Robert Martensen

Robert Lawrence Martensen (January 1, 1947, Lake County, Ohio – September 26, 2013, Pasadena, California) was an American physician, historian, and author. Career and publications Martensen worked as physician in emergency department and intensive care unit settings and as a professor at Harvard Medical School, University of Kansas Medical Center and Tulane University, teaching bioethics and medical history. After Hurricane Katrina, he moved to Maryland to work for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as the director of the Office of History. He was a recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship towards the completion of his book The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press. In 2008, Martensen's book A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.