The field of gastroenterology lost one of its most charismatic figures earlier this year, with the passing of Tom Brasitus, MD. Thomas Albert Brasitus was born in 1945 into a working class family in Scranton, PA, and developed a love of baseball and a curiosity for medicine. Tom worked side jobs throughout college before entering medical school at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, supporting himself as a day trader on the stock market. Tom completed his internal medicine residency at Duke and Cornell and then pursued gastroenterology fellowship training at Beth Israel in Boston.