#eps-11: Samuel William (Shimon Zev/Velvel) Epstein was born in Grodno Gubernia (Poland-Belarus), approximately 1893, the son of Morris (Zalman Mashe) Epstein, who had emigrated to London, England, when Sam was a boy.
http://fill4man.tripod.com/epstein
Morris's father was Avraham Eliezer,  the son of Zev (Wolf)  Epstein - a LEVITE (from a Rabbinic Family) from ZHETL (Dyatlovo) in Belarus// ... Paul Epstein was brought up in a Jewish family in Frankfurt where his father was a professor at the Philanthropin Academy. After submitting a thesis on abelian
functions, he received his doctorate in 1895 from the University of Strasbourg. The city was German at this time (and called Strassburg) and it had been since it was annexed by Germany during the Franco-German War of 1870-71. From 1895 to 1918 he remained in Strasbourg, teaching at the Technical School and also at the University where he had been appointed a Privatdozent. During World War I he did military service. At the end of the war in 1918, however, the city of Strasbourg reverted to France, and Epstein, being German, was forced to leave Alsace. He returned to his native city of Frankfurt. Epstein was appointed to a non-tenured post at the university and he lectured in Frankfurt from 1919. Later he was appointed professor at Frankfurt. On 30 January 1933, however, Hitler came to power and on 7 April 1933 the Civil Service Law provided the means of removing Jewish teachers from the universities, and of
course also to remove those of Jewish descent from other roles. All civil servants who were not of Aryan descent (having one grandparent of the Jewish religion made someone non-Aryan) were to be retired. However, there was an exemption clause which exempted non-Aryans who had fought for Germany in World War I.
Epstein certainly qualified under this clause and this allowed him to keep his lecturing post in Frankfurt in 1933.
Decisions at the Nuremberg party congress in the autumn of 1935 made it clear that non-Aryans would no longer be able to keep their posts even if they had
served in World War I. Siegel writes in [2]:-

Epstein voluntarily relinquished his teaching position before the Nuremberg laws went into effect. As he explained to me, he had wanted to save the German authorities the trouble of doing to him what the French had done back in 1918. Epstein did not attempt to emigrate. He was 64 years old and had he emigrated he would have lost all his money except 10 Marks. There was no prospect of a 64 year old obtaining a post. On the Kristallnacht (so called because of the broken glass in the streets on the following morning), the 9-10 November 1938, 91 Jews were murdered, hundreds were seriously injured, and thousands were subjected to horrifying experiences. Thousands of Jewish businesses were burnt down together with over 150 synagogues. The Gestapo arrested 30,000 well-off Jews and a condition of their release was that they emigrate. The Gestapo broke into Epstein's house but found that he was seriously ill and could not be moved. At this point Epstein must have known that his only chance was to leave Germany. It would have been posssible for [2]:-
... one of his sisters had emigrated earlier and could have supported him. But despite the possibility of escape, he hesitated leaving his books and his native
city. He moved to Dornbusch and was visited there by Siegel [2]:-
... we sat in the sunny garden of the house he was living in then. ... he pointed to the trees and flowers in the garden and said "Isn't it lovely here". About a week after Siegel's visit, Epstein received a summons from the Gestapo. He knew what had happened to others who had received such a summons, many had been tortured and killed. He wanted to avoid the suffering so he took a lethal dose of Veronal. The Gestapo later claimed that they had only summoned him to get him to sign a document to fix a date on which he would emigrate. His work was in number theory, in particular the zeta function. He also worked on the history of mathematics. Perhaps we should mention one other of Epstein's talents which was music, and he took part energetically in the cultural life of Frankfurt.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson Joseph Epstein was born and educated in Chicago, where, since 1974, he has been a lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern University. From 1975 to 1997 he was the editor of The American Scholar. Three of the essays in this volume were chosen for The Anchor Essay Annual and The Best American Essays, where his work has frequently appeared. "The modern essay," as Karl Shapiro has written, "has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein Connecting With Patients A Q&A with Dr. Fred Epstein Every medical school which Fred Epstein applied to rejected him. He was extremely intelligent, but his academic performance had been sabotaged by learning disabilities that were undiagnosed in 1950s.

     Despite being written off as lazy and dumb, Epstein was determined to become a doctor. A friend of the family helped him get into medical school, and he
graduated from New York Medical College in 1963. He decided to become a neurosurgeon and helped create the field of pediatric neurosurgery.
     His pioneering work in figuring out how to operate on tumors in the brain stem and spinal cord — surgery previously considered too dangerous to
perform — helped Epstein become world famous in the medical profession.
