The American and international orthopaedic communities have lost a friend,
a teacher, and an editor. Jonathan Cohen, who was well known in the world of
orthopaedics, died on November 13, 2003, at Deer Isle, Maine, after a short
illness. He was a resident of the coastal community of Spruce Head, where he
had recently retired after a distinguished medical career in Boston,
Massachusetts. He was particularly respected in American academic medicine for
his long service as a teacher and researcher. He was well known
internationally for his fifty years of work as a member of the editorial staff
of The Journal of Bone and Joint
Surgery.
Jonathan Cohen's long life gave us a connection to the past and proved to
be a living history of the Twentieth Century. Jonathan's father was born and
raised in a village on the Sea of Galilee. At fifteen years of age, in the
1890s, Jonathan's father left home to avoid conscription into the Turkish
Army, which at that time controlled the Ottoman Empire. Jonathan's grandfather
was a prominent rabbi in the community and hence was given advance notice of
the Turkish Army's arrival. The family provided what means they could and sent
their teenage son walking across what we now know as the state of Israel to
the Mediterranean Sea. Jonathan's father arrived in New York City after a
journey of more than two years at about the turn of the last century. Jonathan
Cohen was born in New York City in 1915. He attended public schools and
graduated from New York University in 1933. At that time a quota existed for
Jewish students who were seeking medical degrees in the schools of New York
City. However, the Jesuit priests accepted Jonathan into St. Louis University
School of Medicine, where he was awarded his medical degree in 1938. He then
served three years of graduate training in St. Louis and Montreal before
joining the United States Army in 1941. Jonathan's five-year military stint,
from 1941 to 1946, coincided with World War II. He spent the first two years
in teaching and administrative roles at the Infantry School in Fort Benning,
Georgia. He then spent three years as an army surgeon in a portable surgical
hospital in the Japanese theater of the war. Later in life, Jonathan wrote a
history of that hospital unit for the archives of the Army and Air Force. The
unit provided front-line surgical care for the wounded who were stationed
along the western edges of the Philippines, New Guinea, and the Dutch East
Indies. Among Jonathan's patients at that time was Charles A. Lindbergh, who
had sustained a recurrent dislocation of the shoulder while visiting the
troops.
After the war, Jonathan trained as a pathologist as well as an orthopaedic
surgeon, both at the Children's Hospital of Boston and at the Massachusetts
General Hospital. At the conclusion of his residencies, he was appointed to
the staff of the Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he
taught and practiced for seventeen years. He established an Orthopaedic
Research Unit where he worked in collaboration with Drs. S. Burt Wolbach,
Sidney Farber, and William T. Green. He coauthored a number of research papers
with these same physicians.
Jonathan Cohen's research career began in 1950 and was focused on three
topics. In two areas, he and researchers from the Massachusetts General
Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) made notable
contributions. One was the effect of radioisotopes that concentrate in bone
(radium, thorium, radon, plutonium, and uranium). This topic remains a major
concern in public health in the nuclear age. The other was the development of
metals (mainly alloys of cobalt, chromium, steel, or titanium) that are used
in devices (e.g., total joint prostheses, screws, and plates) for orthopaedic
surgical treatment. He and the M.I.T. team contributed to the development of
metals that are well tolerated by tissue. The work made possible the
popularization of total joint replacement for millions of patients. His third
area, less immediate in its application, was a clarification of the physiology
and morphology of bone growth and the depiction of various abnormalities, such
as bone cysts.
After two decades of service on the Harvard faculty, he transferred his
teaching activities to Tufts University School of Medicine. He continued as a
professor while still active in research and clinical practice at the
Children's Hospital and at the Franciscan Children's Hospital Rehabilitation
Center. He retired from active practice in 2001.
Jonathan Cohen's remarkable professional life extended over a
sixty-five-year period, from the 1938 date of his graduation from medical
school to the January 2003 quarterly workshop of the editorial staff of
The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. During that time he was
devoted to our specialty, to the care of his patients, to the teaching of
generations of residents, and to the scientific basis of skeletal disease.
During his years of practice, he was a member of several orthopaedic
societies. He published many papers, chapters, and articles. At the time of
his death, he had recently completed a dissertation on the development of
total hip arthroplasty and the modifications of that procedure over the past
fifty years. The scope of his interest and knowledge was remarkable. He read
voraciously from a number of fields, including natural sciences (related to
his love of the coast of Maine), politics, history, and, of course, medicine.
At the time of his death, he was preparing a treatise to provide an insider
summary of the actions and career of General Douglas MacArthur during World
War II. Throughout his career and until the very end of his life, Jonathan was
a valuable consultant for even the most difficult of cases. His grasp of the
natural history and the pathophysiology of disease and his clear discussion of
the clinical features of a case added immensely to patient management.
Finally, as the senior members of our specialty know, Jonathan Cohen, MD,
devoted great energy and a great deal of time to the American Board of
Orthopaedic Surgery in the development of the certifying examination for
orthopaedic surgeons, especially the pathology sections. We will miss him.
Jonathan leaves his widow, Louise Alden Cohen of Deer Isle, Maine, and four
stepchildren: Stephen Proskauer of Salt Lake City, Utah, Robin Alden of
Stonington, Maine, Abigail Alden of Camden, Maine, and Eliza Alden of Bryn
Mawr, Pennsylvania.
—M.H.McG.
R.E.B.
H.J.M.