Kassirer

I first read New England Journal of Medicine in 1990 when I was a final year medical student. At that moment Jerome Kassirer was the editor-in-chief.

That was a time when all Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital were diagnostic problems, and almost all presentations ended with the mysterious sentence: a diagnostic procedure was performed. I was soon attracted by this weekly intellectual exercise - and to internal medicine.

Some years later I entered the field of renal medicine, and Kidney International became the regular reading. There was a (now obsolete) section called Nephrology Forum, in which experts were invited to discuss special cases and topics. The coordinators of this project, as stated on the journal, were Cohen, Harrington, and Madias. It took me some years to find out that Kassirer was a nephrologist by profession and indeed one of the founder of this Forum.

To me, the most glaring contribution of Kassirer was, however, not to nephrology or his editorship of the New England Journal, but the editorials that he actually wrote. In an era of being "neutral", Kassirer was never shy of giving his point of view - on important issues related to public and health care in general. Yes, as the in-charge of a leading medical journal, silence on important issue does not mean neutral - it is negligence. In a world flooded with information, we need someone to show us the way to the shore.