But my maternal great-grandfather was perhaps even more important to my psychic development as a physician. Though not a doctor, he was a scholar renowned for miles around the town of Stroznitz, in which he lived. (I don’t expect that anyone has heard of Stroznitz, though I recently ran into a young San Francisco physician who actually grew up there.) Stroznitz is not far from Chernovitz, a city that is sometimes described as "the Paris of Central Europe." The whole area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I, when it passed into the hands of Rumania, only to become part of the Ukraine after World War II.

I said that great-grandfather was a scholar. He was, in the sense that he studied widely, but entirely independently, attached to no specific professional group, whether lay or religious. In the years before World War I, study and scholarship were highly respected by the less educated. Respect sometimes approached adulation. My mother told stories of peasants who kissed the hem of great grandfather’s cloak. In time, his growing wisdom came to be recognized as a communal resource.

It seems great-grandfather served as what today might be called a mediator, arbitrator, or judge of a proprietary private court. It was a time during which the civil courts were costly and corrupt, and he provided an alternative. Legend has it that, without any enforcement powers at all, the moral force of his judgments was sufficient to dissuade anyone from ever contravening them. In time, he was trusted to do things as simple as counting the local farmers’ money after harvest and as sensitive as adjudicating partnership and marital disputes and even quarrels over property lines and the ownership of cattle.

But all through this, great-grandfather kept studying to be able to understand more. Sometime in his thirties, the relatives suggested he might consider marrying. He agreed that it was a good idea and the eligible maidens from the village were introduced to him. Family legend has it that he chose the one with the best teeth—in the manner in which one chooses the healthiest horse. I have no idea whether that apocryphal story was a joke or not, but great-grandmother did go on to bear nineteen children (of 20 pregnancies); she ran the farm and sold the produce in a store. She also ran and, of course, raised the children and tended to great-grandfather. Meanwhile, he studied. . . .

Great-grandfather was apparently much loved. Settling disputes and promoting a greater measure of happiness among the people in the community gave him immense satisfaction. It was a form of love that he showed his fellowman. It is said that his funeral procession was the longest ever seen in the village and that people came from all over the province to attend. It was also remarkable in that the mourners included even more Gentiles than great-grandfather’s Jewish co-religionists, at a time when the two communities did not intermingle that extensively.

Interestingly, great-grandfather was not a rabbi or a religious authority. Yet he must have believed deeply in the Jewish precept that good deeds serve as their own reward because they are pleasing in God’s eyes. Whether entirely true or part fable, now, a century later, great-grandfather’s life remains very real in my mind, even though I cannot recall either his name or that of my great-grandmother.

I have informally mediated a couple of disputes in the manner in which I imagine great-grandfather might have proceeded. One, years ago, involved two very able physicians who got into an argument over the functioning of a hospital special-care unit. The intensity of bad feeling alarmed me, and I experienced something of the pleasure that I imagine my great-grandfather must have felt when I succeeded in resolving the conflict with my own form of shuttle diplomacy. More recently, I did something similar in a painful divorce situation in which both parties were my friends.

But it is in the care of patients where my great-grandfather has served as my greatest inspiration. I see and feel a connection between what I do in my work and what he did in his that makes him feel close to me, though I never met him. I have no doubt that he fully valued the extraordinary wife he chose as the sustainer and facilitator of his efforts and who allowed him to achieve what he did while still living a full life.

I don’t want to imply that my maternal great-grandfather was perfect. But I find him an extraordinary ancestor whose legacy I am grateful to have received.