Letters
"Now that the joke has been had..."

Meyer's impact
I was thankful for Leon Botstein's "Meyer Remembered" ("Letters," October/02). I was transported back to my Humanities I class with Professor Gerhard Meyer in 1961. I remember this compact, kindly man with a shock of white hair, thick German accent compounded by a stutter, fingers and dark-blue suit smudged with chalk. He taught me a lesson about cross-cultural prejudice and perception that guides my thinking and actions today as a medical- school professor. Using the blackboard (we didn't have whiteboards back then) in that gothic Cobb Hall classroom, he explained the difference between formal freedoms (the right to vote, assemble, express ideas) and effective freedoms (the right to jobs, housing, health care), which find different emphases in capitalist versus socialist societies.

On a daily basis, my fellow faculty, residents, and students in family medicine struggle to create access to basic health services for impoverished, ethnic-minority patients who present at our hospital and clinic doors, their condition often worsened by inadequate access to jobs and shelter. It is shameful that while our nation boasts the most sophisticated scientific medical system in the world, our population's health statistics rank near the bottom of industrialized countries. Professor Meyer's "freedoms" speak volumes as to the cause.

Arthur Kaufman, AB'65
Albuquerque

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