Dr. J. Donald Boudreau, interim director of the Institute of Well being Sciences Training at McGill College in Montreal, stated, additionally in a tribute, that the idea of “physicianship” that Dr. Cassell had helped develop “argued {that a} key function of medication must be to return sufferers to a way of well-being, the place well-being relies on attaining targets and functions in life.”
Dr. Cassell was born Eric Jonathan Goldstein on Aug. 29, 1928, in New York to Hyman and Anne (Lake) Goldstein and raised in Queens. His father was a civil engineer for the submit workplace. Dr. Cassell stated that he and his brother had modified their surname to approximate the unique pronunciation of that of their immigrant grandfather, earlier than it was modified at Ellis Island when he arrived from Russia.
Dr. Cassell earned a bachelor’s diploma from Queens Faculty in 1950, a grasp’s from Columbia College and a medical diploma from the New York College College of Drugs. He was a captain within the Military Medical Corps from 1956 to 1958 in France and served his internship and residency at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.
In 1971, on account of an article he had written, he was recruited to the Process Power on Dying on the Hastings Middle.
“That actually modified my life, broadened my horizons, pushed me to turn into literate, and gave substance to a genetic predisposition to philosophy,” Dr. Cassell wrote on his web site. “I started to wonder if a physician might truly deal with sufferers in a efficiently helpful and particular means as a result of they have been dying.”
“Now we all know that you just not solely can,” he added, “however it’s best to.”
He directed the Program for the Research of Ethics and Values in Drugs on the medical school of Cornell College from 1981 to 1986. He retired from his inside medication apply in 1998.
Along with his son Stephen, from his first marriage, with Joan Cassell, which resulted in divorce, he’s survived by a daughter, Justine, from that marriage; his spouse, Patricia Owens; his stepchildren, Margaret, Theresa, Shirley, James and Rebecca Owens; a granddaughter; two step-grandchildren; and a step-great-grandchild.