Interview with Stanley Cortell, MD by Norma M.T. Braun, MD

Dr. Stanley Cortell came to the St. Luke’s Hospital Center as the Division of Nephrology Chief in 1975. Between 1979 and 1983 he also served as the Director of the Medical Service there. He stayed at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center through its merger with Mount Sinai Medical Center, retiring in 2014. He was born in Boston, MA, attended public schools and then studied metallurgy at MIT with the intent to follow his father into the jewelry business. His professional goals changed to medicine when he spent a summer working as an orderly at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He changed his major to Quantitative Biology to prepare for medical school, attended Tuffs Medical School. He dabbled in several specialties before settling in nephrology, and practiced in the New England Medical Center Hospitals before relocating to New York.

Dr. Norma Braun (neé Wang Mai Tsen) was born in Shanghai, China during the third Japanese invasion, before the World War II. Prior to the war her family was well off and very well educated. Both her grandfather and father spent time in American universities. Norma, however did not attend school until age 10, because of the war. In 1949, she, her mother and siblings relocated to Philadelphia. Norma, who desired to be a doctor from a young age, started medical school at Temple University but transferred to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (Class of 1963) after being offered a scholarship. She completed her internship and residency at Bellevue Hospital and began working at St. Luke’s Hospital in 1982, as a cardio-pulmonary fellow under A. Loomis Bell, MD, who ran the cardiopulmonary laboratory. Eventually she narrowed her specialty to pulmonary medicine, and continues to work in that area at St. Luke’s, now Mount Sinai Morningside.