“He dictated the entire letter,” he told CNN. “I didn’t write that letter.”
Harold Nelson Bornstein was born on March 3, 1947, in New York City, son of Dr. Jacob and Maida (Seltzer) Bornstein. From a very young age he wanted to be a doctor, like his father. A photograph in his office showed him as a smiling boy holding a stethoscope for what appeared to be a teddy bear, according to a profile of him in 2016 on the medical news website Stat. In high school, he played in a band called Doc Bornstein and the Interns.
Dr. Bornstein went to Tufts, just outside Boston, graduating in 1968 and graduated in medicine from Tufts in 1975. He had a strong loyalty to the university, which 19 members of his family have attended over the years. He was an extravagant figure on campus; he was a good student, albeit irreverent; and wrote poetry under the pseudonym Count Harold.
Dr. Bornstein ended up joining his father in his office in Manhattan and was part of the team at Lenox Hill Hospital, also on the Upper East Side. Her father lived in Jamaica, Queens, near Trump’s childhood home, and a patient of Jacob Bornstein is believed to have introduced them. The oldest Dr. Bornstein died in 2010 at the age of 93.
Dr. Bornstein was proud of the medical concierge practice he ran with his father for more than 50 years. “My biggest successes,” he said in a 2017 interview with a Tufts medical school alumni magazine, “have avoided managed care medicine and refused to have the conservative beard and haircut that my parents considered necessary for success ”.
Dr. Bornstein, who continued to make home visits, had a reputation for being exceptionally considerate of his patients. A former patient, Evan McGlinn, who started seeing him in 1988, said in an interview that visits to the doctor always made him nervous and raised his blood pressure. He said that Dr. Bornstein was aware of this and would leave the exam room, only to reappear with a top hat and a rubber nose.
“It would break me and my blood pressure would return to normal,” said McGlinn, who was a reporter at Forbes magazine at the time.
Dr. Bornstein, who lived north of New York City in Scarsdale, was married three times, most recently to Melissa Brown, who survived him. He also leaves a daughter, Alix; two children who are also doctors, Robyn and Joseph; and two other children, Jeremee and Jackson, according to the published death notice.