Jerome Abrams: Desiderata Fan

Jerome Abrams is a family physician with more than thirty years of experience. He was a founding partner at Dover Family Physicians in 1983 and was with that practice for thirty years, providing a full scope of family medicine services.

In 1973, he earned a degree in philosophy from Franklin and Marshall University, several years before he began studying medicine. But he remains interested in the life of the mind; he says that the famous poem "Desiderata" is a summation of the principles that he tries to live by.

That poem, written by Max Ehrmann in 1927, was relatively obscure at first but became very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. It advises its readers to view the world with compassion, and to see the beauty that is all around them. "Speak your truth quietly and clearly/and listen to others/even the dull and the ignorant;/they too have their story/Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit..."

Legend has it, as Dr Jerry Abrams knows, that Max Ehrmann actually translated "Desiderata" from the text on a stone all of the bell tower of Old Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland. Whether that is true or not, they are beautiful words to live by, he says.

Jerome Abrams enrolled in the Temple University Medical School and graduated in 1977. He began a three year residency at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland that same year, and completed it in 1980. He spent three years working as an emergency room physician before entering private practice. Most recently, he started practicing at Family Medicine of Smyrna-Clayton.