I write this little essay in memory of my dear friend, Genuino Nazzaro, M.D., who died at his home in Princeton on June 23rd. The death of any person of his remarkable character is a loss—to his family, to his community, to his friends, to his noble profession, a loss indeed to a needy world in which human goodness can never be in excessive supply. But he had certainly had a good run. He was nearing his hundred-and-second birthday, and only near the very end was the infirmity unsustainably oppressive. As fate would have it, quite without knowing it we overlapped in the Princeton hospital for a day or two of the last week of his life. There were other comforting serendipities. At his funeral on Friday in Trinity Church, Joan and I were seated in the nave not twenty yards from the Lady Chapel, where we were married in 1962.
That may also have been the year I met Dr.Nazzaro, though I think it was actually in the mid 1960s, when I returned to Princeton from Wisconsin as an assistant professor. I can no longer remember the circumstances that first brought me to his office, but I liked the modesty of the operation with its private house vibe, and its never-empty waiting room presided over by a friendly but firm young lady named Nancy. The office moved a couple of times, but it was always homey and welcoming,
For many years I always called him Doctor Nazzaro and he always called me Professor Fleming, but at some point the formality evaporated, and found I was calling him Gino and he was calling me “Johnny”, an infantilizing name by which I had not been known elsewhere for about half a century. It is natural, I suppose, that a man should remember his friendship with a medical practitioner in terms of particular pathologies. For me it was the coincidence of Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal and my Gall Bladder Crisis that cemented things. Nazzaro did not perform surgery. So that duty fell to another impressive medical friend and co-religionist, the late Bill Burks, probably in 1973, but Nazzaro was strongly recommending the operation. When I slightly demurred on the grounds that surely no organ of the body was completely unnecessary, Nazzaro said: “Professor Fleming, I dono why God give you a gall bladder!” Seldom is medical advice both understandable and succinct.
Geniality was for this man a rule of life, but he had no sympathy with the sloppy immoralism that sometimes passes for sophistication in American culture. My own cultural instincts on the whole lean conservative, but Gino put me the shade. He sometimes could sound like a contemporary Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre. Of his five children, four are women, and I can but imagine the delicacy required when one of them as teenagers introduced him to a young male friend.
He read a lot, though I think almost exclusively medical papers. He told me in so many words that he wanted to be the best doctor he could be, and for him that involved a lot of technical reading. As a young man he had engaged with vigor against the power of the Communist Party in mid-century Italy. When I gave him a copy of my 2009 book The Anti-Communist Manifestos, he was very pleased, though he cannot possibly have had time to read it. It is a work of literary history, not political argument. But its title was right down Gino’s line.
Though he spent most of his life in America, his English remained colorfully accented, especially when using technical medical language. And Gino loved to speak medicalese. One of his favorite words, which worked its way into a surprisingly large number of linguistic settings, was triglycerides. That’s a pretty big word already, but Gino’s accent infused it with a kind of vatic or mystical dimension demanding not merely respect but actual awe. I think I sort of know what a triglyceride is, as much as I understand physiological stuff at all, but I was clearly missing the magic of it all.
In retirement years (for both of us) our get-togethers became much more frequent. Our houses were a short drive apart, and not even that long a walk. We moved from joint food shopping adventures to talking about food shopping. After the death of his wife Geraldine about five years ago, which roughly coincided with the beginnings of my own medical challenges, our visits became more sedentary. Diminution of bodily dexterity had the recompense of more fluent and adventurous volubility. We would sit at opposite ends of a large dining table, with me nibbling little bits of nectar-like Parmesan ham and this or that exotic cheese. On a thoroughly bipartisan basis there was always plenty to grouse about on the political front. Gino was a most gracious host but also a most reluctant guest. It was the law of the Persians and the Medes that we meet at his house, never mine.
There is a large and long-established Italian-American community in Princeton. It was mainly Italian-American master masons who created the mini-Amiens Cathedral that is our university chapel. Fifty years ago, and probably still today, there were numerous Italian-Americans in all sections of the University’s ever-expanding buildings and grounds divisions. The progeny of the stone masons now include several of the leading citizens of the town and the leaders of town’s business and artisanal sectors. Dr. Nazzaro was held in reverence and professionally patronized by many members of this group. In fact nothing was more American about this great American doctor than his living continuities with his fellow Italian-Americans. The idea of the American sociological “melting pot” has somewhat fallen out of favor, but consciousness of family history is not the same thing as “ethnic identity”. There is a real pluribus, but is not more powerful than the unum it has succeeded in achieving. The posterity of the huge Italian immigration to this land is as “diverse” and as “American” as the Cabots and the Lodges or the Hatfields and McCoys.
One of the prices of the longevity I myself have enjoyed, largely a benefit of the excellent health care I have received, is outliving so many friends and contemporaries. Gino was more than ten years my senior, but I had come to suspect that he was immortal. Now I am sure of it. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Genuino Nazzaro, medicus et amicus, 1923-2025.
