The Society of Alumni of Bellevue Hospital

These announcements are provided by member request and have not been approved or verified by the Society.

January 7, 2015:

Welcome Remarks from President Vincent Palusci:

GOOD EVENING AND WELCOME to members and guests to the 1043rd stated meeting of the Society of Alumni of Bellevue Hospital. My name is Vincent Palusci, and I am proud and honored to be your president for 2015.  We all think we chose to train or work at Bellevue at some point in our career, but in reality, Bellevue chose us. Bellevue remains a force in our lives and in New York City and the nation, as evidenced by a recent NY Magazine honoring Bellevue and its staff as among the Best Reasons to live in NYC. 

I would like to thank all the members of the Society for your fellowship and warm welcome for Roz and me and for all the new members that have joined in recent years.  I also want to thank Drs. Alan Friedman, Ariel Distenfeld, Perry Berg, and Helen Zimmer for all their work on the Executive Committee over the last decade to preserve and continue the Society. I would also like to thank our new members of the Executive Committee for volunteering to work for the Society in the coming years. 

Our new Vice President and President-Elect is Paula J Prezioso, Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine and an Outpatient Site Director for the Pediatric Clerkship.  She completed her Residency and Chief Residency at NYU and Bellevue in 1991 and has worked since then at Pediatric Associates of NYC, where she is a Managing Partner.  Dr Prezioso has a strong interest in mentoring medical students and has developed a program for teaching in the private practice setting that recently earned her the AOA Teacher of the Year Award.  Paula will also be taking over as Chair of the Committee on Entertainment and will working with Alan Friedman and the Executive Committee to plan our events for the coming year.

Perry Berg is continuing as our Treasurer and Trustee of the Robert J. Carlisle Fund.  Perry has been a member of the Society for 40 years and is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at NYU and was in private practice as an internist in midtown Manhattan.

Our new Secretary is Ann Garment, Assistant Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, where she is an internal medicine clinician-educator who both works in the Bellevue Hospital Adult Primary Care Clinic as well as attends on the wards for the general medicine service. She participates in Bellevue's Survivors of Torture Clinic as well as its Addiction Medicine Clinic, and her areas of clinical interest include history of medicine, medical ethics, and women's health.

Laura Erickson-Schroth will be our new Chair of the Committee on New Members and will stand-in for Ann as needed during her postnatal sabbatical.  Laura is a public psychiatry and LGBT health fellow at Columbia University Medical Center and graduated from the NYU/Bellevue psychiatry residency training and Dartmouth Medical School.

Our new Historian will be Elihu Sussman.  Elihu retired from active pediatric practice and continues as a member of the NYU faculty after training at Bellevue and Boston City Hospital and BU.  I would like to specially thank Elihu for his 40 years of service to the Society and his tireless energy in expanding our membership to include more recent Bellevue graduates and to bring us into the 20th century as a membership organization. I would like to present him a small token of my personal esteem and gratitude for all he has done. (SHOW BOOK)

As the Society enters its 129th year as an organization and 100thyear here at the Yale club in this very building, if not this very room, we should pause to remember our mission as a Society and honor our members for their historic work on behalf of the people of New York City and the development of medicine in the world. Here are some things that I hope we can do over the next few years to remember our past, improve where we are in the present, and take the Society into its next century.

Tonight we are honoring our past with some pomp and circumstance, and I hope future presidents will follow in this tradition. We have a distinguished history at Bellevue and our Society of which we should be very proud.  There are many Bellevue firsts:

· The first medical officers were ancestors of President van Buren;

· The first recorded instruction in anatomy (1750);

· The first obstetrical unit;

· The first hospital (1818) to require a physician to pronounce death;

· The first “resident” physicians (1825);

· Dr. Fordyce Barker introduced the hypodermic needle to the US;

· Dr. Lewis Albert Sayre was the first chairman of Orthopedic Surgery in the US and performed the first successful operation for hip-joint disease;

· Dr. Austin Flint brought the stethoscope into general use in the US and served as president of the NY Academy of Medicine and of the American Medical Association;

· The first City morgue (1866);

· The first cesarean section in US;

· Walter Reed graduated from Bellevue Medical College;

· The first pavilion for the insane within the hospital grounds (1879), an approach deemed revolutionary at the time;

· Andrew Carnegie made his first public gift: $50,000 to Bellevue Medical College to establish the Carnegie Laboratory--the nation’s first laboratory for teaching and investigation of bacteriology and pathology;

· The first hospital appendectomy in the US is performed at Bellevue;

· The Mills Training School for Male Nurses;

· Dr. William T. Bull performed the first successful operation of the abdomen for a pistol shot wound;

· The Synagogue Committee was started, the first volunteer project of the newly formed Free Synagogue under the direction of Rabbi Stephen Wise and his wife, Louise, to provide translation and social services for Yiddish-speaking patients;

· AND THESE WERE ALL BEFORE OUR SOCIETY WAS FOUNDED IN 1886!

In the Present, we will take several measures this year to enlarge our society and its influence in the medical community.

· At the end of 2014, the Society had 112 members, including 48 who are emeritus;

· We are communicating with members via email;

· Thanks to Ann Garment, we have a functioning website up and running with details about membership and our upcoming sessions;

· Our finances are strong;

· We have moved back into the larger room where we have met for many years;

· We will take steps to attract new members through CIR and the residency training office at NYU;

· We will distribute short articles to Bellevue Departments for their staff and newsletters;

· We will again have Executive Committee meetings after each stated meeting, and you are all welcome to join us to contribute to the governance of our Society;

· Elihu and I have located the historical materials of the Society in the NYU Archives.  As historian, Elihu will collect the minutes and information from Society proceedings and we will again publish this for the membership;

· We will create a Wikipedia site with history of our Society, its members, and its accomplishments;

· We will begin posting information about members, events, and obituaries on the website as well;

· As Chair of the Committee on Science, I will start with short reports on Bellevue science and history at the beginning of each meeting.  To do this, I plan to invite the current Medical Director and other Bellevue leaders to give us a report on what Bellevue is doing and how we as Alumni can help in its Mission.

· I have also started distributing abstracts from recent scientific papers published by Bellevue physicians to help keep us abreast of current activities.

To stabilize and promote the Future of the Society, in the coming months, the Executive Committee will be studying our fee structure, membership levels, amenities at meetings, and term limits for officers.

Thank you all for being here tonight to celebrate our fellowship, our Society, and our future together with Bellevue and all its good work.  As the Mayor and others toasted our Society in 1897, lets us now raise our glass and make a toast:

 To the City of New York—“God made the country and Man made the town;”

 to the People,

 to hygiene,

 to the Doctor’s Doctor,

 to the Patient

 to Bellevue Hospital

 and to its Alumni

May we have a happy and healthy new beginning and continued growth and success in 2015 and for many years to come. 

Cheers!