Dr. Stanley Aronson

“Stan was a giant of medical education, at Brown University and elsewhere, a distinguished leader in global public health, especially in developing nations, and an elegant, learned and delightfully idiosyncratic writer,” said Robert Whitcomb, writer, editor and blogger, and former Journal editorial pages editor.

Edward C. Achorn, The Journal’s current editorial pages editor, said: “Each column was on a different topic. It required a lot of research. It wasn’t just on the top of his head. He had this passion for knowledge that continued until the very end.”

Achorn recalled visiting Aronson at his house just two weeks ago. “He was talking to me about how he would, instead of watching TV, go look at the Internet or the books on his shelves and think about what to write about,” Achorn said. “He was fascinated by virtually everything.”

“In conversations with Stan during the last several years, I came to understand how pleased he was with the growth and development of the medical school he did so much to create,“ Brown President Christina Paxson said in Brown’s tribute to Aronson. “His natural humility prevented him from taking credit, but Brown’s medical school and many of the statewide improvements in medical care delivery that grew along with it began with Stan’s arrival in Providence.”

Said Dr. Joseph Friedman, professor of neurology and the Stanley Aronson Chair in Neurodegenerative Disorders at Butler Hospital in Providence: “I will always remember Stan as the embodiment of a polymath, a person who knows everything about everything, yet he was caring, humble and anxious to help others.”

Aronson was the author of more than a dozen books and some 400 articles for medical journals.

Aronson’s last Journal column, “Where are aromas from yesteryear?,” was published Monday. The week before, the paper published “A move to document the causes of death,” an elegant essay on the history of mankind’s chronicling of death. It ended:

“In the words of an anonymous scribe, ‘We come hither; we know not why; and we then go hence, we know not when, to join the majority.’”

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Elihu and Lena Aronson, Aronson graduated from City College of New York and New York University’s medical school. At the age of 60, when he retired as dean of what is now called Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Aronson enrolled at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and earned a master’s degree.

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