunited with his inner writer in retirement. I surrendered the pleasure of writing columns on various topics for my local newspaper in Connecticut to focus on my debut novel, The King’s Anatomist.

grandstand

Ron and lab partners in gross anatomy

Growing Up

I grew up in a sliver of the south Bronx between the Grand Concourse and the Harlem River that happened to include Yankee Stadium. A lifetime later, I drove down from Connecticut to watch the last grandstand section of my Field of Dreams being yanked to its knees in full view of the glitzy new ballpark across 161st Street.

I am a product of a New York City education: the Bronx High School of Science, the City College of New York, and finally, SUNY-Downstate Medical Center in far-off Brooklyn.

Career

After four years in Tucson, Arizona (U. of Arizona pediatrics residency, marriage, two sons), we relocated to Connecticut to where I started practicing general pediatrics. I found myself more and more in administrative roles, finally choosing to leave clinical practice altogether.

Writer

There always was a writer cooped up inside me, but he got loose only after I retired. I had permitted him to show up only in school classes, health and business writing, and newspaper columns, but I realize now that I kept him on a short leash because I was afraid of him – afraid of his disruptive potential and afraid of what he would look like to the world. But at this point in my life I got past those excuses and let him out to see what he could do.

The King’s Anatomist, it turned out, was an ideal writing project, anchored in facts, but with ample room for creativity. Thank you, Andreas Vesalius, for being such an interesting guy.

{

There always was a writer cooped up inside me, but he got loose only after I retired. I had permitted him to show up only in school classes, health and business writing, and newspaper columns, but I realize now that I kept him on a short leash because I was afraid of him – afraid of his disruptive potential and afraid of what he would look like to the world. But at this point in my life I got past those excuses and let him out to see what he could do.