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compositions. He said, “I love what you composed. Your influences seem to be Wagner and Rachmaninoff.” I adored Rachmaninoff and took that as the greatest praise I could ever have received. Of Wagner I had only heard the prelude to Tristan and Isolde , but I didn’t dare tell him that.
    I said that I was starting medical school, and that I wondered if I could study both medicine and piano.
    He said, “No, that used to be possible at the time of pianists like Moriz Rosenthal”—a pupil of Liszt’s who studied philosophy at the University of Vienna in the 1880s—“but nowadays you have to practice like a maniac.”
    He continued, “You are a fantastic pianist; you are one of the best. You remind me not only of me, but of Samson François. He played for me on that same piano.”
    The comparison took my breath away. Samson François was my favorite among the younger generation of pianists.
    Rubinstein went on, “You must perfect your technique. You need to practice Czerny, Scarlatti, Bach, and Mozart. You should abandon medicine and start right now.”
    Hearing “You must perfect your technique” crushed me. The praise went in one ear and out the other, while the criticism echoed over and over in my mind. I told myself later, “If that’s how it is, I’m not going to become a performer, because it’s too much work.” I didn’t want to do scales. And I had difficulty reading scores: that would be a terrible hindrance and embarrassment in a conservatory program or in trying to work with professional musicians.
    The die was cast. I would become a doctor.

    A few weeks later, in October 1969, I began medical studies at one of the University of Paris’s teaching hospitals, Hôpital Cochin, a fifteen-minute walk from home. I was only sixteen years old, two or three years younger than everyone else in the class. I was painfully conscious of not fitting in. But then chemistry captured my imagination, thanks in large part to a brilliant teacher named Jean Durup, and I became engaged intellectually in what I was doing. I saw aesthetic beauty in how chemical bonds formed and how different arrangements of atoms and molecules created different substances. My mother had pushed me into a field that I would soon come to love.
    The following year my older brother, Jean-Claude, followed me into medical school. (Eva also studied medicine in due course. Jean-Claude became a distinguished immunologist and Eva a fine surgeon.) Thereafter Jean-Claude and I often prepared for our exams together and throughout medical school we had a great intellectual partnership, the closest and most stimulating that I have ever had with anyone. But this also meant that in my mind I carried the burden of Jean-Claude’s prospective progress, as well as my own. Having taken the exams before, I had to be sure that he knew what to expect. My anxiety left me unable to sleep, and I was soon exhausted from insomnia.
    Desperate for more rest at night and less anxiety during the day, I went to our family doctor, Dr. Gilbert Meshaka. He listened to me carefully and prescribed a two-week supply of Tranxene, a tranquilizer that belongs to a family of drugs called benzodiazepines, or benzos, that includes Ativan, Valium, and Xanax. That helped me get through the ordeal of exams, and thereafter Dr. Meshaka prescribed Tranxene or another benzo intermittently when my anxiety became unmanageable.
    In 1977 I completed my basic medical training. Having passed the medical internship test, I did internships in neurology, internal medicine, and cardiology. In French hospitals then there was usually wine on the table in la salle de garde , the room where interns and residents ate meals and took catnaps when they were on call. One day at lunch I decided to have a drink. It ruined the rest of the workday, and I concluded that alcohol did not agree with me.
    After my internships, I did a residency in nephrology at Saint-Cloud Hospital in the western suburbs of Paris.