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www.donaldmiller.com |
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A
Brief Biography of Donald Miller I
was born in 1940 in Honolulu, Hawaii. My
father was a Navy surgeon, so we never lived in one place too long.
Like other Navy brats I attended a mixture of public schools, in Bethesda
(MD), Cleveland, Faison (NC), San Diego, Newport (RI), and once again in
Bethesda, where I graduated from high school in 1958. In
college, at Dartmouth, I majored in philosophy of religion, took classes in
music, and played the alto and baritone saxophone in a jazz quintet called The
Modern Men. Essaying the genre known
as hard bop, we played for parties at colleges in the region and at
two intercollegiate jazz festivals, at Notre Dame and In
1965, M.D. degree in hand, I went to New York for two surgical residencies.
The first one was in general surgery, at Roosevelt Hospital (1965-1970).
Each month a sheet was posted in the residents’ lounge at the hospital
where you could sign up as the house doctor for performances at Lincoln Center
two blocks away (and get two free tickets).
This enabled me, two or three times a week during the five years I was at
Roosevelt, to attend performances at the New York State Theater (New York City
Opera and Ballet), Avery Fisher Hall (New York Philharmonic), and sometimes,
when their in-house physician was not available, at the Metropolitan Opera.
I
next served two years active duty in the Navy in North Carolina (as a Lieutenant
Commander, USNR) doing surgery on marines and their families at the Naval
Hospital in Camp Lejeune (1970-1972). Then,
back in New York, I did a (2-year) residency in cardiothoracic surgery at
Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, which included a six-month rotation at
Harlem Hospital. While at Harlem I
wrote a paper on the 60 patients with gunshot and stab wounds of the heart I
treated during my short time there, which was published in The
New York State Journal of Medicine. I
started practice at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle in 1974 and a year later
joined the faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine, as an
Assistant Professor (1975-1978) and then Associate Professor and Chief of the
Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery (1978-1980). I then went back to
Swedish and practiced adult cardiac surgery from 1980 to 2002 and served as
Medical Director of the Swedish Heart Institute from 1994 to 1997.
Currently, once again on the faculty at the UW School of Medicine as a
Professor of Surgery, I run the cardiothoracic surgery program at the Seattle VA
Medical Center (2003 to present) and do some surgery, including heart
transplants, at the University Hospital when on-call there. Beginning
at an early age I succumbed to the gentle madness of loving books.
I have written three books, two on heart surgery, The
Practice of Coronary Bypass Surgery (1978) and Atlas of Cardiac Surgery (1983),
and one, Heart in Hand (1999), that
delves into music, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, religion, science, the
films of Woody Allen, and my life as a heart surgeon. I collect
modern (post-World War II) American fiction and poetry, focusing on writers of
the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac in particular.
I also collect books on such diverse subjects as the Civil War, great
conductors, mystery novels (by Ian Fleming, Ross Thomas, and Donna Leon, among
others), and nautical fiction (Patrick O’Brian); and I collect recordings (78
and 33 rpm) of the great conductors, most importantly Wilhelm Furtwängler.
In addition, I have a sizeable collection of (analogue) opera and jazz
recordings. Along
with these pursuits I like to hike in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State,
with my lovely wife, Linda, when I can corral her to come along with me and with
my four children when they were growing up. |