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Medical Maestros
HMS alumni compose lives that balance music and medicine.

Richard Kogan ’81

When Richard Kogan arrived at HMS, he was already an accomplished musician, and he knew he could not give up the piano for the duration of his medical training. He credits Daniel Federman ’53, then the dean for medical education, with enabling him to juggle music and medicine. Federman created a special five-year schedule for him, including time off for performing concerts between rotations. And even when he was on-site at the medical school, Kogan continued to perform in a trio with two of his Harvard College classmates, violinist Lynn Chang and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Today, Kogan continues to balance music and medicine. He is a concert pianist, a practicing psychiatrist, and the acting director of the Human Sexuality Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. As a specialist in sexual dysfunction, Kogan seeks to help patients express themselves emotionally, realize their potential, and experience life to the fullest. He thus focuses on the achievement of “peak experiences,” a description that he would apply to music as well as to sexuality. Recently, he has been pondering the connections between the two in preparation for a lecture series about how the sexual practices of great composers relate to the characteristics of the music they have written.

Such studies extend one kind of work Kogan has been doing for some time. Fascinated by the way in which many composers managed to sublimate or channel their suffering and convert it into creativity, the psychiatrist-pianist lectures on such artists as Beethoven, Gershwin, and Schumann, illustrating his points with music.

“Beethoven,” says Kogan, “transcended his deafness by withdrawing into the world of his imagination and reaching a stylistic breakthrough. Schumann was truly mentally ill, with manic-depressive psychosis. He used his auditory hallucinations, the voices, to create. I seek to explore such links between psychopathology and creativity.”

Kogan also manages to combine his two driving interests by playing concerts to raise money for health-related organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and Music for Healing.

Despite such connections—and despite the similarities he draws between music and medicine, calling them both “healing arts”—Kogan finds that he thrives on piano performance and psychiatry for different reasons. He says there is nothing in music quite like the intellectual fulfillment he finds in the one-on-one, doctor/patient relationship. Nor does psychiatry offer any equivalent of the artistic satisfaction in performing a Brahms concerto. So in his own life, Kogan continues to require the kind of schedule Federman worked out for him, one that balances two kinds of peak experience.
—Beverly Ballaro

Samuel Wong ’88

At HMS, Samuel Wong felt pressure to align himself with the hard science of genes and molecules. It was only after he had decided to leave his work in ophthalmological surgery for a career as a conductor, Wong says, that he gained the courage and wisdom to recognize that although healing through music “is not as quantifiable or easily expressible in words, it’s just as powerful a realm as traditional Western medicine.” That music can open new therapeutic frontiers is “more than just a hunch,” says Wong. “Many studies are showing the efficacy of musical interventions in health care.”

When he was a medical student, Wong’s mind and heart were torn between medicine and music. The struggle came to a head in 1990, when, in a single day, the young resident at the Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital performed surgery on two brothers in the morning and conducted the New York Philharmonic in the evening. Although all three performances were successful, “I couldn’t continue like that,” Wong says.

At HMS, Wong was hard pressed to see the symbiosis between his two chosen fields—“I just followed my heart,” he says. But in retrospect, the maestro recognizes that the sciences and music “inform and cross-fertilize each other.”

Wong draws similarities between conducting an orchestra and performing surgery, beginning with the striking fact that the latter takes place in a venue called an “operating theater,” complete with bright lights. He waxes poetic about the symbolic reduction of both the masked, gowned surgeon and the silent conductor to mere, but all-powerful, eyes and hands.

Wong now serves as music director of both the Hong Kong Philharmonic and the Honolulu Symphony and guest conducts in Japan, Europe, and such cities as Houston, Seattle, Montreal, and Toronto. Yet he also finds time to bring healing music to patients with neurological disorders.

Wong has touched patients who have appeared beyond reach, as well as audiences of many cultures, and he has come to understand that music and medicine both address the human condition and unite people. For those armed with such universals, concludes Wong, “home is wherever art and science reside.”
—Debra Malina

Henry Schniewind, Jr. ’65

Like many doctors, Henry Schniewind, Jr. carries his business cards with him. Unlike many, he dispenses two types: one in sober beige advertising his psychiatry credentials; the other, emblazoned with the image of a keyboard, promoting his skills in piano standards and jazz. Schniewind, a psychiatrist in private practice, has spent many hours over the past year in a different kind of practice—as a jazz performance major at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

Although Schniewind had discovered at age ten that he had a knack for playing music by ear, he had never learned how to read music properly. Nor had his lack of training bothered him, until, in 1991, he joined a jazz ensemble group in Brookline. The technical gaps in his playing became apparent, so he apprenticed himself to a piano performer.

The psychiatrist soon landed a Sunday night gig at Boston’s Club Cafe, an experience that left him nervous but hooked. He played there for the next year and a half, occasionally encountering patients who, once they had recovered from the surprise, generally reacted positively to their doctor’s alter ego.

