Dr. Lewis Drusin ’60 was given in mid-May a prestigious award by the American College of Physicians to honor decades of work in the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and hospital-acquired infections. The award marked a high point along a career path that changed course after a conversation in fall 1959 with former Union College biology professor Bill Winne.
Winne noticed that Drusin, then a lab assistant, appeared disappointed about his plans to attend the University of Rochester’s medical school. Drusin told Winne, who had earned a doctorate from Cornell University in 1947, that he aspired to attend Cornell’s medical college but had been unable to secure an interview.
“He said, ‘Bring me the name of the dean and I’ll phone him.’ And he did and that’s how I got an interview at Cornell,” Drusin said. “It led to everything that I do.”
Drusin is today a professor of clinical medicine and clinical public health at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City and an attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. But his work extends beyond the classroom and hospital walls. The college of physicians in May gave Drusin the James D. Bruce Memorial Award for clinical and public policy work aimed at preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases through education, treatment and clinical studies.
The American College of Physicians is a national organization of doctors who specialize in the prevention, detection and treatment of medical illnesses in adults. Past recipients of the award, which recognizes distinguished contributions in preventive medicine, include Nobel Prize winner Dr. Jonas Salk, for the polio vaccine, and Dr. Donald Henderson, for eradicating smallpox.
“It’s just amazing to me to be on a list with those people,” Drusin said.
Drusin has published more than 50 papers and book chapters dealing with sexually transmitted diseases and the epidemiology of hospital-acquired infections. At Weill-Cornell, he directs a program placing public health and community medicine students in field locations, and has helped establish an endowment that offers international rotations to medical students. He served as president of the American Venereal Disease Association (now the American STD Association), and he has held prominent roles in many international scientific congresses and study groups relating to sexually transmitted diseases.
“The impact of dealing with sexually transmitted diseases is immediate. Consider the side effects of STDs: infertility; a lot of anxiety in the people who are infected; economic depravation due to lost time at work; severe disability; and sometimes death,” Drusin said.
Since 1995 he has served as the main representative of the International Union Against Sexually Transmitted Infections to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and one of only two American honorary life members of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV. He also earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Public Health.
In laying the foundation of his career, Drusin relied on mentor relationships with Dr. Walsh McDermott, professor and Chairman of Public health, and Bruce Webster, Emeritis Professor of Medicine and our country’s leading venereologist, at Cornell. Drusin’s work in the realm of STDs stemmed from a stint at the Centers for Disease Control from 1966 to 1968. Drusin modeled relationships with these two leading doctors at Cornell after those that he built with Winne and Henry Butzel, who was an associate professor of biology during Drusin’s years at Union.
“Close working relationships with full professors at Union fostered the development of both my confidence to act independently and think critically for problem solving. I continued the same thing at Cornell. I decided early on that Dr. McDermott would be my role model and mentor. I got to know him and spent summers working with him. After I returned from the CDC, he introduced me to Dr. Webster, who also became my mentor,” Drusin said. “Interacting one-on-one with professors who really take an interest is critical for a young person’s development.”