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Heinrich Finkelstein was a monumental figure in pediatrics from the turn of the 20th century through the tortured early years of Nazi power in Germany.1-6 He is almost forgotten today. I learned about Finkelstein from his student and my mentor, Milton Levine.1
ABOUT MILTON LEVINE
My memories of Milton Levine, founding editor of Pediatric Annals, came from my 3 years as a pediatric resident and fellow in nutrition at the New York Hospital/ Cornell University Medical Center from 1967 to 1970. I came to know Levine quite well. His father was a German-born Reform rabbi. Germany, from the turn of the 20th century through the ascension of the Nazi movement, was the world's center for the study of science and medicine. As a young medical graduate in the mid-1920s, Levine went to study in Berlin, where Heinrich Finkelstein influenced him.
In this country, Levine had a successful career as a pediatrician with a clientele that was predominately Jewish and from the Upper East Side of New York. He was also an effective teacher. During my 2 years as a fellow, I was "Dr. Levine," taking his calls every Wednesday night and every other weekend. The high point of that experience was making a house call to examine the child of violinist Itzhak Perlman, who was at the beginning of his career. Mr. Perlman lived in Babe Ruth's former apartment.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it was an era of political upheavals, most notably the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam. However, inside the New York Hospital, conflict focused on the evaluation and treatment of children with failure to thrive. Levine was an advocate of what we now call multi-system therapy, in which the totality of care is maintained from the first contact rather than probing for a single entity as cause.1,7-10 From the contemporary work of Deborah Frank and others, we now know that nurture and nutrition must never be put aside for the sake of a theoretical exact diagnosis, as growth failure is almost never isolated from the social circumstances in which the child lives.8,10
Levine's nemesis at the New York Hospital was the "Doctor's Doctor," a physician who regaled residents and students with his compendious knowledge of pediatrics. With...