Brescia was born in the Bronx on January 11, 1933, and grew up in a small apartment in the borough with his parents and three sisters. “I slept in the living room on what’s called in Italian a branda, a foldout bed, that was kept in the closet when it wasn’t used,” he said in the book Just Kids from the Bronx (Holt, 2015).

His father, a public housing superintendent, hoped that his son would find a lucrative career as a plumber. But one day when Brescia was a boy, a well-dressed physician made a house call to their building.

“There was a lot of talk and excitement about this guy, this doctor,” Brescia recalled. “I was absolutely awed and said, ‘That looks like something I’d like to be.’”

Creating a Revolutionary Medical Procedure

Brescia enrolled at Fordham in 1950, becoming the first member of his extended family to go to college. Four years later, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“He adored Fordham and the education the Jesuits provided,” said his son Christopher Brescia, who added that his father always wore his class ring. “His love of Fordham was so contagious that five of his nieces and nephews and one granddaughter graduated from there. Ultimately, it was the combination of the spiritual and intellectual excellence of Fordham that propelled him through his entire career.”

He followed his time at Rose Hill by earning an M.D. from Georgetown University in 1958 and completing his medical residency at a Veterans Administration hospital in the Bronx. It was there that he and another physician, Dr. James Cimino, developed a technique to improve kidney dialysis.

At the time, patients could be kept on blood-cleansing dialysis machines only for limited periods of time before risking severe damage to their arteries, among other side effects. Brescia and Cimino discovered a way to stitch an artery and vein together that allowed them to safely and repeatedly use the same location on the body to move blood between the patient and the machine.

That lifesaving breakthrough, known as the Cimino-Brescia fistula, was seen as a source of huge potential profits, and the doctors began dealing with investors to set up dialysis centers around the country. As the contracts sat in legal limbo, though, Brescia said his father encouraged him to give it away. If he didn’t, he said he would be haunted by “the faces of the children … who should be with their parents,” Brescia told Fordham Magazine in 2016.

He and Cimino decided to publish their findings in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1966. Brescia later said that he never made money from the technology. “We took a road. To the left, it looked shiny and gold. But to the right, it looked happier to us.”

An ‘Individualized Approach’ to Palliative Care

In 1962, Brescia, along with Cimino, began working at what was then known as the House of Calvary, a nonprofit medical facility founded in 1899 by a group of widows to care for women in poverty with terminal illnesses in Greenwich Village. By the time Brescia arrived, it had moved to the Bronx and was sponsored by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

In the years that followed, with Brescia as attending physician and Cimino first as chief of medicine and later as medical director, Calvary became fully accredited. It was renamed Calvary Hospital in 1969 and moved to its current location on Eastchester Road in 1978. Brescia was named executive medical director in 1994. Today, Calvary is widely regarded as a leader in end-of-life care, with a mission “to serve where the need is greatest among those who suffer most,” Brescia once said, “to equally relieve their physical, emotional, and spiritual pain.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president emeritus of Fordham, recalled working as an orderly at Calvary in the early 1960s, when he was a Jesuit novice.

“I well remember my time there,” Father McShane said, noting that all novices in what was then the New York Province of the Society of Jesus were required to work at Calvary for at least a month as part of their training. “It was a time of great grace for all of us. As one of the nursing sisters at the hospital told us when we arrived, ‘God walks the halls around here—24 hours a day.’ She was right.”

For Jessica Morales, FCRH ’97, who slept on a cot in her mother’s room at Calvary for months while she was being treated for aspiration pneumonia, that presence of God was evident in the kind of care her mother received.

“The care there was so different from the beginning,” she told Fordham Magazine in 2016, noting that hospital staff turned her mother in her bed every two hours, brushed her hair the way she liked, and played her favorite Mexican music to soothe her. “It was an individualized approach.”

“Every time we have a meeting here, everybody’s hugging,” Brescia said. “You have to touch your patients. You have to hold their hands. And it’s got to mean something to you.”

A Lasting Legacy at Calvary, Fordham, and Beyond

The kind of palliative care Brescia and his team offered at Calvary Hospital made him a natural fit to return to his alma mater, which he said gave him “the gift of faith.”

