Conversations with Giants in Medicine - Dr. Eugene Braunwald

In a new video installment of Conversations with Giants in Medicine, interviewer Ushma Neil with the Journal of Clinical Investigation speaks with Dr. Eugene Braunwald from Harvard Medical School about his life and career. Dr. Braunwald, who has often been called the "Father of Modern Cardiology," spent an "idylic childhood" in Austria until the arrival of the Nazis and the outbreak of World War II forced his family to flee first to London, and then to America with "only the shirts on their backs." Despite this experience, he notes that he doesn't consider himself to be a child of the Holocaust. "I came close to a cliff," he says. "But never went over the cliff."

In New York, Dr. Braunwald attended Brooklyn Tech, where he initially leaned towards engineering but at the last minute decided to pursue medicine. He explains the shift:

"I think there was a push and a pull. I think the push was that there were a lot of courses in shop, and drafting which I was not really very good at. I did well in mathematics and physics but not in the manual courses which of course weren't really necessary for engineering but that's the way the school was designed. So I became uncomfortable about that. And then I thought that [engineering] was quite impersonal. And so those are the two things that [drove me to medicine]."

"But when I went to medical school," he continues, "I had an early interest in cardiology because cardiologists were either electricians or plumbers - either electrical engineers or mechanical engineers. So cardiology is the closest thing in medicine to engineering."

Dr. Braunwald goes on to discuss how he came to land as the Chairman of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.