AUGUST is the month of my birth. I breathed my first in Maimonides Hospital, a now-sprawling complex between 9th Avenue, Fort Hamilton Parkway, 48th and 49th Streets in Borough Park, in 1957. I’m told I was a C-section. I’ve only been back a couple of times since then. I don’t remember which building I was born in … there was a lot going on that day … but in 1957, it was in one of the older buildings, and it could have been this one.
The hospital was founded as the New Utrecht Dispensary in 1911; the time when New Utrecht was a separate town in Kings County was still fresh. In 1919 it had expanded sufficiently to be renamed Israel Hospital of Brooklyn, and the very next year, it merged with Zion Hospital to become United Israel Zion Hospital. With a further merger in 1947 with Beth Moses Hospital, it attained its present name, Maimonides Medical Center, named for Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, the 12th century philosopher who established the concept of medicine as a natural science and authored ten medical books that set forth the foundation of modern medical training of physicians.
Besides bringing me on board, Maimonides has also been the home of several other innovations. In 1961, the commercial pacemaker was developed in the Maimonides Research Laboratory, which innovated the intra-aortic balloon pump nine years later. In 1966 the mechanical heart was partially developed here, and a year later, America’s second total heart transplant was executed. The needle aspiration biopsy to collect suspect tissue was first done at Maimonides in 1981; other innovative procedures were developed here as well.
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7/31/23