My great friend Dr. Melvyn Schreiber died at 93.
He retired as a radiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in January. If you’re wondering about a 92-year-old man practicing medicine, Melvyn read images — X-rays and the alphabet soup of scans. He said it was a matter of experience — and a bit like solving a crossword puzzle. You learn what to look for and what to ignore. You learn how to recognize things that look bad but aren’t.
In a discipline that favors experience, it’s hard to beat 60 years. Melvyn was good. More than once, I was with him when a prominent doctor at a famous medical school in another state called and asked him to look at a scan — just in case.
On May 4, 2010, Bill Hynek of Galveston asked Melvyn and me to lunch. It became a weekly event. Another professor, Bill Winslade, often joined us.
We warned each other to stay away from the complaints of old men — lunatics in politics and our own aches and pains. We talked about ideas that interested us and books we were reading.
After we left Galveston, Melvyn and I kept up the conversation with old-fashioned letters.
One of his daughters contacted me and let me know she’d found his last one and had put it in the mail.
• Notes: Melvyn appears in many of these notes. For more on our correspondence, see “These letters require stamps,” Aug. 20, 2023. He was a fine essayist; for a sense of what his writing was like, see “Another physician, another small habit,” June 4, 2023.
I’m sorry for the loss of your friend, Heber.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michael. I miss him. I was just incredibly lucky to have known him. That's something: to have lived that kind of life — when you go your friends feel grief, of course, but more gratitude than grief.
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