Following in dad's footsteps

Photo caption: McGill Medical student Daniel Gottesman holds a picture he drew for his dad as a youngster, which his father Dr. Ron Gottesman, left, still has pinned up in his Montreal Children’s Hospital office.

“To be honest, I never really thought about becoming a doctor when I was younger,” admits Daniel Gottesman, a second-year Medical student at McGill University and son of Dr. Ron Gottesman, Division Chief of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the MUHC and Medical Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.

Midway through finishing his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at McGill, Daniel Gottesman became very interested in biomedical engineering. “I started thinking of ways I could combine technology and medicine,” he says. Ultimately, he decided to practice medicine to better understand patients so he could eventually design healthcare technologies.
 
Even as a child, Gottesman was curious about everything around him. He was always putting things together and taking them apart. He wanted to know how they worked and accomplished that by removing every single bit and bolt from broken appliances around the house. “We still have jars full of bolts and screws in our basement,” laughs his father.

“When I was ten, I built a miniature boat from old motors and a battery from a camcorder,” recalls Gottesman. “And, I used lots of duct tape!”
 
Eventually his innate curiosity and ingenuity led him to start asking his father about the mechanics involved in his line of work. “He wanted to know what I did for a living and how did all these machines work,” says Dr. Gottesman.

Gottesman is still trying to figure out what type of medicine he would eventually like to specialize in. “It definitely has to involve technology and lots of problem-solving,” he says.

Whatever path he pursues, his father will always be proud of him. “I even gave Daniel my old stethoscope from when I was in med school,” he says. “And, I’m honoured that he has adopted it as his own.”