Malcolm Goodridge

Malcolm Goodridge graduated from Princeton in 1894, and from Columbia’s P. and S. in 1898. He practised medicine in the City all his life, and at his death was consulting physician to New York Hospital, Bellevue, and the Neurological Institute.

He was a general medical practitioner and specialist in internal medicine, a survival of the old-fashioned doctor. He was suave and friendly, and a past master in the art of handling difficult patients with tact and urbanity; and at the same time he was thoroughly abreast of the time and quite aware of the latest developments in medical research.

He was a keen observer and a remarkable diagnostician. During the early days of the reorganized Cornell Medical Center, clinicopathological conferences were held in the large amphitheatre of the College once a week. Goodridge shared the limelight on these occasions with his good friend and worthy adversary, Walter Niles. Cases were presented, findings submitted, and diagnoses invited by the moderator. After lively discussion and the presentation of diagnoses, the necropsy findings were revealed, and the final diagnosis pronounced. To hear Goodridge and Niles discuss and argue a given case was exciting: they went for each other quite informally and familiarly, but with no holds barred. Sometimes the final diagnosis proved Malcolm to be the winner; sometimes Niles it was who emerged victorious. Naturally, the students learned a great deal from these discussions. Cases submitted were always carefully selected as being particularly ticklish, and the Goodridge-Niles exchanges were the best possible demonstrations.

He was a good doctor and a good man, and he crowded a vast deal of extremely useful work and contentment into the span he was allowed. As the Father of Medicine laments: The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

George W. Martin
1957 Century Association Yearbook