He came back to campus to speak with students and faculty, including at a 2015 symposium titled “Humanizing Medicine: The Achievements and Future of Palliative Care.” Fordham students and faculty have also conducted research at Calvary, and other Calvary medical staff have lectured at the University.

“I was fortunate to hear a couple of presentations by Dr. Brescia,” said Cathy Berkman, Ph.D., director of the palliative care fellowship program at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, which has seen a number of its students and graduates take internships and jobs at Calvary. “It was clear that I was in the presence of a very special physician. The concern, and I think love, that he had for patients at Calvary was so deep and genuine. I know many excellent and dedicated health care professionals, but Dr. Brescia stands out as someone we can all admire and hope to emulate.”

In 1994, Fordham awarded Brescia an honorary doctorate of humane letters. The citation in that year’s commencement program reads in part, “He helps the sick lead productive lives; he leads the dying into the vestibule of heaven.”

Brescia is survived by six children—three of whom are physicians—and nine grandchildren. His wife of 53 years, Monica, died in 2007 of a brain aneurysm.

When Carlisdania Mendoza, M.D., left New York to begin medical school at Duke University, she brought many of Fordham’s Jesuit values with her.

When it comes to service, the 2012 Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate explains, her undergraduate experience taught her that “you don’t do things reflexively, but you’re rigorous and methodical and reflect on what you’re bringing to the table. Being partners with the community is more enriching for everyone involved.”

As part of both STEP and CSTEP at Fordham—two New York state programs designed to support minority students and prepare them for careers in science, health, and technology—Mendoza had mentored younger students, organized cancer walks, volunteered with those affected by cerebral palsy, and much more. It was through these programs that Mendoza first realized she wanted to study medicine.

Once in North Carolina, she joined Duke’s new primary care track on a half-tuition scholarship. She also maintained her focus on service and began working with a support group for transgender Latina women, including some who were undocumented.

But she wanted to do more. “I knew I could go deeper,” she says, “and also help [these women]live longer and trust the medical system. What’s more humanizing than acknowledging that someone has a need and then helping them get that?”

Mendoza was frustrated when she couldn’t get the support she needed to create a medical clinic for the women, but the experience made her rethink her trajectory. Midway through medical school, she gave back her scholarship and switched to Duke’s psychiatry track, a bold move that did not surprise Renaldo Alba, FCRH ’02, GSE ’10, associate director of Fordham’s STEP and CSTEP programs.

“Carli is strong-willed and stubborn in her principles. She doesn’t do things because they are financially convenient,” Alba says. “And that’s what we need. When we are most vulnerable, we need conscientious dissenters.

“Other folks are looking to win, win, win. Carli is looking to do good, good, good.”

Though Mendoza initially wanted to be a neurosurgeon, she had not considered the mental health field until she entered medical school. “I’m a one-and-a-half generation immigrant,” says Mendoza, who was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the Bronx with her family when she was 10, “so my views on mental health were very limited. My community looks at mental health like it’s a white problem.”

But during her psychiatry clinic, Mendoza realized how rewarding she found working with mentally ill patients. “It felt very easy and natural for me,” she says. At the same time, the women in the support group were expressing a need for mental health services. “They’re under acute stress on a regular basis,” she says, “so it was a really important need that they identified.”

Now, having graduated from Duke in 2016 and completed the first year of her psychiatric residency at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Mendoza knows she’s found her path. “I just feel so energized working with people and achieving goals with them,” she says.

But she’s looking forward to returning to New York after her residency, when she hopes to help develop intervention programs that could help LGBTQ, trans, gender-nonconforming, and sex worker communities struggling with mental health issues.

“I’ve realized how much I enjoyed my work at CSTEP, so I also hope I can collaborate with Fordham again in some way.”

Are you a graduate of Fordham CSTEP? Join us for our 30th Anniversary celebration on Saturday, June 3, during Jubilee.

According to the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits, “A little holiness and great health of body does more in the care of souls than great holiness and little health.”

