Open Heart by Jay Neugeboren

Author:Jay Neugeboren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Open Heart
ISBN: 9781497669444
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2003-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

Jerry, who has returned a few weeks before from an international AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, talks with me about how inspiring the conference was, especially the moment when Nelson Mandela appeared, and thousands of people burst into cheers, South Africans dancing and singing, “Nelson Mandela! Ga go no yo a swana na ye…” (“There is no one like him…He brought us our freedom.”)

Jerry has written an account of the conference for AIDS Clinical Care, and has titled his essay “Breaking the Silence.”* He shows me the manuscript, which he has prefaced with an African proverb: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

The great significance of the conference, and the international attention it received, we agree, is that the world can never again claim to be unaware of the horrific extent of the AIDS epidemic in the developing world. “We know how to prevent HIV transmission, yet the pandemic continues to grow unchecked in most of the world,” Jerry writes. “Surely, lack of information can no longer be blamed for the worldwide shroud of silence regarding the pandemic’s magnitude.”

Attending the conference, he tells me, has also confirmed his decision to return to South Africa during his sabbatical a year hence.

In 1975, Jerry took a leave of absence from Harvard. “I liked being both in the Harvard medical school environment and in the black community,” Jerry says, “and I felt fortunate, and was able to lead this life for a while, but it took its toll, and I burned out. So in 1975, I took a leave of absence, and Gail and I wound up going to Israel.”

Jerry found out about a man from the Harvard School of Public Health, Asher Siegel, who was helping to develop a new medical school in Beer Sheave that would attempt to integrate public health, clinical medicine, and basic science. Jerry and Gail left for Israel with a single suitcase—they had never been there before—and they lived in Beer Sheva, where Jerry was visiting professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and where he taught infectious disease, which was not a recognized specialty in Israel at the time. It was a wonderful place, Jerry says (one of the wonderful things about Jerry is how frequently he uses the word wonderful)—innovative, chaotic, and with a pioneering spirit. He developed a curriculum for the treatment of tuberculosis that integrated clinical care and public health, and he found the experience enormously gratifying.

After his return to the States, he continued teaching and doing clinical work at Harvard and in Roxbury, becoming, among other things, coordinator of clinical training for infectious disease at Beth Israel, Children’s Hospital, the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School. The Black Panther Party gradually disintegrated, and in 1981, when a new chief of medicine came to Harvard and brought his own infectious disease people with him, Jerry decided to leave.

“Life is not a controlled experiment,” Jerry says. “There’s no way of proving whether you went in the right or wrong direction.

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