Fame and Death
After three years in the military, Ransohoff completed his residency at Montefiore Hospital. He went on to teach at Columbia University and practice surgery at the New York Neurologic Institute at Presbyterian Hospital. In 1962, Ransohoff was invited to become chairman of the New York University School of Medicine, a prestigious position he held for over thirty years. While in this capacity, he was famed for hosting a weekly spinal and neurosurgical gathering for doctors of the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to come and seek his advice on challenging cases. Ransohoff was part of the team at George Washington University Hospital that successfully operated on White House Press Secretary James Brady after the Secretary was shot in the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt. During his chairmanship at NYU, he was also known as an early and strong advocate of wider stem cell treatments.
In 1992, Dr. Ransohoff left New York University Hospital for Tampa, Florida, at the behest of the James A. Haley VA Hospital, which wanted to reform its neurosurgical department. Professionally he greatly improved the neurosurgical and spinal centers at the VA Hospital and Tampa General Hospital, and significantly added to the brain cancer research programs at Moffitt Cancer Center. In terms of his personal life, however, Dr. Ransohoff endured a spate of unwelcome publicity in 1999 after a 27-year-old lingerie model, Laura Holt, was sentenced to a year in jail for grand theft. She told police the doctor had given her more than $100,000 over time after her friends threatened to expose their affair.
Dr. Ransohoff died at his home on the morning of January 3, 2001 of natural causes.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Ransohoff
Famous quotes containing the words fame and, fame and/or death:
“Stupid misery of fame and money. Always we were safe from it, mistaking our obscurity for a curse when it was a treasure. Free to make what we liked, to be ourselves, even do nothing at all. No one watching. We could be real.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
For now he lives in fame though not in life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)