By Tom Long, Globe Staff, 6/10/2004

When he was a first-year student at Harvard Medical School, Jordan B. Fieldman was told a brain tumor would probably would kill him before the year was out.

It didn't.

Dr. Fieldman went on to graduate from medical school and spent the next 15 years sharing his unusual perspective on the doctor-patient relationship, and championing a holistic approach to medical care. The Pittsfield internal medicine specialist died from brain cancer June 1. He was 38.

''One day I was a person; the next day I was a brain tumor. A month later, I was a medical student," Dr. Fieldman said in his valedictory address to the 1995 graduating class at Harvard Medical School. ''When I put on a white jacket, I am a medical student. When I put on a johnny, I am a patient. Although it is the same person underneath different outfits, the words, labels, and costumes can actually affect the way we feel, act, and respond."

Dr. Fieldman said living as a terminal cancer patient while attending medical school gave him ''a foot in each camp." Cancer patients would complain about doctors and doctors would criticize patients, he said.

''Imagine how it might affect the patient-doctor relationship if we acknowledged our common goals and considered our patients, as 'partners in healing,' " he said in the valedictory address.

Dr. Fieldman became an advocate of macrobiotic diets, meditation, and other alternative therapies, which he felt helped bridge his two worlds.

''When Western medicine gives you zero percent survival, you start exploring other options," he told the Globe in 1997. ''It would have been easy for me to obey the odds and do what it says in the textbooks. But I had faith I could overcome it."

A tall, slender man, who was partial to bow ties, Dr. Fieldman always found time to chat with his patients. As part of his training at Berkshire Medical Center he helped staff a clinic for low-income Pittsfield residents.

''He could connect with almost anyone," Dr. Mark C. Pettus of Berkshire Medical Center said yesterday. ''He always saw the person in the patient and never reduced anyone to a stereotype. Consequently, nobody ever missed an appointment with Dr. Fieldman."

Dr. Fieldman was born in Montreal. He graduated from Harvard College in 1987. As an undergraduate, before his cancer diagnosis, he spent six months in Nepal studying meditation.

''He always had a scientific bent," his father, Michael of New York City, said. ''When he was 2, he knew all the models of all the cars. When he was 4 years old he organized his library by the Dewey Decimal System . . . and I didn't even know what it was."

Michael, an architect, said his son once told him that he didn't want to become an architect because the work seemed like such a struggle. The practice of medicine was not a struggle for Dr. Fieldman, he was a natural. ''He was a humanist of the first order," said his father.

In addition to practicing in Pittsfield, Dr. Fieldman was a trustee of the Mass. Medical Society and was a member of its committee on publications, which oversees the New England Journal of Medicine. He taught at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox and hosted a weekly show on Pittsfield Community Television called ''Healing People."

''You know how some people find it difficult to look at you?" asked his father. ''Well, you could not escape his gaze. He looked you right in your eye and held your attention. We would be sitting in a restaurant in Pittsfield and somebody would ask a question and the next thing you knew he would be locked in an intense conversation with somebody he'd just met."

In addition to his father, Dr. Fieldman leaves his mother, Andrea Fieldman of Montreal; a brother, Anthony of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and his grandparents, Eva Fieldman and Eli and Pat Yaphe, all of Montreal. A memorial service was held in Lenox.

This story ran on page C15 of the Boston Globe on 6/10/2004. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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