Doctors Against Mar-a-Lago
“I've learned a lot about being a patient. The place where you receive oncology care really takes on significance in your life. You have a strangely deep relationship with it—it’s the source of some terrible experiences, but also your hope and refuge. Just walking through the front door, you feel frailer and more dependent.”
Alan Guttmacher is a physician with leukemia who watched his father and uncle die of the same disease. He gets his treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. A towering glass monolith among less resplendent research buildings, it’s specifically designed to give patients a womb-like reassurance: Inside the doors, a “healing garden” fills 2,000 square feet and includes “a simple and non-toxic plant palette of bamboo, lily turf with frequent rotations of colorful flowers, individual planters with sterile soil mix and self-watering irrigation systems, and a separate glass-walled Conservatory for immune-suppressed patients who cannot enter the garden.”
Perennially atop the lists of the world’s leading centers for cancer treatment, Dana-Farber sits a few hundred meters from the center of the Harvard Medical School campus. Doctors on staff have appointments as professors and fellows at the University. Guttmacher himself graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1981. He went on to become a genetics researcher and pediatrician, eventually rising to direct the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
But this week he’s grown cold toward Dana-Farber, and he is far from alone.
That’s because on February 18, the hospital will hold a lavish fundraising gala at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago, the resort that last month President Donald Trump “the Winter White House.” The resort charges to host the event, which promises “anhis son as its official director, the president has not provided evidence of divestment. On Tuesday press secretary Sean Spicer the President will spend his second straight weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where he is to be joined by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