In other words, says Nardone—a board-certified OB/GYN with a passion for nutrition and more than 30 years of clinical experience—no matter what you do, “if you’re healthy, you can fulfill your responsibilities all the better.”

We asked Nardone for her advice on getting and staying fit throughout the year.

1. Be Practical

Set achievable goals, and don’t be too hard on yourself.

“Patients tell me, ‘Oh, doc, 20 years ago, I was your size.’ And I say, OK, it took you 20 years to (gain the weight); it’s not going to come off in 20 days,” Nardone says.

The goal is to get and stay in a range that’s healthy for you—one that’s not only appropriate for your age and in line with your genetic makeup but also compatible with normal blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and glucose tolerance.

“The worst thing is yo-yo dieting—up and down, up and down,” she says, which puts a lot of stress on your heart, your vascular system, and your entire body. “You should always try to stay within a seven-pound range that you can maintain without dieting or worrying every day.”

2. Weigh In Regularly (But Not Obsessively)

Get a scale you like and use it wisely, Nardone says.

“You can lie to yourself—oh, I’m fine—but your scale doesn’t lie. So you should weigh yourself once a week or once every two weeks. Patients will come to me once a year, and they’re surprised that they’ve gained 15 pounds. How could you not notice?”

But don’t “get obsessed with it,” Nardone adds, “and never weigh yourself every day.”

3. Prioritize Exercise

Daily exercise will help stem weight gain and improve your mood, so treat your workout like a social commitment.

“Mornings are probably best because later never comes. If you’re a mom and a working mom, you know what that means: later never comes,” Nardone says.

But allow for some flexibility in your routine, she adds.

“If the gym is closed, go for a walk or do a workout video on YouTube at home. And you can take the stairs instead of the elevator or walk around the block at lunchtime. You don’t need to belong to a gym to be physically active.”

4. Make Smart Swaps

Some simple recipe adjustments can go a long way toward reducing fat, salt, and calories in your meals—and improving your health, Nardone says.

• Try half-and-half or 2 percent milk when recipes call for cream.
• When cooking with butter, use half the amount called for in the recipe.
• Use low-sodium stocks (and don’t add salt) when making soups or gravy.
• Use olive or nut oils when sautéing.
• Add more vegetables like roasted carrots, peas, broccoli, and brussels sprouts (“You want a very colorful dish!”) instead of starchy sides such as potatoes and pasta.
• Choose lean cuts of meats and poultry that are fresh and farm raised.
• Serve water or club soda. Keep alcohol consumption to a minimum. And ditch sodas and juices entirely. “They’re just wasted calories,” she says, “and loaded with sugar and additives.”

5. Manage Stress

Use exercise and healthy food habits to reduce stress.

“Number one, exercise is a great release for stress. And it takes time, but you have to plan your meals. Don’t allow yourself not to be eating. You need breakfast, you need a lunch, and you should keep some healthy snacks, like low-fat granola, in your drawer,” Nardone says.

“If you’re stressed but you’re hungry or you’re not drinking enough and your blood sugar’s dropping, you get shaky. One component of stress you can control is eating, so eat the right things.”

Last but not least, she says, “Don’t use eating as an activity. Do something active instead. You’ll enjoy your food all the more when you’ve earned it!”

Adelaide Nardone, MD, FACOG, earned a BS at Fordham and an MD at New York Medical College. She was a clinical instructor at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island. And she’s been an instructor and a wellness consultant at Fordham, where she has offered one-on-one career guidance to students through the Fordham Mentoring Program.

In 2014, she spoke with FORDHAM magazine about her family’s ties to Fordham and her participation in the mentoring program.

Photo by Bruce Gilbert

On Oct. 30, the leading minds in cancer care gathered at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus for a roundtable discussion on improving care both for patients whose cancer is active and for patients whose cancer is in remission.

“It’s a question of measuring the value of health, and not just good healthcare,” said Falguni Sen, PhD, director of Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, which co-sponsored the event. “Value,” he continued, means increasing the quality of care while keeping costs under control.

