The alumni of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&amp;S) have made remarkable strides in medicine, academia, public health, and industry. In this they follow in the footsteps of Samuel Bard (1742–1821), a prominent early American physician and a founder of what would become VP&amp;S. In The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard, Peter Wortsman offers a selection of profiles of Columbia-educated doctors who have made a fundamental difference in the lives of others. The physicians profiled in this book represent the complete spectrum of MDs. They have charted new fields of medicine, resolved long-standing biochemical mysteries, discovered the causes and cures of diseases, developed vaccines, pioneered surgical procedures, helped halt epidemics, and cared for imperiled populations. Some have run hospitals, medical schools, universities, the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, city health departments, and major pharmaceutical concerns. Others practiced at the White House, climbed mountains, or flew to outer space. Still others wrote pioneering papers, edited prestigious medical journals, and authored prize-winning books and best-selling novels. In each case, the clinical training, scientific thoroughness, and humanistic values inculcated at Columbia had a formative influence on their thinking and practice. In telling their stories, The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard illustrates the importance of clinical rigor and humanistic caring in the practice of medicine and offers readers a rare insight into the heart and soul of American medicine at its best.

The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard: Profiles of Selected Distinguished Graduates of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbiana)

Biographies & Memoirs

Wortsman, Peter

Professionals & Academics

Columbia University Press

A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories & Microtales

Literature & Fiction

United States

Fromm Intl

A Modern Way to Die: Small Stories and Microtales

Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space. Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Führer’s Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution.

Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray

Historical

Travelers' Tales

Cold Earth Wanderers by Peter Wortsman is a science fiction novel set in a completely built up world where vertical values are prized while all horizontal tendencies are suspect. 16 year old Elgin Marble has had enough of a world that is decidedly vertical. When his father, an upstanding elevator man, is marked for disposal, Elgin joins an underground group called the Crabs. This illicit group tirelessly digs tunnels in the hope of one day breaking through to the outside. But who are the Crabs, and can they be trusted? Elgin's mother, Ellen, is worried sick about her son. The ruthless school principal, Mr. Orion, warns her that Elgin is in big trouble and blackmails her for sexual favors. Together they go underground to search for the boy. Meanwhile, agents of the IVT (Institute for Vertical Thinking) are also hot on his trail, and the Crabs are feeling the heat. "In Cold Earth Wanderers Peter Wortsman has given us as daft and delirious a dystopia as might be imagined. Comparisons with Edwin A. Abbott's endlessly ingenious Flatland are both inevitable and entirely warranted." James Morrow "A darkly comic folktale for a dysfunctional future, or a nightmare fable for disobedient children ..." Geoffrey O'Brien

Cold Earth Wanderers

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Pelekinesis

Fiction. These FOOTPRINTS IN WET CEMENT are just that: stories—some experienced, some homespun, some dredged from the fertile detritus of dreams; impressions gathered and ruminations fermented over the past decade or so—the fleeting imprint of a life left to harden in the ephemeral mold of language. Straddling the tenuous borderline between the narrative and the poetic, they are all the product of a pressed aesthetic. "In these delicious short (often very short) stories, Peter Wortsman crosses Kafkaesque absurdity with Chekhovian realism, fairy-tale and fable with everyday journal entry. A master of the telling detail, Wortsman is one of those rare writers upon whom nothing, as Henry James put it, is ever lost. The slightest incident can be seen to contain magic, an absurd TV commercial can prompt the most erotic of fantasies: it's all in a day's (or rather a night's) work and usually momentary. FOOTPRINTS IN WET CEMENT is a book to be kept on the bedside table: open anywhere at any time and you will be completely captivated."—Marjorie Perloff

Footprints in Wet Cement

Short Stories & Anthologies

Borrowed Words

Poetry

Bamboo Dart Press

Driftwood at the River's Edge

A Modern Way to Die

Peter Wortsman, best known for his prose fiction and plays, takes stock of life in late middle age. In the short personal essays that comprise EPIPHANY OF A MIDDLE-AGED PILGRIM, ESSAYS IN LIEU OF A MEMOIR, author Peter Wortsman, best known for his original prose fiction and stage plays, and his translations from the German, follows in the footsteps of French essayist Michel de Montaigne, taking stock of life in middle age. His perspectives, including childhood fear, chronic insomnia, ironing a shirt, getting a haircut, having a skin cancer removed, travel at home and abroad, a consciousness of getting older, et al, and concluding with a reflection of life in lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, make for a rich mosaic of memories meant to spur readers to seek out their own epiphanies. Literary Nonfiction. Memoir.

Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim: Essays in lieu of a Memoir

Travel

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Books by Wortsman, Peter