• Art Jahnke

    Senior Contributing Editor

    Art Janke

    Art Jahnke began his career at the Real Paper, a Boston area alternative weekly. He has worked as a writer and editor at Boston Magazine, web editorial director at CXO Media, and executive editor in Marketing & Communications at Boston University, where his work was honored with many awards. Profile

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There are 5 comments on Boston Medical Center’s Paul Drew Dies

  1. Paul Drew was an incredible person that treated everyone with respect and dignity. It is a tremendous loss for BUMC and he will always be remembered as one of the great forces during the merge. I send my condolences to the family.

  2. Thanks to the person who wrote this piece on Paul Drew. Paul was an incredible force yet one of the most engaging and warm people I have known. I consider it a privilege to have worked with him at NEMC and BMC and was happy to see the work he did, partcularly at BMC, recognized and applauded. We are all berift at his loss and are thoughts are with his family and other firends, all of whom keenly feel his loss.

  3. Art–Thank you for a wonderful article about Paul Drew. One could never say enough about his warmth, sensitivity, and dedication to the faculty he recruited. He had a great sense of humor. Knowing I was an avid football fan, he adopted a ritual of calling me on Sundays at 10:55 AM, a time when he knew I was finalizing my football picks (for entertainment purposes only) and he tried to make me change my picks. I don’t know if he knew football that well, but I thought he knew more about everything than I, and his persuavive powers threw me into obsessive fits.
    A small group of senior faculty lived on Bay State Road at the time, and despite our responsibilities we still knew how to have fun. l am sure the students saw it as a faculty nursing home,but we saw it as a mature fraternity house. And certainly the only one with the Dean of Marsh Chapel. Dean Hill and his wife Jan were great referees when Paul and I argued about the relative merits of BC versus Georgetown. I also had the advantage because he had split loyalties to the two Jesuit instituitions. Luckily no one from Notre Dame ever moved into the Bay State building!
    Along with his social ease and wonderful sense of humor, he had great compassion. During his period at BMC he recruited major faculty, and convinced us to come because of his belief in our potential, and our belief in his dedication to the health of everyone in the city. I have never met anyone who could speak with ease and grace with senior Senators, while at the same time make true emotional contact with the troubled city kids both of us were determined to help. But most of all I remember the time I walked in his office, a year or two after I joined BMC, and tearfully offered my resignation. An error had occured on my watch, and even though it was not directly related to anything I did, I felt I owed it to him to offer my resignation to prevent him the stress of asking me to submit it. He looked at me for several minutes. He then said, “OK, you told me you were a sensitive guy when I interviewed you. But don’t think that every time there is a mistake on your service you are going to come in to my office, teary eyed (and also some expletives that are best left to the imagination). This your first problem; get the hell out of my office and come back with a plan to fix it. These are the experiences that will make you the leader that both you and I want you to be.”
    Paul–you are gone, but you live within us and our community.

  4. Art, although we haven’t met, thank you. I had the pleasure of knowning Paul since our time at New England Medical Center. Paul was VP for Clinical Operations and I was VP Research and Finance at what was then NEMC. Paul was a great friend and colleague. Paul taught me the balance between clinical operations and academic research. He will be truly missed and a loss for BMC and Boston Medicine.

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