Harold N. Bornstein, Trump’s Former Private Doctor, Dies at 73

“He dictated this whole letter,” he told CNN. “I did not write this letter.”

Harold Nelson Bornstein was born on March 3, 1947 in New York City, the son of Dr. Jacob and Maida (Seltzer) Bornstein were born. Like his father, he wanted to become a doctor from an early age. A photo in his office showed him as a smiling boy holding a stethoscope to a teddy bear, according to a profile of him on the 2016 medical news website. In high school he played in a band called Doc Bornstein and the Interns.

Dr. Bornstein went to Tufts for his bachelor’s degree in 1968, where he graduated in medicine in 1975. He was very attached to the university, which 19 members of his extended family had attended over the years. He made an extravagant figure on campus; was a good student, if disrespectful; and wrote poetry under the pseudonym Count Harold.

Dr. Bornstein eventually joined his father in his Manhattan practice and worked at Lenox Hill Hospital, also on the Upper East Side. His father had once lived in Jamaica, Queens, near Mr. Trump’s youth home, and a patient of Jacob Bornstein is said to have introduced her. The older Dr. Bornstein died in 2010 at the age of 93.

Dr. Bornstein was proud of the concierge practice that he ran with his father for more than 50 years. “My greatest accomplishments,” he said in a 2017 interview with a Tufts Medical School alumni magazine, “have been avoiding managed care medicine and refusing to have the conservative beard and haircut that my parents used considered necessary for success. “

Dr. Bornstein, who continued to make house calls, had a reputation for paying extraordinary attention to his patients. A former patient, Evan McGlinn, who visited him in 1988, said in an interview that visits to the doctor always made him nervous and raised his blood pressure. He said Dr. Bornstein was aware of this and would leave the examination room only to reappear in a cylinder and a rubber nose.

“It would upset me and then my blood pressure would be normal,” said Mr. McGlinn, who was a reporter for Forbes magazine at the time.

Dr. Bornstein, who lived in Scarsdale north of New York City, was married three times, most recently to Melissa Brown, who survived him. He is also survived by a daughter, Alix; two sons who are also doctors, Robyn and Joseph; and two other sons, Jeremee and Jackson, according to the published obituary.

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