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Igor Laufer was a wonderful person, husband and father, kind, friendly, generous, bright, dedicated to his patients, warm to his colleagues, helpful to his students, a diligent investigator, an astute diagnostician and, all in all, a remarkable model of modern radiology. He died on 14 September (2010) after a long struggle with his own malignancies.
The early part of Igor Laufer’s life was a struggle. He was born in Czechoslovakia during World War II. He and his mother hid from the occupying Nazis. At the end of the war, they managed to escape to Canada, settling in Toronto, Ontario. He attended college and then medical school at the University of Toronto. His internship with the target of internal medicine was at Toronto’s Mt. Sinai Hospital. Then he began a residency in internal medicine at Toronto Western Hospital. Louis Harnick, chief of radiology at Western, seduced him into radiology. Though he was lacking in any of the physics expected of radiology candidates, he began to apply for a radiology residency in New England. At first, he was rejected.
In 1968, he obtained an interview with Morris Simon, then the chairman of radiology at the Boston Beth Israel Hospital, where he was accepted to start in the summer of 1969. Then, and now, Beth Israel was affiliated with the Harvard Medical School. The Beth Israel radiology department was small. Felix Fleischner, who preceded Dr. Simon, was an emeritus professor. The resident program relied on participation in clinical practice. But it was lacking in organized lectures and group seminars. “We residents taught each other,” Dr.Laufer recalled. Together with another resident, Barry Green, he contacted the radiology departments at the other Harvard related hospitals and gained access to their grand rounds and conferences.
He spent three years in Boston on a student visa and passed his examination for certification by the American Board of Radiology. He hoped to move on to a fellowship in cardiovascular radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and applied to Stanley Baum who was chief of that section. However, MGH fellowships were open only to American citizens. As a Canadian citizen, he was required to return to Canada.
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