Our Story
The idea for this site arose during a conversation with my good friend Russell W. Steele, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and jazz musician (aka, Dr. Jazz) in New Orleans. He described a program he helped start, providing health care and counseling at a shelter for runaway teens. Medical residents and nurses donated time, drug companies donated medicines, and teens got treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and other problems they faced. I was so touched, I wanted to share his story with the world. When others heard about this, I reasoned, they might be inspired to create or support similar programs appropriate to the disadvantaged populations in their own cities and towns.
The series thus began on Medscape in 2001 as “Angels in Our Midst.” After a request for “Angels” went out in Medscape’s weekly email, three editors — Vicki Porter, Hope Vanderberg, and Zoe Gollogly — enthusiastically wrote about some of the people and programs readers shared with us.
When I left Medscape, the publisher was kind enough to allow me to reprint those stories (You can read those original stories here: Angels in Our Midst), and continue the series on my own site, which I renamed “Angels in Medicine.” I and a group of volunteer writers continued the mission of highlighting the incredible work people in healthcare do to improve the health of the world.
Some of the groups we covered in the early years are still active twenty years later! These include Danielle Butin and the Afya Foundation, an organization that finds a home for unused medical supplies and equipment, and Patty Webster and Amazon Promise, providing medical care to poor communities in Iquitos and the Peruvian Amazon.
The work continues to this day, 25 years since we began, reprinting articles from humanitarian medical organizations, with their permission, and publishing original articles by volunteer writers. Over this time, more than 40 writers — doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists and medical writers —volunteered their time and skill to interview and write about people they admire: the medical humanitarians caring for people with little access to quality healthcare, including the homeless, refugees, the incarcerated, and those in poor and war-torn parts of the globe.
As of 2026, we have posted more than 550 articles, reporting on more than 35 organizations working in more than 85 countries around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including most states in the U.S. The range of topics we’ve covered includes African sleeping sickness and other neglected tropical diseases, healthcare for the homeless, preventable blindness, many types of cancer (breast, cervical, colon and liver), and vaccination to prevent infectious diseases and cancers.
Thanks for taking the time to visit. Please share this site with others.
— Harry Goldhagen, Editor
About the Editor
Harry Goldhagen worked as a medical editor for over 30 years for numerous print and online publications, including Scientific American Medicine, Infections in Medicine, and Medscape/WebMD. He studied biochemistry and journalism at SUNY Stony Brook, and pursued graduate research in molecular biology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx before turning to writing and editing. He also has pursued fiction writing and filmmaking, which can be viewed at www.harryllama.com.
Harry makes his home in the village of East Fairfield, Vermont.