Stephen A. GellerA Little Piece of Me is my first novel. It is entirely a work of fiction based, in part, on years of experience as a physician. Previously I was co-author of a general pathology book (Grundmann and Geller: Histopathology) and a liver pathology text (Geller and Petrovic: Biopsy Interpretation of the Liver). I was born in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, New York. My mother made sure I had a library card almost as soon as I learned to read and I became a regular visitor to the public library branch a half-mile away. I was educated in the New York City school system, including Walt Whitman Junior High School 246, Stuyvesant High School and Brooklyn College. At Stuyvesant I was co-editor of The Caliper, the literary magazine. I was encouraged to write and had aspirations of becoming an English teacher and author of novels. As a high school senior I volunteered as an orderly on the neuropsychiatry ward at Lenox Hill Hospital and then was an operating room technician for 6 years. I met my wife, Kate, at Lenox Hill, where she was a student nurse. Before starting my senior year of college I realized I wanted to be a physician and became 'pre-med.' I earned my M.D. degree from the Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C. and returned to Lenox Hill for a 'rotating' internship year, following which I was a resident in Pathology at The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, for four years. After residency I served for two years as chief of laboratories at the Naval Hospital, Beaufort, S.C. before returning to Mount Sinai with its new medical school where I eventually became professor and also was acting chairman for 30 months. In 1984 I moved to Los Angeles to be chairman of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a position I held for 22 years. My areas of special expertise are liver pathology, autopsy pathology and the history of pathology and I have published approximately 200 scientific articles, book chapters and monographs. Since my retirement from full-time work I have been living part of the year in Los Angeles and part of the year in New York. I teach part-time at the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, and at UCLA, and devote as much time as possible to writing fiction, including short stories. My second novel, Personal Medicine, is in preparation.