Lisa M Schwartz: devoted her career to improving transparency and understanding of medical evidence

Everyone in any way concerned about the state of contemporary medicine will be shocked and dismayed by the untimely death of Lisa Schwartz, professor of medicine and community and family medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and co-director of the Center for Medicine and the Media.

Lisa was born in the Bronx, in New York City, on 30 June 1963 and qualified as a doctor in 1989. The following year she met Steven Woloshin while they were both working as medical residents at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Bellevue was founded in 1736 and is the oldest public hospital in the US, which somehow makes it a fitting setting for the creation of a partnership totally committed to the concept of public good within medicine. They married in 1992 and for the following 26 years shared the closest professional and personal relationship that I have ever been privileged to witness.

It takes some of us many years to appreciate the shaky foundations …