1970s - Kent

This fall Donald L. Kent, M.D. ’72, HS ’76, of Great Neck, N.Y., encountered symptoms never seen before in his nearly three decades as an otolaryngologist. Beginning a week after the trauma of September 11, a total of nine New York firefighters who had been part of the rescue operation in Lower Manhattan presented in his Long Island office with “a sandpaper-like inflammation” of the airways. The injuries did not seriously impair breathing, and they dissipated after several days of moisturizing therapy to reverse the effects of smoke and cement dust. “Let us hope,” Kent writes in an e-mail to Yale Medicine, “that no physician sees these physical occurrences again!”