In an interview at the Einstein campus in Morris Park, Ozuah and Gottesman spoke about the donation, how it came together and what it would mean for Einstein medical students.

In early 2020, the two sat next to each other on a 6am flight to West Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first time they had spent hours together.

They talked about their childhoods – hers in Baltimore, his, some 30 years later, in Nigeria – and what they had in common. Both had doctorates in education and had spent their careers at the same institution in the Bronx, helping children and families in need.

Ozuah described moving to New York, not knowing a single person in the state, and spending years as a community doctor in the South Bronx before ascending to the top of the medical school.

Leaving the airport, Ozuah offered his arm to Gottesman, then not quite 90, as they approached the curb. She waved him off and told him to “watch your own step”, he recalled with a chuckle.

Within a few weeks, the coronavirus brought the world to a grinding halt. Gottesman’s husband, in his 90s, became ill with the new pathogen, and she had a mild case. Ozuah sent an ambulance to the Gottesman home in Rye, New York, to bring them to Montefiore, the Bronx’s largest hospital.

In the weeks that followed, Ozuah began making daily house calls – in full protective gear – to check in on the couple as David Gottesman recovered. “That’s how the friendship evolved,” he said. “I spent probably every day for about three weeks, visiting them in Rye.”

About three years ago, Ozuah asked Ruth Gottesman to head the medical school’s board of trustees. She had done the job before, but given her age, she was surprised. The gesture reminded her of the fable about the lion and the mouse, she told Ozuah at the time, explaining that when the lion spares the mouse’s life, the mouse tells him, “Maybe someday I’ll be helpful to you”.

In the story, the lion laughs haughtily. “But Phil didn’t go ‘ha, ha, ha’,” she noted with a smile.

The money

Gottesman’s husband died in 2022 at 96. “He left me, unbeknownst to me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” she recalled. The instructions were simple: “Do whatever you think is right with it,” she recalled.

It was overwhelming to think about, so at first she didn’t. But her children encouraged her not to wait too long.

When she focused on the bequest, she realised immediately what she wanted to do, she recalled. “I wanted to fund students at Einstein so that they would receive free tuition.” There was enough money to do that in perpetuity, she said.

Over the years, she had interviewed dozens of prospective Einstein medical students. Tuition is more than $US59,000 a year, and many graduated with crushing medical school debt. According to the school, nearly 50 per cent of its students owed more than $US200,000 after graduating. At most other New York City medical schools, less than 25 per cent of new doctors owed that much.

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Almost half of Einstein’s first-year medical students are New Yorkers, and nearly 60 per cent are women. About 48 per cent of current students are white, 29 per cent are Asian, 11 per cent are Hispanic and 5 per cent are black.

Not only would future students be able to embark on their careers without the debt burden, but she hoped her donation would also enable a wider pool of aspiring doctors to apply. “We have terrific medical students, but this will open it up for many other students whose economic status is such that they wouldn’t even think about going to medical school,” she said.

“That’s what makes me very happy about this gift,” she added. “I have the opportunity not just to help Phil, but to help Montefiore and Einstein in a transformative way – and I’m just so proud and so humbled – both – that I could do it.”

Gottesman went to see Ozuah in December to tell him that she would be making a major gift. She reminded him of the lion and mouse story. This, she explained, was the mouse’s moment.

“If someone said, ‘I’ll give you a transformative gift for the medical school,’ what would you do?” she asked.

There were probably three things, Ozuah said.

“One,” he began, “you could have education be free.”

“That’s what I want to do,” she said. He never mentioned the other ideas.

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Gottesman sometimes wonders what her late husband would have thought of her decision.

“I hope he’s smiling and not frowning,” she said with a chuckle. “But he gave me the opportunity to do this, and I think he would be happy. I hope so.”

Einstein will not be the first medical school to eliminate tuition fees.

In 2018, New York University announced it would begin offering free tuition to medical students and saw a surge in applications.

The name

Gottesman was reluctant to attach her name to her donation. “Nobody needs to know,” Ozuah recalled her saying at first. But Ozuah insisted that others might find her life inspiring. “Here’s somebody who is totally dedicated to the welfare of others and wants no accolades, no recognition,” Ozuah said.

Ozuah noted that the going price for getting your name on a medical school or hospital was perhaps one-fifth of Gottesman’s donation. Cornell Medical College and New York Hospital now include the surname of Sanford Weill, the former head of Citigroup. New York University’s medical centre was renamed for Ken Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot. Both men donated hundreds of millions of dollars.

But it is a condition of Gottesman’s gift that the Einstein College of Medicine not change its name. Albert Einstein, the physicist who developed the theory of relativity, agreed to confer his name on the medical school, which opened in 1955.

The name, she noted, could not be beaten. “We’ve got the gosh darn name – we’ve got Albert Einstein.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.