     But his success today is twofold. His skills as a neurosurgeon are legendary and have been for nearly four decades. Now he’s focusing on creating
what he calls “a healing environmentâ€* not only for patients but for their families and the doctors and staff who treat them.
His dream has been realized at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center North, where Epstein is the director of the Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
     Epstein has helped create a treatment center where trauma to young patients is minimized with the help of regular visits from Adam the Clown and
“therapyâ€* dogs. The playroom is open all day and there is a rooftop playground for youngsters.
     Parents can accompany their children into the operating room and stay until they are asleep. There is no recovery room. Children wake up with their
parents by their bedsides. If children need to stay in the intensive care unit, their parents can spend the night with them.
     Doctors are encouraged to channel competitiveness into productive learning environments with fellow physicians and nurses. The goal is to create
treatment teams, instead of the rigid hierarchy that exists in many other hospitals.
     Esptein’s vision was to create a facility at Beth Israel North where state-of-the-art technology could exist within an environment of compassion and
humanity.
     ABCNEWS’ Nightline profiles Epstein’s work in “The Messengerâ€* broadcast
Q&A with Dr. Epstein
My sister died in 1970 at the age of 10 from a tumor of her brain stem. No one would attempt the surgery at that time. What prompted you to step in and begin doing this type of surgery? — Mary Anna Wolf of Allen Park, Mich.
Dr. Fred Epstein: First of all let me be very clear that the great majority of brain stem tumors are not operable. Unfortunately with these tumors, the outlook is the same today as it was 25 years ago. The only treatment is radiation therapy, sometime supplemented with chemotherapy, and most of the children pass away within 18 months of diagnosis. What I discovered some years ago that while the majority of brain tumors could not be treated with surgery about 25 percent of them were in fact noncancerous and operable. These tumors may be identified by their location in the brain stem, and their appearance on the MRI scan. They occur in two areas of the brain stem, the medulla (which is the lowest part of the brain stem) and the midbrain (which is the highest part of the brainstem). Tumors in these regions may often be largely removed with surgery and treated only in that way. In other circumstances the surgery may be supplemented with chemotherapy or radiation therapy. My experience has been that 80 or 90 percent of these patients survive indefinitely after this treatment.Hopefully in the coming years we will develop effective treatments for the brain stem tumors that occur in the pons, which is the most common location of brain stem tumors, and at the present time the most difficult to treat.In the broadcast, you mentioned that the Dalai Lama had asked you to scientifically evaluate whether Eastern medicine works. I’m wondering if you’ve begun that project yet and what the conclusions are. I hope that the results of any such study would be published widely.
— Ellen Seger of Mesa, Ariz.
Dr. Epstein: There is no question in my mind that mind that many of the meditation techniques utilized in the Tibetan culture have important applicability to stress reduction programs in our facility. It is extraordinarily difficult to evaluate this “scientifically,â€* while we endeavor to do that in the future we are still developing different facets of the program in a clinical setting. In other words, during our first phase the techniques were utilized for stress reduction amongst our nursing staff who were becoming emotionally drained as a result of the clinically complex problems that we deal with and they were faced with. In the next phase we intend to make this program available to both parents and children in an effort to reduce the terror associated with surgery, blood tests, etc. I am hoping that ultimately we will develop a scientifically accepted method of assessing the results. Perhaps we will discover that utilizing these techniques reduces the time of hospital stay, perhaps it will become obvious in other ways. The most important aspect of this program in the overall sense is that we recognize that we must not think so much as health providers but healing ones.What causes a 12-year-old child to develop a nonmalignant brain tumor? What are the chances that the same child will develop another tumor that will or won’t be malignant? — Stephanie Boeke of Austin, Texas
Dr. Epstein: We do not know the cause of brain tumors. There is very exciting research that is being directed toward understanding this and hopefully within the next few years it will come to fruition. It is very unlikely that child with a benign brain tumor will develop a second tumor within the brain or body. Please describe your public school experience. When did things get difficult due to the undiagnosed learning disability? Were there any strategies that you developed to compensate for your disabilities?
— Daphne Pereles of Littleton, Colo.
