During the past three decades, Dr. Daniel Weiner '54 has led a life of contrasts.
One week he works as a “Park Avenue plastic surgeon,” performing nose jobs, face lifts, breast implants, and other procedures.
The next week he is in the former Yugoslavia, negotiating with the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia to get medical services to the citizens of the Balkans.
The contrasts have been Weiner's life since the Vietnam War. In 1968, he made his first trip to Southeast Asia as part of a team of physicians evaluating the war's civilian casualties.
“We found that a lot of families were using jet fuel as cooking fuel, and there were a tremendous number of explosions,” Weiner recalls. This problem, combined with the common use of napalm to burn Vietnamese jungles, produced a dire need for reconstructive surgery for burn injuries. Weiner began with dozens of Vietnamese children, and before he was finished he had helped set up a hospital for plastic and reconstructive surgery for children in Saigon. He says it was one of the few apolitical establishments during the war, providing care for children from both North and South Vietnam-and it is still in use.
Ever since then, Weiner has been returning to the world's developing and war-torn nations to help set up hospitals and medical relief programs for children and the neediest.
“I'm always back and forth between luxury and the third world,” Weiner explains. “It brings a personal balance to my life.”
That balance is possible because in New York Weiner performs only elective surgery, clearing long blocks of time for his work abroad. In 1972, for example, he was able to visit Bangladesh and Calcutta as director of medical programs for the International Rescue Committee, serving more than 10 million refugees by setting up health care programs in emergency medical situations.
A few years later, his work took him to Cambodia and Thailand, and
in the early 1980s he went to southern Lebanon during the Israeli-Lebanese war. It was a strange mission, he says, because he was speaking to the leaders of many nations, none of whom were speaking to each other. “They would talk to us because we were on a humanitarian mission.”
More recent missions have taken Weiner to Somalia, Sudan, Poland, Moscow (where he set up medical services for survivors of the Gulag), and the Balkans, where he helped establish a hospital for children.
Weiner says he learned about serving his community as a young boy in Hollis, Queens. The child of European immigrants, he watched as a modest but tightly knit community always found a way to help its neighbors.
Some people, however, believe that there must have been some sort of ghost of public service influencing the air in Weiner's childhood home. When his family sold the house in 1956, it was bought by the Powell family, whose son, Colin, was a decade shy of beginning a distinguished military career.
When the general's book came out last fall, Weiner contacted Powell. The response, written in Powell's purple felt tip pen, asked Weiner, “Do you remember
the 'Juke Box' your family left behind? I had tons of fun keeping it working.”
Weiner takes special pride in a program he set up between the Albany Medical College and the Marie Sklowdoska-Curie
Cancer Center and Institute of Oncology in Warsaw, Poland. Weiner helped found the cancer center, Poland's first, in 1990. When he learned that the U.S. government was creating a grant program that would establish partnerships between hospitals in America and those in Eastern Europe, he recommended the program to his old college friend, Anthony Tartaglia '54, the dean of the Albany Medical College.
“The government told me that this kind of funding usually goes to places like Harvard and Stanford,” Weiner says. “But I said it was time to give some other places a chance.” As a result, Albany received a $2.5 million grant as well as a partner in Warsaw.
Currently professor and chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery
at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Weiner now owns a farm in Vermont.
“I went back to work in Poland because that's where my parents came from. And now I have this farm that overlooks the hill where I used to sit during the weekends in college when we used to go to Bennington. I see the same hill from the other side. It's funny, that hill now looks smaller than how I remember it.”