This is the short memorial I presented to the Board of Physicians for a National Health Program:
What can one say about Sid? He was a natural and social scientist, an analyst, and an activist in so many fields, over so many years, that many of us knew him well in only a single sphere of his well-nigh universal activities. Yet he managed to connect all of his interests and his friends and fellow activists into an amazing, coherent whole.
He began in the hard sciences and spent his working years as a physicist, a biochemist, a physiologist, a philosopher of science, and more. In those years he was always an activist as well, working with many groups for peace, for disarmament, and against the spread of nuclear technology. He was always, as in later years, a good comrade and a hard worker for common interests and, indeed, for the wider public good.
After he retired from his academic science career, he began to focus on health and public health in a major way, using his deep-rooted knowledge of proper scientific methodology to become an expert in many aspects of those fields, becoming as knowledgeable in his chosen areas as many others who had advanced degrees and decades of experience in them.
Sid grew up in a lower middle class, mainly Jewish, world in Baltimore. Judging by so many others who came out of that world and that city, including our own Len Rodberg and David Kotelchuck, who also made aspects of health and public health their chosen fields of interest, Baltimore must have been a special place indeed (even if we provincial New York Jews had no idea of it), and his secular Jewish background surely helped point him to community service and love of truth, rationality, and desire to improve the world as he found it.
In the world of public health, I can only speak of my own experiences with Sid, although I know that many others have analogous stories in their own dealings with him. We worked together on many projects, analyses, and political activities. He was always in the lead and was a source of inspiration to me and others; he was, to be sure, my mentor in many of these activities. My own turn toward public health from health finance and economics was certainly guided by Sid, and I relied immensely on his knowledge, his common sense, and his ability to make connections among subjects that I might otherwise have missed or ignored. I owe my understanding of such varied things as the precautionary principle and health impact assessment, among many others (such as the nature of a scientific “theory”), to him.
In the Public Health Association of New York (PHANYC) he played a leading role in important projects, almost single-handedly creating and helping to lead major projects to analyze and understand the public health systems of the New York region; working to connect the disparate organizations, commissions, public authorities, and academic institutions that form its substance; and attempting to make them work together more collaboratively. He believed strongly in public and community planning at a time when that was sadly out of favor. At the same time, he played major roles in the American Public Health Association, serving with distinction in its Medical Care Section and in other important positions.
With others, some of them in this room, he founded Rekindling Reform, an organization dedicated to educating advocates, academics and the public regarding health reform issues and which, in later years, turned to advocating for and defending the wider sphere of social insurance, especially Medicare and Social Security. He was the heart and soul of this organization and we certainly could not have done our work without his tireless and invaluable oral and written input.
In all those years he was a committed friend to the single-payer movement and spent many hours at PNHP’s forums and other activities.
Finally, to me he was a good friend on those many occasions when I needed one, and I could always rely on his advice and thoughts in both good and bad times.
There is much more to be said about Sid, but not enough time to say it. I can summarize it all, and, to me, this is the highest accolade I can give him: he was a mensch.