The stories of three Einstein medical school graduates who signed up to fight COVID-19 during the height of the pandemic in the Bronx in the spring of 2020 are told in a new book written by New York Times reporter Emma Goldberg. In Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, published by HarperCollins, Ms. Goldberg interviews six newly minted New York City doctors, three of whom are members of Einstein’s Class of 2020.
The three—Drs. Iris Aimlin, Elana Levy, and Ben Liu—took up Einstein’s offer to graduate early and join the front lines at Montefiore hospitals, where they all matched for their residencies. It was not an easy decision to make as New York City hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients. But as Dr. Aimlin says in the book to her friend and classmate Dr. Levy, “What would 50-year-old Elana look back and wish you had done?” The author chronicles how each of the young physicians spent those historic weeks. The story was pieced together from lunch-break phone calls, subway-platform conversations, and late-night interviews.
“They took an oath,” Ms. Goldberg writes. “They took deep breaths. And each morning they put on their scrubs and went to work.”