Schniewind’s steady gig expanded his repertoire, his skills, his confidence—and his awareness of his lack of formal training. So he applied to Berklee, becoming the oldest in a class of 700 students.

Schniewind realizes that his decision to divide his energy between music and medicine at this stage in his life might raise eyebrows among some of his colleagues. Yet he believes psychiatry and jazz are not such dissimilar realms. Both provide means by which people engage in powerful, cathartic, and often poetic expression.

He imagines that his two disciplines will continue to overlap as he pursues his goals of performing solo, working with singers, and teaching music. Balancing 20 to 25 hours of psychiatric practice with a full complement of music courses is certainly demanding, but he finds the challenge energizing. “If you’re going to die from something,” he muses, “it should be life, and music is life.”
—Beverly Ballaro

Yeou-Cheng Ma ’77

As the daughter of an opera singer and a musician who played 200 instruments, Yeou-Cheng Ma never questioned that she would be involved with music. She got her first violin at seven months, began playing at two-and-a-half, and from then on, music was always “what I do for fun,” she says. But if music came naturally to Ma, another natural tendency might have hindered the dual calling that landed her as a developmental pediatrician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and as executive director of the Children’s Orchestra Society in New York: Ma was shy.

Her shyness contributed to her decision not to become a professional performer. She ceded that role to her more outgoing younger brother, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who had earlier opted to avoid sibling rivalry by leaving violin playing to his sister. Instead, Yeou-Cheng studied the sciences at Harvard and went on to HMS despite her trepidation about the interpersonal challenges of practicing medicine. Unexpectedly, she found great comfort in taking care of people—and in helping adults to see that children “come in different sizes and ways of thinking.”

In childhood, Ma’s shyness was exacerbated by her family’s immigration to the United States. “When I first came to America, I knew little English,” she says. “In a certain way, I was like a language-disordered child.” She feels a special affinity for many of the developmentally disabled children with whom she works, and she uses music to reach them. “Many children who are unable to use language enjoy music. You can use music to calm them while you’re doing procedures, or to reach out to them in a nonverbal way.”

If music feeds her pediatric work, the exchange is two-way. Ma says that when she teaches music, she uses the tools she has developed in working with challenged children. “I have many students that other teachers might have been too discouraged to teach.”

Ma also sees general applications for music education. As education specialists begin to understand better the different modes of learning—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—many recommend multimodal learning. Music, says Ma, is one way of doing that. Music’s patterns also make learning it similar to studying science. “But the art of medicine is what appeals to me,” she says, “the art of taking care of people—when, for example, to break news to parents that they might not be ready to hear.” As in music, she says, it’s all a matter of timing.
—Debra Malina

Einar Anderson ’68

Einar Anderson thrives on challenge. As an active practitioner of emergency medicine affiliated with three hospitals in and around Columbia, South Carolina, Anderson often spends days on end at a hospital 75 miles from home. Yet he somehow manages to find the time to perform as a horn player with the Palmetto Brass and to serve as music director of the Lutheran Bach Choir and Orchestra of South Carolina.

As Anderson sees it, emergency medicine has two key advantages over other specialties. First, as long as the hospital is not short-staffed, ER physicians work circumscribed shifts, allowing for the flexibility necessary to schedule other activities. “If I have a concert or musical function, I simply take that day off,” Anderson says.

Second, and more important, the ER offers a tremendous range of intellectual challenges. “A classmate once said that he hated the ER because he never knew what was going to roll through the door,” Anderson recalls. “That’s why I like the ER—nothing is the same. Every day is different; every case is different.”

In a sense, it was Anderson’s hankering for intellectual variety that led him from singing and brass performance to conducting. When he was part of an orchestra, a choir, or an ensemble, he found himself intrigued by listening to what the other performers were doing—and seeing what the director did to correct or help them. Anderson did some conducting in high school, and after he had completed medical school and fulfilled his military obligations, he earned a master’s degree in orchestral conducting at the University of Southern California.

The challenges of HMS were heightened by Anderson’s participation in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, an activity that took two nights each week away from his studies. “In medical school, you feel that,” he says. “You notice if you’re studying that much less than your classmates.”

But when he was accepted into the highly selective orchestral conducting program at USC, he learned what real competition was like. As one of only four graduate students, Anderson quickly realized “how high the professional standards were, and how good some of the people were.”

If the intellectual challenge attracted him, however, Anderson has found true satisfaction in the fact that both music and medicine rely on other human faculties as well. In both, he explains, “there’s a huge body of knowledge you must have and certain skills you must possess. But when it comes time to carry them out—to practice medicine, perform on an instrument, or conduct a work of music—then the intellectual aspect is sometimes not as important. It becomes more emotional and subjective. Both professions balance the two sides of human nature nicely.”

Both music and medicine, Anderson adds, have healing properties. “The ultimate purpose of medicine is to improve the quality and duration of life. And music, simply, has very emotional, spiritual, and therapeutic aspects.”
—Debra Malina

This article appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin.