Dr. Eric Shoenfeld, Baldwin Herald's 2010 Person of the Year

When the Herald put out the call for Person of the Year suggestions, Dr. Eric Shoenfeld’s was a name we saw a lot. “He’s everyone’s doctor,” one nominator enthused. “He’s everyone’s father’s doctor, too.”

So, as we always do on matters relating to Baldwin, we consulted Michele Snow, a 36-year Baldwin resident who answers the phones at the Herald offices. Did she know Dr. Shoenfeld?

            “Yes,” Snow said. “He’s my doctor. He’s my father’s doctor, too.”

There aren’t enough fathers’ doctors left in this county — doctors who tend not only to the patient, or the body part, in front of them, but to human beings, families and communities. In an era when having any health care at all can feel like a stroke of luck, the value of a genuine, dedicated general practitioner is incalculable.

Becoming a true generalist in a world of specialization, a world of referrals and re-referrals, requires something of an idealistic streak. Luckily, idealism has always come naturally to Shoenfeld, the Herald’s 2010 Person of the Year. “Social consciousness has always been a part of my life,” says the East Meadow native, who has lived and practiced medicine in Baldwin for 34 years. “The social movements of the ’60s were very important to me, and there was a very healthy attitude to those things in my house.”

  Shoenfeld, an accomplished saxophonist who played with do-wop legends the Tranells in the mid-’60s, also credits musicians like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan with influencing his philosophy on medicine. “Those artists had a real social conscience,” he says, clad in his customary cool garb of a black T-shirt under a blazer. (He sometimes wears a jazz band’s T-shirt under the black one.) “They were never afraid to take a stand for something they believed in.”

Shoenfeld’s stand, in the face of pressure to specialize, incorporate or turn his patients over to hospital care, has been to renew his commitment to his community. He serves as physician for the Oceanside, West Hempstead and Island Park school districts and mentors children in Baldwin schools as well. “All I ever really wanted to do was be a doctor for a community just like Baldwin,” he says with pride.