Eulogy delivered to the Stamford Medical Society on December 13, 1994. For his Yahrzeit November, 2009.
Martin Robert Benjamin loved medicine. From Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of a clothes manufacturer and a housewife with a heart condition, and from the University of North Carolina, he went to Flower Fifth Avenue, the New York Medical College, where he got his MD. From there he went to Bellevue where
The elusive blue breasted seersucker he completed his training in Internal Medicine. Bellevue, my father told me, was a lively place even back then. As often happens when working in the trenches,a camaraderie developed among the residents. Marty got to know an attractive female resident who happened to be married, but told him that she had a sister at home just like her. She introduced him to her identical twin, Vicki, and Marty and Vicki soon married.
In 1954 Marty, Vicki and their one year old son, Dan, made the adventurous move to the suburbs. Marty put out his first shingle on Summer St. at the Mayflower Gardens, with the
young family living upstairs. Those early days were a struggle, but Marty did what he had to do. He covered for many of the well established doctors in town, taking their night and weekend
call, and through their kindness received referrals as well. Marty wrote a story about his first New Years Eve in Stamford. It was 3 AM, cold and raining, when he got a call from one of the busiest doctors in town, someone who had never called him before, a real SOB to those who knew him, but, of course, the doctor to his patients. Marty was told to see an immigrant tailor with CHF who was short of breath. Before long, Marty was climbing up to the third floor of this tailor's tenement. He was let in by two policemen and stared down by a tiny man in obvious heart failure. The man said nothing, but took Marty's coat lapels and ran the material between his fingers. He then turned the lapels over to examine the stitching. Now, Marty always prided himself in his dress. He took to heart the advice of Polonius, "In thy dress be rich but not gaudy," paraphrased in Brooklynese, "Dress British, think Yiddish". Even after his stroke, when it would take him 45 minutes to dress, he would walk out to the family room to have us check his ensemble. He called himself a public figure and always had to maintain that professional appearance.
But how was that little tailor to know that this was the only winter jacket Marty owned. When he got through fingering the material, he told Marty, between coughs, "Big shot, vat do
you know". He just couldn't trust such a young doctor with such a well made jacket.
Mayflower Gardens soon got crowded with the practice downstairs and the family, now expecting a second child, upstairs. Marty moved the office south on Summer St. where he rented space from Dr. Leo Heimovitch. His first break, an ironic one, came soon when Dr. Heimovitch had a heart attack. Marty took care of the older physician’s practice and from there his own practice took off. I don’t have many vivid memories of my father in those days. I know I was busy with school and football and baseball. He was busy with the practice. That seemed okay to me…except when my friends’ fathers would throw a baseball with us or take us swimming, or just be around the house. I guess I was so used to not seeing him that I didn’t really notice when, in 1961, at the age of 38, he had a heart attack. My older brother and I visited him once in the hospital. The two younger brothers, there were four boys then, never did. As soon as his doctor would allow, Marty went back to work. He was in Hanover Hall on Bedford St. then. Dr. Michael Browne had the office to the left and Dave Widrow the one on the right. Dave’s consultation room was through a thin wall from Marty’s. That, Dave tells me, is how he learned all of his dirty jokes. Marty would call them stories, “true stories”. He’d tell them and then laugh louder that any of us.
Marty loved his patients. He was a kid from Brooklyn. They were mostly blue collar workers, West Side immigrants, cops. He just hit it off with them. He’s listen to them, they’d confide in him. We were never hurting for cookies, cakes, sweaters, wine; you name it at Christmas time. We couldn’t walk down the street in Stamford without someone stopping us to say hello. They wouldn’t even let us pay the 25 cents at the Greenwich tolls. The toll taker would take my father’s quarter and return 25 cents in nickels to the kids in the back seat. I remember one call at night at home. My parents were out and my father had signed out to another doctor. The man was calling about his wife. She was sick, but not the kind of sick that a covering doctor could help. He told me this, and then told me, a kid, maybe ten years old, that my father was a special man. That he listened and cared and meant more to people than just a doctor. My brother Fred tells of another middle of the night call, on the kid’s telephone. My father, head on hand, elbow on knee, listening and listening, and finally putting the phone down. Fred said, apologizing for getting dad out of bed, “The man told me it was important”. Marty replied, “To him it was, and that’s enough”.
