THE ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON FOUNDATION has energized and inspired me for more than three years now. It has been the most noble, challenging and satisfying work I’ve ever known—with one exception. Deep in my heart I am still a physician, a geriatrician, and few things fulfill me more than pulling on my old white lab coat, picking up my stethoscope, sitting down in front of a real patient and asking, “OK, tell me what’s bothering you.”

This past summer I returned to the front lines of patient care at a community health clinic in downtown New Brunswick, about 25 hectic minutes up Route 1 from RWJF’s peaceful campus outside Princeton. The clinic provides health care for thousands of our area’s most vulnerable low-income or uninsured families who turn to the clinic’s doctors and nurses for a full life cycle of medical help, from prenatal to elder care.

These patients present a daunting array of cultural and social problems that, taken together, relentlessly conspire against their own good health. Many are poor, illiterate, living in terrible housing or no housing at all. Their illnesses are chronic and multiple. They advocate fiercely for their own individual care, but in languages many in the health care system do not comprehend. This is a world of medicine that is gritty, intense and intimidating—the kind of medicine I was trained in while in Boston. If what you want to do is help and to heal, this is where you belong.