When he was growing up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the 1930s and ’40s, Joseph Sonnabend would watch his mother, a physician, make house calls in the middle of the night and talk with patients on the phone at all hours.
He didn’t want to follow that path, but he did study medicine and become a medical researcher, working alongside Nobel laureates in England on virology and immunology.
When he arrived in New York in 1969, he continued that research. But as a gay man, he was drawn into volunteering at the Gay Men’s Health Project in Greenwich Village and saw a need for doctors who would treat this population.