Dr. Stanley Aronson was the founding Dean of Brown University’s Alpert School of Medicine, a prolific writer, an advocate for community organizations, and one of Rhode Island’s most prominent public intellectuals. His career spanned more than 70 years, and he was a world-renowned doctor, medical researcher, and leader in medical education. He was a co-founder of Home & Hospice Care of Rhode Island and served as a mentor to generations of physicians and medical students.

Besides his medical roles, Dr. Aronson was perhaps best known to Rhode Islanders for his weekly columns in The Providence Journal. Readers looked forward every Monday morning to his op-ed page columns. Active until his death, Aronson’s writing encompassed the worlds of medicine, history, science, politics, and music. He was also a community leader in Rhode Island, serving on the boards of many community organizations.

Dr. Aronson was born on Feb. 3, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Elihu and Lena Aronson. He graduated from the City College and New York University Medical School and trained in neuropathology under Abner Wolf at Columbia. He did research on polio with Gregory Schwartzman at Mount Sinai. During WWII, he served in the European theater as a member of the U.S. Army Medical Corps. In 1954, he accepted a position at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, where he established the Division of Neuropathology and had a National Institutes of Health-funded training program in neuropathology. He was also the Dean of Financial Aid at the Medical School. He trained a generation of neuropathologists, did pioneering work in Tay-Sachs disease, and published the first case report of Lewy body dementia. The neuropathology service Aronson directed covered a huge city hospital, the medical examiner for both Brooklyn and Queens, and several other affiliated hospitals. Many of his trainees went on to take leadership positions in the field.

In 1970, he moved to Rhode Island as Director of Laboratories at the Miriam Hospital and Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the Brown University Medical School. In 1973, he was appointed Dean of the medical school, which was expanding from a 2-year preclinical experience to a full 4-year curriculum. He led the school through this major reorganization and accreditation. Aronson also played a crucial role in the development of the Early Identification Program, which helped make the Brown Medical School more diverse by creating a special path for admission for college students from Rhode Island and from Tougaloo College, a historically African American school in Mississippi. He stepped down as Dean in 1981. The following year, he took a sabbatical leave, during which he received an MPH in neuroepidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.

From 1989 until 1998, he served as the editor-in-chief of the Rhode Island Medical Journal. He strengthened the publication by including literary and artistic contributions. Dr. Aronson was an amateur artist, and many of the covers of the Providence Journal used his paintings, typically submitted under a pseudonym. He began writing a monthly column on a wide variety of medical topics. These columns came to the attention of the Editor of the Providence Journal. The Editor was struck by their literary quality and felt they might interest the public. He asked Dr. Aronson to write a weekly column for the Op-Ed page. At first, the columns dealt with medicine and medical history, but soon, their scope reflected the wide range of Dr. Aronson’s knowledge and interests. They often dealt with historical issues and word derivations. Aronson’s contributions appeared each Monday for more than 20 years.

In January 2011, on the occasion of his 1,000th column in The Providence Journal, Aronson joked that he had “clung to this Monday morning site, much like herpes—tenacious but only rarely fatal.” Other newspapers in New England began to print his columns. This gave him a large audience to enlighten about a wide range of topics. The devotion of his readers became evident when the journal noticed a dramatic increase in circulation each Monday.

In his eighties, Dr Aronson continued to be influential in Rhode Island medical circles. Among his many contributions was his role in founding the Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island, the first facility dedicated to providing end-of-life hospice care in the state. He guided this institution, served on its board, and it was where he died. Toward the end of his 70-year career in medicine, he received many honors, including honorary degrees from Brown University and the University of Rhode Island. In 2014, he was honored by the creation of an endowed chair in his name at the Butler Hospital.

Dr. Aronson had a humorous streak. For many years, he lived on a farm just east of the Massachusetts border with Rhode Island. By judicious pruning, he created intersecting paths in the woods. Then he placed wooden signs that he made himself, naming them after streets from his youth in Brooklyn (Flatbush Avenue, Bedford Avenue, and Linden Boulevard.)

In his next-to-last last column, Dr. Aronson, then in hospice care, wrote about death. “Except for exalted leaders, death was a happening rather than an event, a part of the tapestry of surviving in an unforgiving world, and death was the end of an uncelebrated, brutal existence,” he wrote. He died on Jan. 28, 2015. He was inducted into The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 1997.

For additional reading:

• Aging in Today’s World: Conversations between an Anthropologist and A Physician, by Renee Rose Shield and Stanley M. Aronson, Simon & Schuster, 2003.

• The Tapestry of Medicine, by Stanley M. Aronson, McGraw-Hill, 1993.

• Perilous Encounters: Commentaries on the evolution, art, and science of medicine in ancient to modern times, Stanley M. Aronson, Prentice-Hall, 2009.

• Cerebral Sphingolipidoses: A Symposium on Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases, Stanley M. Aronson, Alexander Press, 2013.

• Inborn Disorders of Sphingolipid Proceedings of the Third Symposium on the Cerebral Sphingolipidoses, Stanley M. Aronson and Bruce Volk, Progressive Press, 2017.

• Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes November 2001, Stanley M. Aronson, 2002.

• Worms, germs, and wayward physicians; collected essays from The Providence Medicine & Health/Rhode Island, Stanley M. Aronson, 2000.