TO DIE PEACEFULLY at home at 93, attended by a cherished wife, and four children, and some of seven grandchildren–full of years, as the Bible has it, and loved and esteemed on every side–is given to few. It was the only fit end for Richard L. Masland, an eminent neurologist and faithful man, who slipped away a few days before Christmas, ushered out by pneumonia.

The roomy, rambling, century-old frame house under the tall trees in Englewood, New Jersey, where he died is the one the family moved to in 1968, when Dr. Masland left a top job at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, to head up the neurology department at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. The décor has scarcely changed in 35 years. The last time I visited, a wooden sculpture carved by his daughter Sancie, now pushing 60, as a college girl still sat on the living room mantelpiece; above it was the same embroidered hanging of favorite woodland mushrooms and wildflowers, made by a friend, that had first caught my eye back in Bethesda.