Role Model
Dr. Finland was a tireless worker. He personified the 24/7 work ethic (not much in evidence today). He lived at the hospital, had his meals in the City Hospital cafeteria, and worked from early morning to late in the evening in his office at the end of the hall on the fourth floor of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory. If you wanted to talk to Max about a problem with an experiment, he could be approached during the day for a brief discussion. But if you needed advice – personal issues, questions about career choice – you best approached him Saturday afternoon or Sunday when he would relax and give you as much time as was needed.
Jerome O. Klein, M.D.
Professor of Pediatrics
Boston University School of Medicine
31 August 2001
Given his total involvement in his work, Max was always at the lab on the weekends; given my hefty workload, so was I. I remember sitting at my desk late on a weekend afternoon and having the lights go out. I groped my way down the hall and caught up with Max as he was leaving the building. Apparently, he had thought that he was alone in the lab and had automatically turned out all the lights before departing. After that occasion, he always stuck his head into my office on his way out, nodded approvingly at my devotion to the cause, and left the lights on for me.
Dennis Kasper, M.D.
William Ellery Channing Professor of Medicine
Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
Executive Dean for Academic Affairs
Harvard Medical School
13 September 2001
As are few men, Max Finland is a man of ethic. His ethic has sustained and characterized him in the past as it will in the future. The ethic can be expressed in that ancient Hebrew prayer that he knows so well:
“From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that it knows all truth,
Oh God of Truth, deliver us.”
Edward Kass and Jerome O.Klein
The Journal of Infectious Diseases
Volume 125 March 1972 Supplement