By Karl Grossman
There’s a new era in medicine on Long Island, across the state and beyond. On Oct. 1, Michael Dowling stepped down as president and CEO of Northwell Health. In his 23 years at the helm, Dowling led Northwell to become the largest health care provider and private employer in New York state.
Under Dowling, Northwell grew to 28 hospitals, more than 1,000 outpatient facilities and 104,000 employees, including over 20,000 physicians and 22,000 nurses, in five states.
Dowling’s successor is Dr. John D’Angelo, of Bayport, who has been with Northwell since 2000. He began as an emergency-room physician at its Glen Cove hospital, and since then has held positions including executive vice president of the network’s Central Region.
Dowling was born in Ireland, and his parents were disabled — “Their conditions set the tone for his personal relationship with the health care world,” the magazine Irish America reported. His father had rheumatoid arthritis, and his mother had been deaf since age 7. “Yet, his parents, his mother especially, never for an instant allowed Michael to believe that he could do anything less than what he set his mind to,” the article continued.
Dowling eventually earned a master’s degree from Fordham University, became a professor there, and served as commissioner of the state Department of Social Services and director of Health, Education and Human Services.
Another Long Island giant in health care, Dr. Edmund Pellegrino, created and shaped Stony Brook University Hospital and its medical school — from which D’Angelo graduated.
Like Dowling’s, Pellegrino’s story is amazing. Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Italian immigrants, as the Journal of Ethics of the American Medical Association related: “Ironically, this elder statesman of the medical profession was almost not admitted to medical school. Despite his outstanding grades at St. John’s University … he was not invited for interviews at any of the schools to which he applied. A letter from one Ivy League school complimented young Pellegrino on his grades but declined his application, stating that he would be ‘happier with his own kind.’ Italians, said his academic advisor, were no more welcome than Jews in the major medical schools, and he might fare better if he changed his name. Pellegrino refused.”
His admission to NYU Medical School “was due in part to his father’s ingenuity. A salesman in wholesale foods in New York, the senior Pellegrino approached one of his customers who owned a restaurant near … NYU and asked to be introduced to one of the regular customers … the dean of NYU Medical School, who asked Mr. Pellegrino to send along his son’s grade report … and the rest, as they say, is history.”
In the early 1960s, the state government wanted health sciences schools and a hospital at Stony Brook University. But its top administrators were nuclear physicists, unfamiliar with medical education or care. A search committee chose Pellegrino — and this area got a medical visionary as Stony Brook’s vice president of health sciences.
In my interviews with Pellegrino, he spoke of medicine being a moral enterprise, with doctors having “covenants” with their patients. He was dissatisfied with the direction medicine was taking, being turned into a commodity, a business, he said. He was the first person I ever heard use the words “bean counter.”
He directed Stony Brook’s medical, dental, nursing and social welfare schools to take what he called a “virtue-based” approach, emphasizing interdisciplinary studies. He wanted the hospital to be exceptionally caring.
Pellegrino was a founder of the field of bioethics, and chaired the President’s Council on Bioethics. After his years at Stony Brook, he became president of the Catholic University of America. He died in 2013, at age 92, and taught at Georgetown University up to the week he died.
Now, building on what Dowling established, and with an education at the Stony Brook School of Medicine designed in extraordinary ways by Pellegrino, comes D’Angelo.
“I am humbled and honored to be selected to succeed Michael Dowling,” he said at his appointment. “I am committed to build on his unparalleled legacy and vision that grew Northwell from a Long Island-based health system into a regional and national health care leader.”
Echoing Pellegrino’s vision, D’Angelo added, “Health care is a calling. Every minute of every day, we have an opportunity to change someone’s life for the better.”
Carl Grossman has been an investigative reporter in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY Old Westbury.