In 1967, at the age of 44, Marty had his second MI. This time his doctors told him he couldn’t continue to practice medicine. Marty had Vicki, now five boys, the youngest just one, and the practice. He became depressed. After he recovered from the MI he spent six months in a Westchester psychiatric institute. I was twelve. I remember this very well. I hated seeing him sedated, moving slowly, smiling slowly, walking among the splendid trees and the green grass of this institution. I saw him only twice in that six months, but when he came home he looked normal, walked normal…smiled and told jokes…and went back to work. He said he had to work half time. But we all knew what that meant.
I noticed a real change after that. Marty did spend more time at home. He was home for dinner with the family. And I liked that. Dinners at home with the family were great. Every time my mother got up to go to the kitchen he’d tell us another dirty joke or “true story”. We were turning into teenagers and he wanted to be a part of it. “Did you get lucky last night?” he’d ask me. At sixteen I was pretty tight lipped in my replies. But by eighteen, after my freshman year in college, I knew I could go to him when I needed some penicillin. And I’m sure to this day he never told Vicki.
Marty practiced another 15 years. He put a lawyer, a doctor, a rabbi, an MBA, and a young Hollywood exec through college. A lot of pressure, a lot of worries. Vicki tells me that he started to voice a lifelong conflict. “I’m sicker than most of them,” he’d tell her. He resented when, after praising him, deifying him, they left him after his illness. But there was a good side to this. The practice became almost like work and his important relationships grew with us. He became co-owner of Ben-Paul Stables so he could sit in the owner’s box at Belmont. He travelled, read, gardened. He was the life of the party with his violin on birthdays and holidays.
I was an intern in Philadelphia, doing my neurology rotation of all things, when I got a call. He had a stroke. Despite a dense hemiparesis, he felt he’d again return to work. He worked hard at the physical and occupational therapy. He learned to walk, to dress himself, to drive, but he never practiced medicine again.
Some have said over the years, that it was medicine that caused his heart attacks and strokes. But he never did. It was his family history, high cholesterol and hypertension that did it. It was medicine that kept him going. He never lost faith in medicine or in his fellow physicians. When he could no longer practice, he began writing, mostly about his days as a practitioner. He continued to go to medical conferences and, along with Monroe Coleman, developed the Physical Diagnosis course for second year medical students. He read and read about the history of medicine, and delighted students with the wisdom of Osler and Freud.
For his sons and many of his nephews, nieces and special friends, he remained a sounding board. He still wanted to listen. Something about the way he listened made others sure he cared, and this caring became addictive. In the end Marty was not ready to die. He still felt he had something to give.
This last year was a recurring nightmare for us. Marty didn’t remember what hit him, but we told him. I was angry at the indifference, incompetence, insensitivity of some fellow physicians, but not Marty. He was thankful. Among our community he had his heroes. He spoke of Mike Parry as a clinician, Noel Robin as a teacher. In his word processor I found a letter of congratulations to Bill Hines.
In the end, he wanted to come home. He never made it back to his study, his music, his gardens that he loved so. But he died where he labored…in Stamford.
If there is a message to us physicians from Marty’s life, it is his sons. We have all achieved some measure of professional success, but every day we go home to our families, and play with our children, bathe them, feed them, talk to them, listen to them, or just spend time around so they’ll know we’re there for them. Marty Benjamin loved his family, and we miss him very much.
This week’s blog is serious. Please take a few minutes and click on the link above to read the New England Journal article on mammography in women between 40 and 50. Before you start reading, take a moment to recognize and acknowledge your biases. After you have read the article I’d like to discuss some of these issues with you. The issues that come to mind for me are breast cancer, cancer screening, women’s health, health care rationing, the health care crisis, the government’s role in health care decision making, technology and its limitations….there’s a lot to talk about.
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