Remembering The Heart Transplant Pioneer Who Made House Calls

Remembering The Heart Transplant Pioneer Who Made House Calls

According to a famous passage in the Talmud, “the best doctors go to Hell.”

I bristled the first time I heard it, because my father, Mauricio Golberg, was the best doctor in the world. There was no way he was going anywhere but the Good Place. Directly.

Although my father never learned to read the Talmud, his descendants did.  They’ve since reassured me that our Sages weren’t talking about him—they were talking about doctors whose power over life and death goes to their heads, filling them with hubris.

So my father was safe. He was an exceptionally humble person, especially considering what he accomplished, early in his career: a groundbreaking heart transplant in dogs that paved the way for the first successful human heart transplant.

If he were alive today, my father would be 107—or 108. We’re not exactly sure, because he wasn’t born in a hospital, where the date would have been recorded. He was born on his mother’s kitchen table that rested on the dirt floor of their one-bedroom house in Medanos, Argentina. My grandparents immigrated there from Russia in 1905.

The second-to-youngest of eight children, my father’s older siblings pooled their resources to send him to medical school at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. While there, he earned extra money by selling his lecture notes. He also earned the nickname “el tanqué” (the tank). I’m not sure why. Was it his prodigious memory? His indomitable persistence? Probably both. He graduated at the top of his class in 1945.

On the advice of his teachers, my father came to the United States during the Korean War—doctors were needed here to replace Hawkeye and B.J. —where he spent eight years in numerous hospitals, training to become a cardiovascular-thoracic surgeon.

After these years of research, in September 1957, using the technique he developed, my father and two colleagues performed the first animal heart transplant in which the donated organ sustained circulation in the recipient. Hearts had been transplanted in animals before, but only in parts of the body other than the chest to see if they would continue to beat after transplant.

My father proved the heart could be transplanted from the chest of one animal to the chest of another and work.

And then, a scant few days later, just as news of the historic transplant was hitting the stands, my father returned to Argentina, this time with my mother and brother.

He missed out on most of the publicity. He wasn’t even interviewed.

It would never occur to my father to stick around and promote himself, much less hire a publicist to make sure he got credit for the achievement that was rightfully his.

He did get his props in Argentina – From @lanuevaweb, 67 years ago:

“Leaving American Surgeons Stunned: A Jewish-Argentine Doctor Achieved A Heart Transplant”

(I like how they un-self-consciously call him a “Jew Doctor.”)[*]

After about a year in Argentina, my parents returned to the U.S., settling in southern Rhode Island, where I grew up. My father became a family doctor and general surgeon in South County.

In a 1968 interview with the Narragansett Times, Gerry Goldstein asked my father why he had traded pioneering work in heart-transplant research for general practice and thoracic surgery in small-town Rhode Island:

“Goldberg cast a quizzical eye at me, as if my question made no sense, and replied softly: “What is the difference whether I save a life by curing a pneumonia or by transplanting a heart?”

My father was perfectly content to be a small-town doctor, wrote Martha Smith in the Providence Journal. “He had a fascinating life and yet here he was, prescribing antibiotics and caring for arthritic fisherman.”

I was six years old, boarding the school bus one morning, when I first encountered some of the patients who crowded my father’s waiting room. As I climbed the steps, I saw a black boy fix his sight on me and rise out of his seat, blocking the aisle. I was terrified but determined to keep walking—until he turned to his seatmates and demanded, “Stand up! It’s Dr. Golberg’s daughter!” Now there were three big black kids staring me down.

Mercifully, I spotted a seat in front of them and slunk into it, relieved as they too, sat down. But I was baffled. I didn’t know them; our paths never crossed. What could I possibly have done to provoke them? And yet somehow, my first-grade brain apprehended they weren’t standing up for me, they were standing up for my father. Why?

That night, my father figured it out: He had treated their family the day before without charging them. They left with both their wallets and their dignity intact.

My father’s fellow surgeons also deeply respected him. “He’s probably one of the most dedicated physicians I’ve ever seen,” his longtime colleague, Dr. Robert Conrad, said: “At 6:30 in the morning he’d be at the hospital and at 11:30 at night he’d still be there.”

Sometimes, as the wife of one of his patients shared with my mother, my father was there even later:

After my father passed away, Smith, who was also his patient, warmly recalled him as  “unquestionably among the most beloved men in southern Rhode Island.”  He was also her doctor—“that most gentle and compassionate of doctors—and the kindest of people.”

My father was as kind to his fellow doctors as he was to his patients, though he didn’t advertise that either, Dr. Alberto Gambarini, a paisan and good friend, revealed in the Providence Journal:

In his quiet, understated fashion, Mauricio was also extremely generous. Last year, I went to a South County professional because of a foot infection. She told me that she had arrived in South County several years ago, ready to start her practice but without the finances needed to open an office. Dr. Golberg found out about her situation and offered her the use of his office and equipment free of charge. Her story did not surprise me, although Mauricio had never told me of it.

“In the final years of his practice, when his office hours were curtailed, Dr. Golberg made house calls,” Smith wrote, “tending those who were unable to get out.”

Even after he “retired,” my father continued to look after his patients, Goldstein noted. “Grown frail himself,” my father “would grip his bag and call on elderly patients he had seen through sickness and health”:

With regularity, for instance, he would visit Eva in the Scallop Shell nursing home. At 97, Eva has now outlived her doctor. She wept for him when she heard the news, recalling the many times he sat on the edge of her bed rejoicing at the length of her years.

I sometimes went along on those Sunday nursing home visits with my father, earlier in his career. “I have to go,” he would tell me. “They’re depressed because their children don’t visit them.”

Was my father dropping a broad hint? I really don’t think so, but, either way, he need not have worried.

One early afternoon in May 1998, the dreaded Phone Call with “Rhode Island” in the caller I.D. came. It was my mother, and she just kept repeating, “He’s gone! He’s gone!” I understood immediately that my father had died, but I didn’t understand how.

Later, my mother explained she had gone into the study to ask him a question, and when she came back moments later, he was—gone. That is, he was there in the same position, sitting on the leather couch with the newspaper. His eyes were still open, but the life was drawn out them.

According to the Talmud, my father experienced misas neshika, “death by a kiss,” reserved for the most sublime souls.

On a more mundane note, my brother discovered one of the “side effects” of my father’s heart medication was—“sudden death.”

Make of it what you will.

I make of it that the man who devoted his whole life in this world to relieving other people’s suffering merited to pass directly to the Next One without any of his own.

[*]The correct spelling of our family name is “Golberg.”

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