Epilogue

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done… The History of Herodotus, The First Book, Titled Clio M ichael j. lepore, md died on 2 September 2000. The year of his birth, 1910, was marked by the publication of the now famous Bulletin Number Four of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Medical Education in the United States and Canada, by Abraham Flexner. The Flexner report would lead to the closure of substandard proprietary medical schools, to the creation of University of Rochester School of Medicine which my father would enter in 1929, and to emphasis “on medicine as a science, while the practice of the art would be relegated to a secondary role.”1 The year of his death brought forth completion of a working draft of the DNA sequence of the human genome. This would delineate an estimated 90% of genes on every chromosome and “the first time in the story of life on earth that a species has read its own recipe.”2 The years 1910 and 2000 bracket a time of great ferment and unimaginable progress in the evolution of the field of applied biology known as medicine. In these 90 years my father observed the dawn of the atomic age at close hand, was physician to patients from all walks of life, including a President, made significant contributions to the treatment of hepatic disease, and used the new technology of TV to educate doctors. To my mind his life's work was emblematic of a heroic age of medicine which ended with the decline of the Oslerian clinicianscholar and the advent of the “corporatization” of American medicine. As Life of the Clinician ends in 1976, the curtain has not yet been brought down on the embattled clinician-scholar and my father graphically communicates the excitement and hope surrounding the use of plasmapheresis to treat fulminant acute viral hepatitis—a malady regarded up until that time as invariably fatal. We are left with a snapshot of an indefatigable team of St. Vincent's Hospital physicians and nurses, a monofuge spinning off plasma, and a young man emerging from hepatic coma. The memoir concludes with my father at the bedside 104 blocks south of the flat in Harlem's little Italy where he had entered the world 66 years earlier

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