Escaping WWII, going to Harvard, and other stories from a former doctor
Albert: I’m now 90. Never thought I would get to be this old. I was born in Turin, Italy. I lived there for the first few years of my life until World War II exploded, and my father, who was a little bit in politics, had to leave. We managed to get the last Italian ship out of Gibraltar and were torpedoed once by the French, but they fixed the ship and let us go. So that was one big experience I had when I was little. We ended up going to Ecuador. Wonderful place, we lived there for 15 years until I came up here to go to college.
Interviewer: What college did you go to?
Albert: Harvard. The only school I’d ever heard of, so that’s where I wanted to go! And when you apply to it from so far away, it’s easier to get in. So I went to Harvard. Four years of medical school, and four years of post-graduate training. Then, I started a medical practice in Winchester, where I practiced for about 50 years until I retired.
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I went into internal medicine, gastroenterology. At the time that I was coming along, endoscopy was becoming common. I was one of the first ones to learn how to do endoscopy, which is looking down into your stomach and looking up through the rectum at the whole colon. In those days, I was the only one doing it for a while. So it was quite an experience.
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I think I've led a pretty full life. I was always doing something, going places, and enjoying life. When I was young, I spent a lot of time in the horse barn, rode horses, and played polo. I played polo for Harvard, and I played polo for Yale. It was a big sport. But once my kids started going to college, I couldn't afford horses. They cost a lot of money, unfortunately.
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Interviewer: Did you do your graduate school at Yale?
Albert: Yes, Harvard College and Yale Medical School. I was planning to go to Harvard Medical School, but when I went to Yale for an interview they said "if you tell us now you're coming, you're in. "So I gave up my other applications.
When I was in college, there were no women in the college. There were no Black people in the college. There were no Chinese in the college. When I went to medical school, there were no Ecuadorians either.
In medical school, the same thing: no women. We had four women in medical school. In a class of 100. All white people. The way the world has changed since then is amazing.
