David Price, B.D.

Now long retired from teaching medical ethics, I teach a wide range of mid-career health professionals from all over the US and Canada in a course that I regard as the crowning achievement of my career. Of the small group of ethicists from New Jersey who developed this course in 1992, I am the only one still active in it. Every time it’s my turn to do one of our 17 or so sessions per year, my juices run like a kid’s.

It is almost 40 years since I met my second wife Pat Murphy, a nurse who still teaches ethics part-time at the medical school where I taught for 25 years. Five years ago, Pat and I moved to the Jersey Shore. Our condo apartment is directly on the ocean. That move was No.1 on my bucket list. I have let go of my No.2, another sailboat. Too creaky…. not the boat, me.

I enjoy hearing from and about my YDS classmates. I have always had more identification and more pride of association with YDS than with either of my other universities. And lovely memories: waiting for Richard Niebuhr to finish packing his pipe before responding to some classmate’s question; all those lusty male voices singing “A Mighty Fortress” in chapel; marching down Canner St. to waiting TV cameras on the New Haven Green after Vanderbilt Divinity School students sought support for college kids sitting-in at lunch counters; weekly lunch-time bull sessions with Jim Dittes in the Dining Hall balcony to talk about current events; watching “Gun Smoke” and “Have Gun, Will Travel” every Saturday night in the Common Room of Bradley Hall while some of the wives ironed and Serene Jones slept in her daddy’s lap.