Bernard J. Sussman has had a long career as an accomplished neurosurgeon and research scientist before becoming a critic of medical practice. At the same time he was developing an analytical approach to what he deemed the quixotic nature of human behavior.
Now, at eighty-eight years of age, and not inclined to let up in spite of his having developed Parkinsonism, this self-described “avidly amorous” fellow has managed to retain this same bent of mind while carrying the scars of a life which began in a poor Jewish neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, where both Orthodox Jews and a rife gangster element with the likes of Abe Reles and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter lived tenaciously alongside one another in an area overlooked by the arrogant “Micks” of a towering local Catholic high school but all the same periodically invaded by the marauding bands of stone throwing Italians, the “Wops” from below Lefferts Avenue.
Later, surviving military service in the Army Air Corp, including parachuting away from a C46 plane crash, he went on to medical school, not by virtue of a near perfect scholastic record but because his uncle Joe played poker regularly with a university professor who happened to be the chief toxicologist for the city of New York, Doctor Alexander O. Gettler.
After completing his postgraduate training in both neurology and neurosurgery at leading universities in New York, he ultimately made highly-regarded research contributions for patients with stroke, herniated disc disease, and spinal injury for which he received several awards including the Honors Achievement Award of the Angiology Research Foundation for being the first to show that an enzyme could be used to remove blood clots from the arteries of the brain in patients with stroke.
During these years in the course of giving medical legal testimony he began to appreciate the fact that although doctors had certain guidelines for their conduct they were not being held to any actual treatment standards. This lead to lectures regarding that unfortunate fact before medical societies and in peer reviewed medical journals. He subsequently brought this matter to the public in a book entitled Pupils: An Eye-Opening Account of Medical Practice Without Standards.
Following this he started to write about the behavioral underpinnings which were part and parcel of both societal and professional shortcomings. These provided his rationale for the “The Adam Quatrology” a breathtaking literary accomplishment involving four novels, each featuring a different character, unique aside from their shared first name.
Bernard Sussman is a gifted and persistent photographer and has exhibited at the Mercury Gallery in Boston. Examples of his work appear on this website including a photograph of a baby girl that was taken when he was only fifteen and which won him a popular photography award as well as an early one of his kid cousin Sherwin Gardner, destined to become a commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
all images copyright Bernard Sussman 2014