Dr. Epstein: When I was in my early years (first through fifth grade) learning disabilities were an unknown entity. Those of us that had these problems were simply viewed as unintelligent, and from my perspective the greatest sadness was that we viewed ourselves the same way. Retrospectively I recognize that I had difficulties from the first grade on. I still remember in the third grade standing at the blackboard and being used as an example of how not to write. I will never forget the humiliation and subsequent depression that was associated with this. I remember in the second grade the class was expected to perform addition or work with relatively complex numbers. This was an impossibility for me and I was viewed as a student with a very questionable future. Later on in school it was recognized that I had impaired skills in reading, this made it very difficult for me to keep up with my classmates even in the most basic subjects, such as history and English. Teacher comments on my report cards were always the same, I should work harder, and my problem was laziness. Over the years I adjusted to my problems by developing a work ethic that was a very simple one: I would put in many more hours studying than my friends would to accomplish the same end. I will never forget how my friends were all very surprised that anyone could work as hard as I did for such mediocre results.The end result of this, however, was that I was always willing to work hard, and to pursue my ideas irrespective of how impossible it may have seemed at the time to fulfill my ambitions. I only recognized that I had a learning disability when my 12-year-old daughter was having difficulties in school and underwent detailed testing. I will always remember our meeting with the psychologist that carried out the tests and how she described Ilana’s problems. She explained to both my wife and I that she was an extremely intelligent girl, but she had very specific problems in well-defined areas which were considered to be “learning disabilities.â€* It was only when she described these problems in detail that I first recognized that this is what I had as a young child. What is so interesting to me know is that I experienced something quite similar to something that other children have described when being informed of their learning disability. That was a sense of relief until I recognized that this was the basis of my old problem I must always have felt somewhere inside of my soul, that I was not as smart as my colleagues. All of a sudden I not only understood what was going to help my daughter, but also, that it had helped me.I turned on Nightline a little late and found you talking about a patient who had touched your life. You asked the question, “Who holds the patient’s hand?â€* Nurses hold the patient’s hand. This is how we connect with our patients.
We also comfort the grieving family. Please hold a hand if a patient looks you in the eye and asks for support, but know that the nurse is there for the patient also. — Marian Soat, RN, BSN, CCRN of Cleveland, Ohio
Dr. Epstein: There is no question that nurses bear an enormous burden in caring for patients with complex and life threatening problems. I am convinced that the empathy that is communicated between nurse to patient is one of the essential ingredients to the healing process. I also believe that nurses have been much more sensitive than physicians in understanding the health system and a healing environment. Your story and commitment to life moved me deeply and really I have only one question: How can I help? Do you need volunteers? — Petra Dorfsman of Yorktown Heights, N.Y.Dr. Epstein: I greatly appreciate the fact that many have offered to volunteer after viewing the Nightline program.
However, we are currently fully staffed with volunteers for both our pediatric in-house playroom and out-patient chemotherapy playroom. Many hospitals have pediatric programs in desperate need of volunteers. I would be deeply honored if you on the basis of having watched the Nightline program find a new and fulfilling direction in your own life that may translated into helping children who are ill from whatever cause.Following “The Messengerâ€* broadcast, Dr.Epstein received more than 1,000 e-mails via ABCNEWS.com and the Beth Israel Medical Center Web site. Dr. Epstein can be contacted via e-mail at doctore@bethisraelny.org.

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Richard Epstein received a B.A. in philosophy summa cum laude from Columbia in 1964. He received a B.A. in law with first class honors from Oxford University in 1966, and an LL.B., cum laude, from the Yale Law School in 1968. Upon his graduation he joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, where he taught until 1972. In 1972, he visited the University of Chicago, and became a regular member of the faculty the next year. He was named James Parker Hall Professor in 1982 and Distinguished Service Professor in 1988.Mr. Epstein has written extensively in many legal areas. His books include: Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998); Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? (1997), Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), Bargaining with the State (1993), Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992), and Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (1985). Mr. Epstein is also the editor of Cases and Materials in the Law of Torts (7th ed.) and has written a one-volume treatise, Torts (1999). He has also written many scholarly articles on a broad range of common law, constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects.
Among the subjects that he has taught are contracts, property, torts, and criminal law in the first year curriculum, and conflicts of law, health law, workers' compensation, real estate development and finance, and political theory in the upper years. He spent the 1977-78 year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. From 1981 to 1991 he was editor of the Journal of Legal Studies. Since 1991, he has been an editor of the Journal of Law & Economics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. He served as Interim Dean of the Law School from February to June of 2001. Born: 1943.
Education: A.B., 1964, Columbia College; B.A., 1966, Oxford University; LL.B., 1968, Yale University.
Brian Epstein is the man who discovered the Beatles, and guided them to mega-stardom, making them the most successful musical artists of all time. Without Brian, the Beatles as we came to know them, simply wouldn't have existed. But, regrettably, the man who did so much for the Beatles - and who died tragically in 1967 - has become a comparatively forgotten man since his death. Almost a Nowhere Man.