In the early part of the 20th century, Misha Weinberg fled the pogroms in Belarus and came to New York where he worked as a subway motorman while going to medical school. When Weinberg moved to Newark in 1920 and set up an office as a general practitioner, he didn’t know it at the time but his compassionate house calls to the poor in Newark’s Black and Jewish communities would start a family legacy. His son, grandsons and a great grand-daughter became doctors.
This is all chronicled in Exquisite Moments of Sorrow and Grace, a memoir by Kenneth Weinberg, one of Misha Weinberg’s grandchildren, after a 30-plus year career spent in emergency rooms and urgent care centers. Weinberg, who is 77 and divides his time between Manhattan and the Berkshires, is a practitioner of narrative medicine, an interdisciplinary approach to healthcare that emphasizes the importance of understanding and engaging with patients’ personal stories.
Fran Heller, a retired Columbia Presbyterian Hospital palliative care social worker, told me that the narrative medicine approach helped Weinberg become an especially good diagnostician, something that is crucial in the emergency room…