An archetypal member of the Climatological, Nick brought qualities to its meetings that earned him the admiration and respect of his colleagues and culminated in his election as ACCA's president in 1990. To start with, his achievements in academia were impressive. Having received an MD from Columbia P & S in 1951, he went on to a medical residency at Columbia/Presbyterian. Nick also completed demanding post-graduate biochemistry studies at Columbia in 1959. This medical and scientific training at Columbia prepared him well for his chosen subspecialty of Endocrinology with its focus on the clinical physiology and biochemistry of the adrenal cortex. Ultimately, Nick contributed well over 100 original articles to medical journals of high standing such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology. Not surprisingly, he received many awards for his achievements in clinical investigation; among them, the Borden Research Award and the Joseph Mather Smith Prize for Meritorious Research. He also became a Markle Scholar in Medical Sciences. From 1963 to 1967, he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. From 1967 to 1978, he served as an Associate and Consulting Editor of the Cecil-Loeb Textbook of Medicine. Nick was editor and a co-author of The Human Adrenal Cortex published by Harper & Row in 1971— acclaimed during its time as the definitive textbook on the adrenal gland.
In 1965, as an Associate Professor of Medicine at P & S, he became Chief of Medicine at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. During the first 6 years of his service in this position, Nick and I worked closely together in the often frustrating effort to transform the Roosevelt Hospital and St. Luke's Hospital (which I represented) from being merely “Columbia-affiliated” hospitals into Columbia “University hospitals.” With the powerful help of Polycarp Kusch” (Nobel laureate and Columbia's Provost at the time) this goal was achieved in 1971. During the same year, Nick and I were each promoted to the rank of unqualified Professor of Medicine.
One of the things that made Nick so special was the remarkable range of his interests and enthusiasms. He had majored in English at Yale — an experience that, in my view, enhanced his ability to write clear, elegant prose and to express himself eloquently on subjects relating to the fields of art, literature, and music. His son, “Pete” Christy has speculated that his father's ongoing preoccupation with science may have reflected a countervailing need for the reliability and firm foundation provided by scientific discipline.
At Yale, Nick was a member of the Elizabethan Club and was passionate in his love of poetry. Older members of the ACCA will recall that Nick's President's Address in 1990, “Too Close to the Fire”, was a scholarly essay on “hot” poetry, language, and psychopathology. He defined “hot” poets as those who live close to the core of pure language, which is thought. “Their proximity to that core … forces them to emit syntactic lightning bolts.” It was Nick's contention that “… those poets who are so fated, or so endowed that they must live close to the hot central core cannot stand the heat; most of them come to a bad end, using principally three devices to gain relief from their constant exposure to the superheated core of language—they take to drink or drugs, they go mad, or they give up writing poetry.” When I read the 20-page text of the Address carefully in preparation for this memorial statement, I was greatly moved by Nick's scholarship, imagination, and creativity. The Address reminds us that one of the many blessings of the Climatological is that it fosters originality.
With his sensitive appreciation for what language can be, Nick did not conceal his impatience with the overuse of medical jargon (“medspeak”) by too many physicians. Medspeak tends to blur the precision and personalization that should characterize the histories and progress notes presented at rounds or scribbled in patients' charts by house staff and attending physicians. Nick also found it painful to have to read medical papers that might be reporting important research data but did so in a clumsy narrative lacking in clarity and readability. As he saw it, there was too much reliance on the passive voice, multisyllabic words, and long tortuous sentences. He was a strong advocate of plain and clear communication among physicians and between doctor and patient. In recognition of his writings on these and related subjects, Nick was given the 1989 Harold Swanberg Award from the American Medical Writers Association.
Nick also wrote about classical music. A self-taught musicologist, he was an annotator of the Vero Beach, Florida, Classical Orchestra's program notes. He wrote several papers on Gustav Mahler and how Mahler's last illness (bacterial endocarditis) affected his compositions. Nick particularly admired Franz Joseph Haydn's work and described him as “a feisty man but not a snob.” Another topic in which he took a great interest was herpetology, with a clinical focus on snake bites.
Nick brought an ironic sense of humor and a lively wit to all of his undertakings. My first encounter with him was when he was a junior faculty member who was assigned the job of organizing a Thursday grand rounds at Presbyterian at which I was one of the speakers. After it was over, Nick (whom I had never met before) came up to me and described the event as a succès fou (an extraordinary success)—an expression I have always remembered because it was the first and last time I ever heard it used in an academic medical setting. But those two words were harbingers of the Christy I got to know well in later years.
His first wife, Beverly Vairin Morris passed away in 1997. His second wife, Caroline P. Adams and his children Nicholas Pierson (Pete) and Martha Vairin survive him.
During the last year of his life he suffered from cognitive impairment but, despite the serious disabilities he had to endure, he was still able to laugh at life's indignities. Nick died just 6 weeks short of his 91st birthday. In the words of one of his favorite poets, Coleridge (who gave up writing poetry to escape one of the bad ends described by Nick in his President's Address),
The Sun's rim dips; The stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark