H. Kenneth Fisher

‘They were just terrific parents’ 

My family roots are in Ukraine on my mother’s side and in Poland on my father’s side. I was born with the name Fischlowitz, which means ‘son of Fischel,’ and I’m now pretty sure that I have correctly traced the family origin to a man who was born in the late fifteenth century, in Cracow. He went to medical school at the University of Padua, which at that time was the only medical school in Europe that would admit Jews.   

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression. My parents were clearly in love and they were just terrific parents to me and my younger sister. Neither of them had gone to college. I remember seeing my father have his breakfast cereal with coffee poured over it rather than milk. And it only dawned on me umpteen years later that that was because there was simply not enough milk for two children and himself and my mother.  

During my 5th grade in school, the public school system in St Louis had all students work through a battery of aptitude tests. I remember my teacher telling me I had scored relatively evenly on the male versus female interests scale and this was an ideal fit for a physician. I have to say the idea had occurred to me even before that, because two of the most honoured members in my parents’ friendship circle were men who were doctors. I liked chemistry at school, but the truth is it was such a good high school and with such skillful teachers that I liked everything. 

Alongside my studies, my major hobby during high school was photography. I was also very involved in Scouting. That love of camping has stayed with me throughout life, expressed not least when my children were very young and faculty salaries were not high: summer vacations meant camping trips! 

‘Lung disease was too important not to have specialists in every major medical centre’ 

When it came time to leave Oxford, I began looking at scholarships to medical school rather than at medical research. But I knew I needed a fallback, so I applied to Harvard and MIT for graduate study in business. MIT offered enough money to pay for everything. The plan was to be there for two years, but my second-year thesis project fell through and I got a summer job in the medical school at Washington U, doing research in brain biochemistry. I had time to ponder, and decided that if they would admit me, I would attend medical school. Luckily, they did, and they also provided money.  That was important, as my father had died five years earlier, and my mother was struggling financially.  

Wanting to be a specialist in lung diseases came about purely by chance. As an intern, I was asked to take care of a man who was suffering respiratory failure. I asked my resident, ‘What can I do?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean, what can you do? He has respiratory failure with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and he’s going to die.’ I went madly chasing round the faculty offices trying to find someone who could help me understand how to approach this situation, but there was no one. I thought lung disease was too important not to have specialists in every major medical centre, so that’s the field I chose.  

The first real job I took after my training period was as Chief of the Respiratory Division at what is now called Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle. I set up the division with clinical laboratories and research facilities and we added two trainees a year. It was sobering. I had had some training in how to give lectures, but I was not well trained for my interaction with medical students and residents on the hospital wards. It took a while before I came to grips with that. When I was later recruited to join the University of Arizona and take charge of a 50-bed chest ward at the Veterans’ Hospital, I really couldn’t resist. It was a very good experience: I was growing as a physician. But the University of Arizona was having some rather unpleasant internal politics at the time, and so, when I got an invitation to go to UCLA, I took it. That was personally a difficult period, though. My wife and I were divorcing, and my move to Los Angeles was in part related to that schism. I honestly hoped I would be able to win custody of my three sons, but my attorney quickly disabused me of that notion. Everyone goes through heartbreaking events at some time in their life, and that was certainly the biggest one in mine.  

In my clinical work, it became evident that many patients with lung disease and strokes also had sleep problems. I grew more and more interested in this area. and accepted a position in Casper, Wyoming for several years, spending half time in sleep medicine and half in pulmonary medicine. I had earlier been asked to write a book about sleep medicine, but could not allocate the necessary time until I retired from clinical office practice at the end of 2021. My book Sleep, a User’s Guide was published in 2025.  After working through much of the Covid pandemic via telemedicine, and publishing a theoretical paper about the extremely low blood oxygen levels seen during that period, I finally let the stethoscope slip from my grasp in 2023.