A critical component of enhancing value is to coordinate care across all aspects of a patient’s treatment, said panelist Randall F. Holcombe, MD, professor of medicine at Mt. Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine and deputy director at the Tisch Cancer Institute.

Cancer is a complex illness, he said—it entails multiple treatments over long periods of time, and it often involves multiple treating physicians, rather than a single oncologist. In addition, patients with cancer experience a high “symptom burden,” meaning that both the cancer and its treatment have steep physical and emotional tolls on patients.

Because of cancer’s complexity, it is critical that all members of the treatment team coordinate the care they provide, Dr. Holcombe said. Doing so can have marked benefits, for instance, reducing the number of emergency room visits and unnecessary hospital admissions. Quantitatively, this means lower costs; qualitatively, it means patients spend less time in a hospital and are spared the radiation-related toxicities of excessive imaging and scans.

The roundtable also touched on the importance of continuing care for patients once their cancer is in remission. This involves not only continuing medical care, but also complementary services such as nutritional counseling, psychosocial support, and rehabilitation services for late effects of the illness.

Patients may also need help grappling with the reality of having experienced a life-threatening illness and what this means going forward—a concept known as patient survivorship. Many patients embrace the term “cancer survivor” as a positive identity, while other patients are ambivalent about the term, and still others eschew it altogether.

“For many of our cancer patients, every day or every minute they’re reminded that they had cancer,” Dr. Holcombe said. “There is the constant concern that the cancer will come back, and that they’re not really ‘well.’ And they often have specific reminders of their cancer, such as neuropathies or other long-lasting toxicities.”

“One survivor told us that cancer survivorship needs to be looked at as if it is a chronic condition like diabetes, and it’s not,” said panelist Mandi Pratt-Chapman, director of the George Washington University Cancer Institute and co-PI for the American Cancer Society’s National Cancer Survivorship Resource Center. “Another told us that he had to go from the mindset of a ‘cure’ to one of ‘control,’ because he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be fully cured.

“There are some people who embrace survivorship, and others who don’t want to think about it or be reminded of the experience they had.”

The roundtable was sponsored by the Emblem Health Value Initiative, a partnership between EmblemHealth Inc. and the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center at the Gabelli School of Business.

However, it is crucial to have those conversations, said renowned oncologist and Fordham alumnus Philip A. Pizzo, MD—especially when it comes to palliative care, a specialty of medicine that can help spare patients and their families from needless suffering.

Dr. Pizzo, FCRH ’66, offered the keynote address on Oct. 20 at “Humanizing Medicine: The Achievements and Future of Palliative Care,” sponsored by the Fordham University Science Council. The event, which also featured an interdisciplinary faculty panel discussion and a presentation by Calvary Hospital President Michael J. Brescia, MD, examined the latest discussions about palliative care in America.

Palliative care refers to a type of supportive care that focuses on controlling pain and relieving symptoms for a patient, rather than actively treating an illness, Dr. Pizzo said. Many people balk at this type of care when they or their loved ones are facing a life-threatening illness, because they believe it means eliminating medical treatment altogether.

“They don’t want to give up on active medical treatment,” said Dr. Pizzo, the David and Susan Heckerman Professor of Pediatrics and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“But palliative care is not a ‘handoff.’ I shouldn’t say to a patient, ‘It’s over, there’s nothing more I can do, so I’m handing you over to palliative care’… It’s not the removal of hope, but fusing it together [with active treatment].”

It was his Fordham education, Dr. Pizzo said, that taught him to prioritize human dignity. This humanistic approach stayed with him once he became a pediatric oncologist in the 1970s, a time when very few children survived cancer.

“I witnessed children dying with terrible pain that no medication could reverse despite our very best efforts,” he said. “I was constantly asking myself when these children were suffering: Is this appropriate? Isn’t this something we should help facilitate? Shouldn’t we help individuals to have as much dignity at the time of their death and not to suffer?”

In 2011, Dr. Pizzo co-led the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine report “Relieving Pain in America,” which included several recommendations pertaining to palliative care. One of the first recommendations was to reorganize the health care system so that high-quality end-of-life care was available and accessible to all individuals.

