Interview with Linda Lewis, MD and remembering Gary Gambuti by Norma M.T. Braun, MD

Dr. Linda Lewis, a neurologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center Dr. Lewis trained at St. Luke's Hospital Center where she was first female president of the house staff and where she met and later married the late Mr. Gary Gambuti, who was in leadership roles at Roosevelt Hospital from the 1960s, serving as President of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center between 1979 and 1996 when he retired.

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.