David Goldblatt, MD (1930–2007)

Abstract

American neurology lost a leading voice in medical humanities, ethics, and professionalism when David Goldblatt, MD, died of metastatic urethral carcinoma on September 1, 2007, at age 77 at his home in Penn Yan, New York. In a career spent almost entirely at the University of Rochester, David distinguished himself as a clinician, teacher, medical editor, and tireless advocate for compassionate patient care. David was born in 1930 in Cleveland. His mother imbued him with a love of literature, particularly poetry, in which he was both an expert and prolific practitioner. His father Harry was a pathologist, known to generations of physiology students from his work showing the renal arterial cause of hypertension. The name Goldblatt will forever be associated with the kidney experiment he conducted. When David underwent a nephrectomy …