He cited a recent clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine that studied the outcomes of adult lung cancer patients who received a combination of palliative care and active treatment. The study found that patients who received this combination of care lived on average three months longer than those patients who did not receive palliative care. (The patients were also happier, more mobile, and in less pain.)

“It’s important to not make a Faustian bargain between delivery of care and supportive care,” Dr. Pizzo said. “Every individual facing a serious prolonged illness that could lead to end of life would benefit from a palliative care physician working in tandem with their health care provider.”

The first step in these efforts, he said, is to have conversations about end-of-life care. In addition to more communication within families, the health care system needs to improve training for physicians, nurses, social workers, and other specialists so that they can better guide patients through these difficult decisions.

The event was co-sponsored by Fordham’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, with support from Calvary Hospital.

Deavere Smith, known for her roles on TV’s The West Wing and Nurse Jackie, transformed into a short, fast-talking, Brooklyn-accented, brilliant, and compassionate physician. That’s Dr. Peggy Bia, who says the actress exaggerated the Brooklyn accent.

Despite Bia’s quibbles, the question Deavere Smith said drove her show—“How do we pursue grace and kindness in a competitive and sometimes distressing world?”—mirrors Bia’s own mission as a medical educator and caregiver.

Long before she was spearheading a new way to teach Yale medical students and long before she was one of few women entering medical school, Bia was paving a path for undergraduate women at Fordham. She was a member of the first class of the all-female Thomas More College, which opened its doors at Fordham 50 years ago this fall.

Bia credits her liberal education—science courses in addition to theology and philosophy—and Fordham’s commitment to community service for molding her into the kind of doctor she has become.

“She’s a dynamo,” says Nancy Angoff, M.D., associate dean of student affairs at Yale Medical School. “She’s tough and gets things done, but it comes from a place of compassion and caring. That’s really what permeated her program in the teaching of clinical skills. This love of being a doctor was so picked up by the students.”

Bia grew up in Brooklyn, the middle child of seven siblings. Her father died when she was 11. Her mother took in foster children to make ends meet. She also took in cousins when they needed a place to stay. “There were always tons of babies in my childhood,” Bia recalls.

She went to an all-girls Catholic high school and met her future husband, Frank Bia, M.D. (FCRH ’67), during socials with the all-boys Catholic school he attended. They’ve been together ever since. She started at Thomas More College when he was a sophomore at Fordham.

Frank always knew he wanted to be a doctor, but Peggy hadn’t considered medicine as an option for women initially. Most of her many female relatives became missionaries, teachers, nurses, or nuns. (One of her sisters is a Sister: Elizabeth Johnson C.S.J., distinguished professor of theology at Fordham.) Bia knew those careers weren’t for her. She toyed with becoming a chemist, but, as she puts it, “I didn’t want to spend my days with test tubes.”

Her pre-med adviser at Thomas More, chemistry professor Frederick Dillemuth, S.J., encouraged her to go to medical school. At the time, she had little confidence in her abilities, but Father Dillemuth and Frank insisted she could handle the work. After she graduated from Fordham summa cum laude in 1968, Peggy and Frank were married at the University Church, with Father Dillemuth presiding. They went to Weill Cornell Medical School and did their residencies at the University of Pennsylvania before earning fellowships to Yale, where they joined the faculty in 1978. They now have two grown sons, each in graduate school.

Bia says she chose to specialize in nephrology because during her residency “the best and most fabulous teachers were nephrologists.” Besides mastering complex renal physiology and caring for kidney transplant patients, she has been a caregiver for her medical students.

She worried at one time that they were not getting the clinical skills to be good, caring doctors. So 15 years ago, she developed a program that emphasizes mentoring. First-year medical students are connected with a physician to help them practice taking medical histories and performing physical exams on patients. They also attend weekly sessions where these skills are practiced in a safe setting.

“There is so much unhappiness in medicine in this day and age,” Bia says. “Finding the joy in practice is a lot harder now than it was years ago. I wanted my medical students to find that joy.”

