Raymond Reitzel was born on a homestead in the days of sod houses near Mitchell, South Dakota, in 1888. Later the family moved to a farm near Sterling, Ill., where Reitzel graduated from Sterling High School. After attending North Central College near Chicago for one year, he enrolled at Cornell. While at Cornell in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, Reitzel was a three-sport athlete in football, basketball, and baseball. After college, the YMCA employed Reitzel, sending him to Europe in 1916, Russia in 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution, and later to Siberia. There he met Gail Berg, his future wife, who encouraged him to attend medical school. After graduating from Harvard University, Dr. Reitzel taught at the University of Texas Medical School for six years. Following that, he became director of laboratories at San Francisco General Hospital and on the teaching staff of the University of California Medical School in clinical pathology, remaining there until his retirement in 1956. In 1957, Dr. Reitzel traveled to Indonesia with a team of doctors to teach bedside diagnosis at the University of Indonesia. Dr. Reitzel attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church where he sang in the choir for 40 years. He met his friends from Cornell once a year in San Mateo. In 1973, Dr. Reitzel was awarded the Cornell Alumni Achievement Award for helping fellow human beings both here and abroad and for imparting his medical knowledge and nurturing similar desires among students. Dr. Reitzel wrote his autobiography, "All in a Lifetime," recalling many humorous experiences from his travels. “Being a doctor was everything to me. You had to do research, and pump every source you could find for information about each medical situation. Most medical students today, if they really want to be doctors, have the same commitment to ideals as earlier generations.” Dr. Reitzel died in San Mateo, California, in 1986, at the age of 98 years old.