These announcements are provided by member request and have not been approved or verified by the Society.
January 6, 2016:
Welcome Remarks from President Vincent Palusci:
GOOD EVENING AND WELCOME to members and guests to the 1051st 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 again for 2016. As I have said before, we all think we chose to train or work at Bellevue at some point in our career, but in reality, Bellevue chose us. Bellevue is a force in our lives and in New York City and the nation, as evidenced by our distinguished history of taking care of New York and providing medical leadership throughout the world.
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. Paula Prezioso, Elihu Sussman, Laura Erickson-Schroth and Ann Garment for all their work on the Executive Committee over the last year to preserve and continue the Society and its traditions.
· Our 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. Paula continues as Chair of the Committee on Entertainment and will working with Alan Friedman and the Executive Committee to plan our events for the coming years.
· Elihu Sussman is continuing as our Treasurer, Historian,and Trustee of the Robert J. Carlisle Fund. Elihu has been a member of the Society for over 40 years and was in private practice as a pediatrician in Manhattan.
· Our new Secretary is Laura Erickson-Schroth, currently a fellow in consultation psychiatry at Mount Sinai. She graduated from the NYU/Bellevue psychiatry residency training and Dartmouth Medical School.
· Ann Garment continues as our WebMistress and now trustee of the Robert J. Carlisle Fund. Ann is 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.
· Our Secretary is Laura Erickson-Schroth, currently a fellow in consultation psychiatry at Mount Sinai. She graduated from the NYU/Bellevue psychiatry residency training and Dartmouth Medical School.
· Danielle LaRocca will be our new Chair of the Committee on New Members and will stand-in for Laura as needed as secretary. She is a 3rd year psychiatry resident at NYU/Bellevue and currently doing a year-long fellowship in psychoanalysis through IPE. She graduated from Mt Sinai medical school and is interested in doing a child psychiatry fellowship after residency.
As the Society enters its 130th year as an organization and 101styear here at the Yale club in 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. This year, we lost some notable members of the Society, including Ralph Lusskin, Perry Berg, Ariel Distenfeld, and Nicholas Tzimas. We just lost Ira Wasserberg in December as well. As it has been the tradition of the Society, let us please give a moment of silence in his honor and for all our members of the Society Eternal.
As we look forward to 2016 and beyond, here are some things that I hope we can do to remember our past, improve where we are in the present, and take the Society into its next century:
· At the end of 2015, the Society had 97 active members, including 33 who joined during these past two years;
· Dues notices have just been mailed but paper meeting notices have been discontinued, and we are communicating with members via email;
· We continue to take steps to attract new members through CIR and the residency training office at NYU;
· Thanks to Ann garment, we have a functioning website with current details about membership, events, upcoming sessions, and history;
· Our finances are strong despite market fluctuation, with over $8,000 in cash and over $465,000 in the Robert J. Carlisle Fund;
· We will continue to have Executive Committee meetings after each stated meeting, and you are all welcome to join us to contribute to the governance of our Society;
· We will develop department specific newsletter articles to be sent to Bellevue Departments for their staff and newsletters;
· As historian, Dr. Sussman continues to collect the minutes and information from Society proceedings and we will again publish this material for our 130th anniversary in October of this year;
· I have been distributing abstracts from recent scientific papers published by Bellevue physicians to help keep us abreast of current activities. Please let us know if there is material you would like to distribute to the membership.
· To stabilize and promote the Society, the Executive Committeewill continue to study our fee structure, membership levels, and amenities at meetings.
· I have submitted a Wikipedia site with history of our Society, its members, and its accomplishments. As you can see we have a lot of history and important members to acknowledge on this page and there are some references supporting our work. Please let me know if you have additional information and supporting materials we can use for this submission;
· We have been offering short reports on Bellevue science and history at the beginning of each meeting. These “Bellevue Minutes” can highlight important new and not so new information about Bellevue. The American Board of Pediatrics has added to our collection with information about Water Reed, a Bellevue Medical College Graduate. Please feel free to let us know if you have something to add during these short presentations.
Thank you all for being here tonight to celebrate our fellowship, our Society, and our future together with Bellevue and all its good work. We have an exciting program planned for 2016. Please contact the Executive Committee and Dr. Prezioso with your ideas for future topics and speakers.
May we have a happy and healthy New Year, and continued growth and success in 2016, and for many years to come. As the Mayor toasted our Society in 1897, let us now raise our glass and make this 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.
Vincent J. Palusci, MD MS, NYU/Bellevue ‘87