Despite the complexities of today’s healthcare system, Bia wants to ensure that her students become keen diagnosticians and expert caregivers who form bonds with their patients, listening carefully to their stories. She believes the altruism woven into the Fordham curriculum helped to shape her view of medical practice.

Around Yale, students perceive Bia as tough yet tender—and not without a healthy sense of humor. Indeed, besides being mimicked at the Long Wharf, she’s been lovingly impersonated by her students. Last spring, at a reception for her when she stepped down from leading the clinical skills program, four students donned big blond wigs and took to the podium, each one claiming to be the real “Doctah Bia.”

Although Bia no longer runs the program she founded, she’s still a full-time faculty member in the renal section, lecturing and running workshops on kidney function for medical students, nursing students, and fellows.

“I grew up with this very Catholic spirit that fostered community service,” she says. “I was teaching younger kids since I was in eighth grade, and a group of us taught math and science to underprivileged high school students when I was at Fordham, so that whole aspect of service was really, really emphasized, and I savored it. It definitely informed what I felt I wanted to do with my life.”

Bia may have grimaced at Anna Deavere Smith’s rendition of her, but perhaps the audience grasped what being Dr. Bia really means. Which is also how Deavere Smith once described the central point of her entire show: to pursue and “find grace in the face of a complex world.”

Or, as Frank Bia once put it to a graduating class of medical students, the message Peggy Bia has been transmitting for years is this: The key to a happy, fulfilling career is “listening to and with one’s heart and using one’s hands to both diagnose and touch another person’s life.”

Maybe that’s why everyone wants to imitate Peggy Bia, on and off the stage.

—Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D., is one of Peggy Bia’s former students at Yale. She’s a freelance medical journalist and the author of Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (Norton, 2010).

Philip A. Pizzo, M.D., FCRH ’66, will deliver a public lecture on “How Science and Health Care Reform Change Medical Education and the Medical Profession,” on Thursday, Oct. 6, in New York City.

Pizzo, the dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, has had a distinguished career in pediatric research and practice at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute and Harvard University.

A native of the Bronx, Dr. Pizzo graduated from Fordham with degrees in biology and philosophy and went on to study medicine at the University of Rochester. He has distinguished himself as an expert in pediatric medicine and immunology, having been a leading advocate for NIH-sponsored pediatric HIV/AIDS research at a time when it was unpopular.

“I’ve never shied away from taking a stand on issues I really felt were important,” Pizzo said in a 2007Fordham magazine interview. “I don’t consider myself a crusader, but . . . someone who is an advocate for change for what I hope are the right reasons.”

DATE:  Thursday, Oct. 6
TIME:  6:30 p.m.
LOCATION:  University Club, 1 West 54th St., New York, N.Y. 10019

The event is free and open to the public.

On Friday, Oct. 7, Dr. Pizzo will visit Fordham’s Rose Hill campus and meet with faculty and students who have an interest in, or are engaged in, medical research.

In addition to serving as dean, Dr. Pizzo is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Professor of Pediatrics and Microbiology and Immunology.

He is the author of more than 500 scientific articles and 15 books and has received numerous awards and honors for his work.

To register for the Oct. 6 event, visit Fordham’s alumni calendar.

Since the focus of the conference was transforming schools into places more conducive to learning, why not include those most likely to be effected by change, namely students and parents? So the morning panel “Families, Schools and Communities: Creating Caring Environments,” which was moderated by New York City Department of Education Mental Health Services director Scott Bloom, featured Mimsie Robinson, pastor of Bethel Gospel Assembly and Shawnette Spence, parent coordinator at the Marie Curie School for Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions.

The inclusion of Kening Ye, a student at Lower East High School in Manhattan and Ebanesha Williams, a student at Prospect High School in Brooklyn lent the conference a bit of youthful energy. Generation divide notwithstanding, participants in the panel—particularly Williams—came to many of the same conclusions of Cohen, who urged educators and parents to take the problem of bullying more seriously and utilize resources freely available to them.

You can read more about Cohen’s speech on Fordham’s news page, and for more resources, visit the Center’s website, www.schoolclimate.org.