Finding Meaning in Medicine— and in Helping Others
Back when Mort Salomon, MD (CAMED’77), earned his first degree, a bachelor’s in history, his path to a successful medical career was anything but clear.
Salomon’s pursuit of a clinical psychology PhD at the University of Rochester was disrupted by the Vietnam War and the end of graduate-school exemptions and deferments. He was not drafted, but the hiatus in his education led him to look more closely at his goals—and a stint working in clinical group therapy made them clear. “I was looking for something that would be more definitively helpful to people, and medicine seemed like an obvious alternative to psychotherapy,” he says.
After a short period at Columbia University while working as a research assistant at New York Medical College, Salomon began his medical education at BU in 1973. With his family funding his tuition and his own savings covering living expenses, he found himself in a better position than many, but national politics came into play again. During his four years at BU, Congress reduced—and then ended—subsidies for medical training and tuition quintupled.
Amidst ballooning costs and antiwar demonstrations, Salomon forged strong bonds with his medical school classmates. He fondly remembers joining a student action to resist the sudden end of pass/fail grading by taking exams anonymously and withholding the identity key from faculty.
During his first year, Salomon heard advice from Pediatrics Chair Joel Alpert that he kept in mind throughout his career. Alpert described how, in the first two years of school, medical students are subject to a lot of scientific education, often causing those seeking to become clinicians to consider the emphasis on science irrelevant—a tension that’s long existed in medical schools. “Not everything you’re going to learn is relevant. But, as first-year students, you’re not in a position yet to know what is relevant and what is not,” Alpert had said.
“I realized that Joel was correct about that,” Salomon reflects. “Lots of things that seem very esoteric for a first-year student actually come back to inform your thinking about patients later on.”
He also recalls formative memories of Dr. Eileen Ouellette. “She took a couple of evenings out of her personal life to shepherd us around the pediatric emergency department and talk to us about patients who were there, just to give us clinical exposure,” he says of his professor. “In the first months of our education, that was a wonderful gift.” His BU experiences led Salomon to his dual career path: pediatrics and emergency medicine.
My educational opportunities allowed me to have a meaningful career that provides a lot of social benefit. I feel that helping the medical school fund the education of other developing doctors is a meaningful gift.
Salomon became board certified in emergency medicine a few years after it became a specialty in 1979 and then spent almost 20 years in the Bronx, which culminated in an academic promotion to professor of clinical emergency medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was also appointed director of the emergency department at Montefiore Medical Center
and executive vice chairman of the newly formed academic department of emergency medicine. Another decade followed at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he served first as chairman of emergency medicine and then as hospital vice president.
Along the way, Salomon grew increasingly concerned by the rapid inflation of healthcare costs and wanted to help blunt the upward curve. As medical director of Cotiviti, a medical technology and data analytics company, he spent the last leg of his medical career focused on pricing accuracy in healthcare, finding it another concrete and rewarding way to help people. “My career in medicine has been extremely satisfying to me,” he says.
Salomon recently retired and moved with his wife Teri to western Massachusetts.
When looking back on his life in medicine and ahead to the plans for his estate, he thought of the educational institutions that gave him his start and decided to provide both for BU and for his undergraduate alma mater. “My educational opportunities allowed me to have a meaningful career that provides a lot of social benefit,” he says. “I feel that helping the medical school fund the education of other developing doctors is a meaningful gift.”