Corey / Sarah

Sarah and Corey in their 9th grade yearbook, 1968.

Corey taking a close look in the woods on a weekend away from Harvard.

Corey shooting in a snow storm in sub-zero temperatures in Yellowstone, winter 2024.

Coyote, Canis latrans.

Trumpeter Swan, Cygnus buccinator.

Sarah circa 2022.

01-28-2025

Corey Raffel talks to his old junior and senior high school friend and Harvard classmate Sarah Webster Goodwin about his thrilling — and sometimes harrowing — life as a pediatric brain surgeon.

“My mom used to say, ‘You have such big hands — how do they fit inside a child’s head?’” Correy Raffel laughs at the memory. “Well, of course, you’re not putting your hands inside the head. You’re resting your hands on the edges of the hole in the skull that you made. And holding instruments between your index finger and your thumb, and those very fine instruments are what you pass down into the brain.”

Such is the life of a pediatric brain surgeon, as Corey tells old friend and classmate Sarah Webster Goodwin in this riveting episode of PasstheMic75.

Corey had no intention of becoming a doctor when he entered Harvard; he wanted to be a marine biologist. But his path led to med school where his life changed forever during a two-week rotation in neurosurgery. “The first day I went into the operating room, I’m watching and maybe daydreaming a little bit, and I look over—and I’m looking at the surface of a human brain! And it’s pulsing! It’s alive! And it had to be the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

That was the beginning of a distinguished career that took him from the University of California, San Francisco, to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio and back to the Bay Area again. “I got to see that amazing sight of the pulsing human brain under the OR lights a few of times a week,” he says. “It was really something.”

Now retired, Corey is pursuing his love of wildlife photography—focusing particularly on parrots, donating his prizewinning work to his favorite conservation organizations. It’s the final anecdote in a thoroughly entertaining and illuminating conversation.