Peter Emanuel Dans, MD: a conversation with the editor

Peter E. Dans, MD, and William C. Roberts, MD

From the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Public Health and Hygiene, Baltimore, Maryland (Dans) and the Baylor Heart and Vascular Center, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas (Roberts).

Corresponding author: Peter E. Dans, MD, 11 Hickory Hill Road, Cockeysville, Maryland 21030 (e-mail: pdans@home.com).

Peter Dans was born in New York City on June 17, 1937. After attending Catholic elementary schools, high school, and college, he graduated from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1961. His internship and first-year residency were on the Osler Medical Service of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, during which he spent 3 months at an infectious disease hospital in Calcutta, India. A medical residency year at the Presbyterian Hospital of the City of New York was followed by 3 years in the US Public Health Service as a research associate in the Laboratory of Viral Diseases of the National Institutes of Health and a 2-year fellowship at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory of the Boston City Hospital in infectious diseases.

In 1969, Dr. Dans joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Medical Center, where he served as director of student/employee health services. While there, he founded an adult walk-in clinic and an evening sexually transmitted disease clinic at the medical center as well as a migrant health clinic in Fort Lupton, Colorado. In 1976, he received a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and stayed on for an extra year as project director of a study entitled “Aging and Medical Education.” In 1978, he returned to The Johns Hopkins Hospital to establish an Office of Medical Practice Evaluation aimed at improving patient care and decreasing costs. For 8 years, he directed the required first-year medical school course, “Ethics and Medical Care.” He joined the Annals of Internal Medicine as deputy editor in 1991 and moved to part-time faculty status at Hopkins. In 1994, he became a medical consultant with AdvancePCS, a pharmacy benefits management firm, working on geriatric polypharmacy and patient safety.

Since 1990, he has written a column entitled “The Physician at the Movies” in The Pharos, the quarterly publication of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. Dr. Dans is a fascinating and multitalented man. I was fortunate to have spent a year with him as a houseofficer in 1962-1963 at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and to have witnessed firsthand the excellent characteristics of this splendid physician. He also is a wonderful guy. (BUMC Proceedings 2002;15:59-69)