IN MEMORIAM

LYNN PAYER

Lynn Payer

Lynn Payer, a medical journalist who spent much of her life documenting cultural differences in medicine, died of breast cancer in New York in September, at age 56. Lynn was an NASW member since 1975.

Although she was modest and reserved about her achievements, she was a memorable, influential writer whose thoughtful prose reached a wide audience. Her internationally praised book Medicine and Culture, published in 1988, revealed striking cultural differences in whether something was considered a disease, if it was treated at all, and how. Examining medicine in France, the United Kingdom, Germany (then West Germany), and the United States, Medicine and Culture built on years of reporting in the United States for Medical Tribune and writing about medicine for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Lynn wrote the book with such a sense of discovery and wit that it led to speaking engagements around the world and set the stage for Lynn to launch her own newsletter, Medicine and Culture Update.

The book Medicine and Culture is a beautifully written compendium of fascinating national differences in medical practice. For example, it shows that although Americans practice the most aggressive medicine, American medical practice yields no better mortality or quality-of-life advantage over tamer medical practice styles in other countries. "We may laugh at the Germans, who treat cancer with mistletoe extracts without much proof that patients live any longer, but then, neither do our breast cancer patients treated with high-dose chemotherapy with stem cell rescue," Lynn wrote in the Fall 2000 issue of Medical Encounter, a newsletter of the American Academy of Physician and Patient, which she edited.

A champion of data-driven medicine, Lynn was emphatic that her role as a reporter was to simply report and not to tell readers what to do. Aware that cultural values shaped medicine, she disliked much medical reporting for a pedantic, black-and-white slant. Besides writing hundreds of news stories and features, Lynn wrote How to Avoid a Hysterectomy (1987) and Disease Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers are Making You Feel Sick (1992). "Disease Mongering was also a very important book because it highlighted and predicted some of the excesses of industrialized medicine," said David Henry, M.D., professor of public health sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

In every part of her life, Lynn made things happen when they might not have otherwise. Born and raised in Kansas, and a graduate of the University of Kansas, Lynn remained close with Kansas family and friends. For many years, she held a party for Kansans in New York around Kansas Day. Lynn helped keep her Columbia Journalism Class of '69 together, helping plan regular reunions and aiding classmates needing help. She helped mobilize support for classmate Michele Montas when Michele's husband was assassinated in Haiti. Both Michele and her husband managed a radio station in Haiti. With Lynn's help, Michele was able to keep the radio station on the air. Lynn also taught journalism at NYU, Columbia, and Indiana University. Faculty and students remember Lynn for her provocative classes, her mentoring, and earnest interest in their careers.

Lynn loved and cooked great food. She could hunt down fabulous restaurants in out-of-the-way places. Her favorite lifelong passions included nature study, mushrooming, and geology.

(Contributed by Laura Newman)

RICHARD (DIC) SIGERSON

Richard (Dic) Sigerson (circa 1954)

Richard L. (Dic) Sigerson, a member of NASW since 1952, died on June 12 of complications associated with amyloidosis. He was 84.

Sigerson's career in science journalism began in the late 1930s with the wire services and New York newspapers, including the maverick PM. The explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry and science communications after World War II led him into public relations. He founded Medical & Pharmaceutical Information Bureau and built it into a worldwide network.

In the late 1950s, he sold MPIB and teamed up with former FDR aide Benjamin Cohen to produce the Latin American Economic Report, which chronicled the growth of the pharmaceutical industry in Mexico and Central America. The Report ceased in 196l, but by then, Sigerson's new firm had branched out.

Over the succeeding decade, Sigerson's group developed a cluster of provocative biomedical publications--Hospital Focus, Geriatric Focus, Issues in Medical Practice, Excerpts in Clinical Biochemistry, and BioLog. The Sigerson team also managed public relations for the New York Academy of Sciences, established and ran a press room for the Academy's conferences, and created the original version of The Sciences.

Several vanguard publications followed. Their primary objective was to widen the intellectual horizons of learned professionals. Science Fortnightly (later Dateline in Science) was a tabloid for physicians that reported news in the sciences except clinical medicine.

Another publication became the firm's flagship publication and its corporate name. Medical Opinion & Review was a monthly magazine of facts, interpretation, and entertainment features. Its core subject was science and public policy. MO&R's contributors and readers included influential figures in academia, government, and industry, as well as medicine.

Sigerson retired in the 1970s but he continued his involvement in the science- and public-policy sector. He was also an accomplished sculptor and painter, and a highly informed art historian. These activities, plus an enthusiastic sally into computer painting, occupied him until his death.

Dic Sigerson called himself "just another Okie." He was born in Wanette, Okla., and grew up in dust-bowl hardship. He worked as a field hand, as records-keeper at a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp, and as a stevedore on the docks in California harbors. His formal education suffered in the desperate need to scrape together a living.

But Dic didn't fit standard molds. He had a restless and voracious intellect; he taught himself and became a skilled artisan and a successful entrepreneur.

Sigerson's mature work in science writing was driven by a vision that broad learning about discovery and invention and the crafting of practical ethics to manage human ingenuity were intertwined and compatible. In his view, industry shared with other leadership groups the responsibility to build "a well-informed policy" on the biospheric plane, competent stewards of the earthly environment. He believed that the whole of this was the true substrate of science communications.

(Source: Don deKoven)

MICHAEL UNGER

Michael Unger, 63, a reporter whose career at New York's Newsday spanned more than three decades and who detailed his own heart attack and subsequent open-heart surgery in a 1979 series that combined personal and hard-nosed journalism, died July 16 of an apparent heart attack in Newsday 's Melville, N.Y., newsroom.

Unger, an NASW member since 1986, was a board member of the New York chapter of SWINY.

A reporter for more than 40 years, first at the Newark Evening News and at Newsday beginning in 1967, Unger early on specialized in planning and transportation reporting but was eventually drawn to science writing, which was a lifelong passion. Over the years he developed a reputation for his intensity and thoroughness in reporting complex stories.

In February 1979, en route to an interview, Unger felt symptoms of a heart attack and drove himself to the hospital. His personal ordeal became the subject of a detailed series filled with candor, such as his description of being prepared for open-heart surgery: "I was so scared I said the Sh'ma, the Jewish prayer one says in case one is about to cash in his chips. I said it three times in case I should die to the strains of Beethoven in a Catholic hospital."

In a follow-up story two years later, he was optimistic about his chances of continuing to live a long and productive life. "There is only so much the doctors and surgeons can do . . . I had to take charge of my own body, my own healing, my own recovery."

For the past decade Unger had been covering biotechnology, having also written extensively about medical technology as a business and science writer. In recent years he worked on stories that focused on work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as well as the development of a biotechnology incubator site at the State University of New York's Farmingdale campus.
(Source: Newsday)

THEORDORE R. VAN DELLEN

NASW has learned of the death of Theordore R. Van Dellen, M.D. of St. Petersburg, Fla. He had been a member since 1957.

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