Robert Arnold Johnson

Robert Arnold Johnson is a physician, now retired, whose career spanned two epochs of specialty over nearly a half century: cardiology and internal medicine in the initial two-thirds, psychiatry in the final third. He is the author of more than forty medically related publications and the co-editor of The Practice of Cardiology (Little, Brown and Company), a popular textbook of the 1980s. He has authored a book of short poems as well (“the Inconclusive Rule”) and an epic poem (“The Laughing Heart—Revised”)—the latter making ample use of his nearly lifelong experience as a fan of Dodgers' baseball. Later work is in the first instance co-authored with philosopher Thomas Alderson Davis on the nature of identity and its implication for medical practice (“Story by Story”) and in the second a book (“The Enigma of Grief & the Sublime”) co-authored with his spouse, violinist, educator, and author Susan Eileen Pickett, and with musician and psychotherapist, Mark Brown.