By All Means, Resuscitate

About the Book

So many times have I worked on a dying patient frantically trying to breathe life into a lifeless body. And many times have I questioned myself, “Why don’t you give up?” The title of my memoir, “By All Means, Resuscitate,” says, “no matter the consequences or the effort required, keep my life going with the caveat: that my intellectual capacity not be impaired.” Though my life has not always been happy, it has been fascinating. Some of the high points of my story are: the closing of a circle beginning with the journey of my grandfather from Europe and my parents to the U.S. and my eventual "aliyah" to Israel. my Harvard Medical School education -- as the fourth brother in the family to be an M.D. my evolution from a ´double-talking physician hiding fatal cancer diagnoses from patients to a proponent of assisted suicide to the terminally ill (with a deep bow of humility to the occasional terminal prognosis that mysteriously reverses itself.) my courtship of my wife by playing duets, she on the violin, I, on the cello. my delight in my family -- two daughters (one now an M.D.) and a son (now a micro-biologist) and my anguish in not being able to save my other beautiful daughter, a manic-depressive, from suicide. my encouragement of -- and fear about -- my wife´s decision to heal her niece by donating a kidney to her. my fights against anti-Semitism and segregation in my small Pennsylvania town. the efforts of my wife and myself to save Russian Jews. our adaptation to life in Israel, including my often frustrating, sometimes comic, struggles to learn Hebrew, and our lives, and those of our children and grandchildren during the Gulf War -- and beyond ...

About the Author

David Chamovitz graduated from Harvard Medical School, the fourth brother to be a physician. He specialized in Cardiology and Nuclear Medicine, practicing in Aliquippa, PA. for twenty-eight years. Overcoming Medical Staff resistance, he opened one of the first cardiac care units and departments of nuclear medicine in Western PA. David moved to Israel at the peak of his medical career. He developed the Department of Nuclear Medicine at a 600-bed hospital near Tel Aviv. “Hebrew was too difficult for me to care for cardiac patients.” “The transition from the USA to Israel continues to provide great adventures.”