Full Circle

Two emotions have defined the life of Dr. Steven Diamond: his desire to overcome the limitations of childhood polio and his great love of medicine. In this stirring memoir, he writes of his own ambitions, his struggles with the post-polio symptoms that crippled his career, and his life at the cutting edge of 20th century medicine.

Two emotions have defined the life of Dr. Steven Diamond: his desire to overcome the limitations of childhood polio and his great love of medicine. In this stirring memoir, he writes of his own ambitions, his struggles with the post-polio symptoms that crippled his career, and his life at the cutting edge of 20th century medicine.

Dr. Steven Diamond was born in New York City in 1940 and grew up in the Bronx, where he contracted polio during the summer of 1953, one year before the introduction of the polio vaccine. Dr. Diamond earned a BA from Grinnell College, attended medical school at the University of Cincinnati, and trained at Bellevue Hospital, where he became a chief resident, and subsequently a fellow, in the department of gastroenterology. In addition to being an associate professor of Clinical Medicine at New York University Hospital and Bellevue Hospital for thirty-two years, Dr. Diamond was chief of the departments of Gastroenterology at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Tarrytown, New York, and at Hudson Valley Medical Center in Peekskill, New York. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American Society of Gastroenterology. With Dr. Lauro Halstead, Dr. Diamond established The Polio Foundation to raise awareness of post-polio and support research into the condition. For twenty-five years, he had a private medical practice in Westchester, New York, until post-polio ended his career prematurely. Today, Dr. Diamond, and his wife Arlene, divide their time between homes in Florida and Massachusetts.