Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Paul Peter Rosen, MD: Happy Birthday, August 16th,

even if the post is late, the birthday congratulations are no less real. Travel and disease slowed me down, but I often think about you ; older sibling where are you, I wonder. I went to Aude in Languedoc, in southwestern France. Why not live there, I ask myself? It is off the beaten track and few Americans have found there way there. It is wild and ancient, with some of the great Upper Paleaolithic Caves and no less than Tautavel's Man's fossils. In the Middle Ages , a vile campaign, a blood-letting crusade occurred against the Cathars. Today it is peaceful, but the terrain has stories to tell. Now known for the vignoble, it was a kind of Arcadia where shepherds herded their flocks not many decades ago. Rough limestone and fields and fig trees growing wild; it is edenic, except in winter when the wild winds swirl down the precipitous slopes of the Pyrenees.
picture 1. Paul Peter , "Peter," my brother with our mother and father, Beate Caspari Rosen and George Rosen, both MDs and my our father with more degrees

Picture 2. a field in the Aude approaching the Pyrenees
3. Susan Joan Rosen and her brother Paul Peter. He became a physician I became an art historian. His specialty, pathology. required visual expertise not unlike the expertise  of an art historian, which in fact he began to seriously specialize in when he began to collect Arfrican art. We are photographed here at 285 Riverside Drive, with our nature wonders, plants and animals. The creatures we are studying snapping turtles, which we captured as they were hatching from their eggs -so long ago at Garnet Lake in the Adirondacks, NY.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

George Rosen: in memoriam, June 23, 1910-July 27, 1977


My father wore many hats; he was a physician with a specialty in Ears, Nose and Throat; he was a sociologist, earning his doctorate at Columbia University, during WWII, even though he was in the army, serving in intelligence. And his third graduate degree was a Master’s in Public Health. He was an historian of medicine, writing seminal works in that field and which he taught at Yale University. Before teaching at Yale, he taught at Columbia's School of Public Health, a field which he knew first hand, having been a New York City health officer "on the beat", as well as directing offices and initiatives which he developed or assisted in developing for the Health Department. He also gained experience at HIP, where he was charged with overseeing Public Health Education. He worked tirelessly as editor of various journals, (for example, The American Journal of Public Health), held offices in national organizations in the history of medicine and in public health and wrote books, articles, reviews, and editorials. Among the books he translated from German into English was "Man in Structure and Function," by Fritz Kahn. George Rosen, whose name appears on his birth certificate as Joseph, was an extraordinary individual (a view a child can hold of their parent) whose curiosity about the world shaped my attitudes and helped me become an historian who looks beyond the boundaries of my field . My father was a loving parent who helped my brother and myself develop our interests: the visual arts was the gift he gave to both of us. Each of us learned how to draw, thanks to his great skill in painting. Knowledge and practice were lessons learned from him. And integral to his success and enjoyment of life was his wife, my mother, Beate Brigitta Caspari-Rosen, M.D.. She stood by his side throughout his brief but full life.