About Doctor Peter J. Morgan

Peter J. Morgan grew up in Long Island, NY, the oldest of five brothers and sisters. He was graduated from New York University School of Medicine, and was an attending physician at the Department of Internal Medicine at University Hospitals in Cleveland, OH. He was about to begin a fellowship in hematology/oncology at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, when he was diagnosed with cancer (synovial sarcoma) in his right leg.

After his diagnosis, he returned to Long Island where he worked for a physician in Southampton, NY; he then volunteered and was put on the staff at the Student Health Service at the State UniversitY of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, where he worked until nine days before his death.

In his diary, the young doctor compared his plight to that of a Holocaust victim. One has to be ready to give up everything at any time and start anew, he wrote. He reflected that concentration camp victims had the strength to do that. Life, he reflected, has to be lived, not collected like material thin

He did just that. He would receive his chemotherapy treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. By 9 AM he would pull out the IV, force himself to drive to Stony Brook to be at work by 11:30 AM because, as he wrote, "it's very important to me ...that I don't lie on my bed."

For him, art was a kind of life raft. He wrote: "Never stop in your mind. When you are physically stopped you can live in your mind like Cervantes did in Don Quixote."