Raphael Kenneth Goldsmith

 

Died October 27, 1971

College: Jonathan Edwards

I knew Ray at Harvard Medical School, where we were both members of the class of ’65, not during our time at Yale. Ray roomed down the hall from me in Vanderbilt Hall at HMS. We enjoyed playing the guitar together and became good friends.

Ray had congenital heart disease, and was operated on at the Children’s Hospital in Boston around his second or third year in medical school. Unfortunately his defects could not be surgically corrected, and therefore no palliation of his condition was achieved. To compound the misery, he developed hepatitis from one of his blood transfusions. This left Ray unable to complete medical school, and he left Harvard, and I lost contact with him to a large degree. Ray studied psychology after leaving medical school, but I don’t know if he got a degree or not.

He visited me once when I was living near Bethesda MD and working at the NIH in 1968, and that was the last time I saw him. He died not long afterwards. Ray was a very warm hearted and talented man, who had more than his share of bad luck.

— By Bill Barry