He believes that rehabilitating the sick and injured can bring the world a little closer to peace.

A Gold Key for a Sterling Alumnus

As a young boy growing up on the island of Oahu, Mathew H. M. Lee, ’56, easily mastered his Chinese lessons while his classmates struggled. He often found himself playing alone because his friends were still hard at work in the classroom. “You have a gift that God gave you,” Lee’s mother told him. “Until you have achieved your level, you are not doing enough work.”

This spring he is being honored by the Medical Alumni Association as recipient of the 2006 Honor Award & Gold Key, awarded since 1948 for outstanding contributions to medicine and distinguished service to mankind.

There is no denying that Lee has accomplished more than most. He is the Howard A. Rusk Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University School of Medicine and medical director of the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. He has testified before Congress on the benefits of music and healing. He is a consultant to the World Bank, has written books on music and dentistry, and is an accomplished violinist. There is even a picture of his hand—A Healer’s Hand—in an exhibit in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. “They took it because it was free,” Lee says of the dazzling piece of work generated from computerized infrared imaging.

But when most people his age are spending time puttering around the house or putting on the golf green, Lee, age 74, says there is still more work to be done. His perspective of health care these days is “worldwide,” he says. He is troubled by disease, illness and injury in countries that have few resources to care for people who suffer from stroke, heart ailments, serious injuries, chronic pain and brain disorders. Land mines sewn in battle in Vietnam are still blowing up today maiming and killing people. “I am saddened by many of these issues,” he says. “If we truly care about people, it shouldn’t matter what country they live in.” He believes that rehabilitating the sick and injured can bring the world a little closer to peace.

But peace seems so far off given the war in Iraq and the turmoil in the Middle East and elsewhere. As chairman at Rusk, Lee is responsible for two Veterans Administration hospitals in New York. He is troubled by reports that 20,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq have been severely injured.

“Normally, in previous wars they died,” he says. “They have severe brain damage, they lose their limbs, their faces are scarred. It is really a pathetic situation. The generals will proudly say we can get our people there in 36 hours to fight a battle, but they don’t come home fast enough when they are injured and need treatment.”

Lee’s interests in medicine are wide ranging. Hedigs within his black physician’s bag to produce a variety of techniques to treat pain, including acupuncture and music. He is also a clinical professor of oral and maxillo-facial surgery and an adjunct professor of music and music education at NYU.

He believes music can ease pain and help in the healing process. The body, he says, consists of rhythms. The brain has rhythms; so does the heart, and there is rhythm to our sleep. “Every organ has a rhythm,” he says. “And all of the body’s functions must be in harmony.”

In the early 1990s, Lee addressed members of a congressional subcommittee and noted that nursing homes were spending an average of $40,000 a year on roughly 200 residents for pills to relieve pain and induce sleep. He advised hiring music therapists to cut costs and employ a more holistic approach to treating the elderly.

Lee during his 1973 visit to the People's Republic of China

“We have seen that if you play the music you like, your blood pressure goes down,” he says. “It is my hope that this is a new frontier, and America is looking at alternatives: how do we use other modalities other than medication that might be less toxic and might be more meaningful? We have reached a point where you can only do so much surgery.”

The odds of Lee becoming a physician seemed long when he was a youngster. He grew up in Hawaii in the 1940s before the islands were admitted to the union, and he almost died from pneumonia when he was two. His father worked the endless pineapple fields on the big island, and the family of six squeezed into a small plantation house with only one bedroom and one bathroom. “If you want to do better or look for a different career, you have to study,” Lee recalls his father telling him.

He was a brilliant student, and had a strong desire to become a physician. When he was 17, he left the island to attend Johns Hopkins University on a partial scholarship. He left Hopkins in 1952, a year before graduation because money was tight, but Maryland accepted him into its medical school. “Maryland took me in,” says Lee, who received a bachelor’s degree from Hopkins in 1953.

Lee graduated from Maryland in 1956. He did his internship at University Hospital and joined the U.S. Navy. In 1959, he joined the U.S. Public Health Service and met Dr. Howard A. Rusk, who is considered the father of comprehensive rehabilitation medicine. He traveled with the legendary physician to the Peoples Republic of China to create the first rehabilitation center in Peking. Rusk told Lee that rehabilitation was a burgeoning field. “He said there is going to be a hell of a lot of work,” Lee recalls. In 1968, Lee was named director of the department of rehabilitation medicine at Goldwater Hospital, a 624-bed operation. He worked there until 1989 and became the acting chairman of the department of rehabilitation medicine at NYU. He became chairman of the department a year later.

With a career that has spanned 50 years, Lee has never been more enthusiastic about medicine. New treatments and technology, and novel ways of approaching illness and injury give him hope. He wants to be remembered as a teacher, and he hopes his students, who are scattered around the world, will “practice good medicine” and “heal people.”

“My mission at this stage of my life is really to give back what other people have given to me and to mentor the young,” Lee says. “We get more by giving.”