“America’s most interesting and important essayist.”
Eric Kandel, Nobel Laureate and author of The Age of Insight
“An absolutely first-rate writer.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“[Weissmann] bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom.”
Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and The Table Comes First
“Weissmann introduces us to a new way of thinking about the connections between art and medicine.”
New York Times Book Review
“Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer, Lewis Thomas . . . Weissmann is in this noble tradition.”
Los Angeles Times
“[Weissmann] is a man of wide culture, a captivating and graceful writer.”
New Yorker
“As a belles-letterist, Weissmann is the inheritor of the late Lewis Thomas . . . Like Thomas, he’s a gifted researcher and clinician who writes beautifully. Unlike Thomas, he is an original and indefatigable social historian as well.”
Boston Globe
“He writes as a doctor, a medical scientist, a knowing lover of art and literature and a modern liberal skeptic. But more than anything else, Weissmann writes as a passionate and wise reader.”
New Republic
“Weissmann writes a complex kind of essay, part Rebecca West in his startling yoking of disparate matters . . . and part Lewis Thomas.”
Harper’s
“Weissmann is a master of the essay form. His witty and elegant prose makes the toughest subject matter not only accessible but entertaining.”
Barnes and Noble Review
“[Weissmann] is a Renaissance Man. . . . He’ll stretch your mind’s hamstrings.”
Christian Science Monitor
“Erudite, engaging, and accessible.”
Library Journal
“Weissmann models his work after that of his mentor, Lewis Thomas . . . his ideas . . . are every bit as important.”
Publishers Weekly
( link)“Weissmann is Lewis Thomas’s heir.”
Robert Coles
“How I envy the reader coming upon Dr. Weissmann’s elegant, entertaining essays for the first time!”
Jonas Salk
“The premier essayist of our time, Gerald Weissmann writes with grace and style…”
Richard Selzer
“Dr. Weissmann’s juggling with the balls of global politics, biology, medicine, and culture in the framework of history is breathtaking.”
Bengt Samuelsson, Nobel Laureate and former chairman of the Nobel Foundation
“Weissmann has a strong and well-informed interest, unusual for a scientist, both in poetry and in art.”
Freeman Dyson, author of The Scientist as Rebel and Maker of Patterns
Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 – July 10, 2019) was a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays; Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter: Pop Culture and Modern Science; Mortal and Immortal DNA: Science and the Lure of Myth; and Galileo’s Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment.
