Please Come for a Visit!

This year, we’ve seen large gatherings banned. Even visits among family members have often been curtailed. Yet, here we are now on the first Sunday of Advent, preparing for a visit!

In early May 2020, Lillian Yu-Feng Hsu, 87, died in an assisted-living facility in White Plains, New York. Han Chinese, she lived through WWII in China when she was a kid, but later studied medicine in Taiwan. Her next step was a major move to the United States to complete a medical internship. “I knew I had to become educated so I could be totally independent,” she would say later in her memoirs.

In time, she became not only a doctor, but a geneticist in New York for many years. Her research was published in such journals as the American Journal of Medical Genetics and The Journal of Pediatrics. She was often the only foreigner and/or the only woman in her class, office or lab, and she later told her grandchildren about the difficulties of dealing with inconsiderate men while working to the top of her field. She set up the first lab in New York City that performed amniocentesis, setting the international standard for prenatal diagnostic testing.

When she died, none of...