Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) promptly reached out after Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast. With flooding forcing the closing of hospitals, including Tulane University Hospital and School of Medicine in New Orleans, WCMC honored its commitment to supporting health care in areas in crisis by mounting a threefold response on behalf of Katrina victims: medical education, research and patient care.

"Our response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrates our humanitarian commitment," said Dr. Antonio Gotto, dean of the medical college.

Physicians and emergency medical technicians from the Emergency Medicine Department traveled to Biloxi , Miss., on Sept. 14 with mobile medical units and a satellite communications vehicle. The journey was part of Operation Assist, a collaborative project between the Hospital, Children's Health Fund and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

The team's doctors were Wallace Carter, associate professor of emergency medicine; Maria Lupica, assistant professor of pediatrics; Jay Lemery, instructor in medicine; Richard Patrick, chief resident in Emergency Medicine; and Alan Manevitz, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry. Manevitz traveled to the heart of the disaster zone, just as he had after the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Mississippians, he told The New York Times, are just as strong as New Yorkers, except more resourceful -- chopping down trees with buzz saws rather than calling the building "super."

Some of their Gulf Coast patients were critically ill, but most needed prescription refills, tetanus shots and other supportive care in the first days of the aftermath. "We were seeing people disenfranchised from the health-care system and their primary care providers -- patients at the fringes with chronic diseases like diabetes, heart failure and kidney disease," Lemery said. "We were a bridge to get them back into the health-care system."

The medical workers went from home to home in devastated neighborhoods, treating the elderly for heat exhaustion, among other maladies. "The relief work was an amazing experience. People really appreciated that we were there," Lemery said. He recounted alarming, unsettling scenes, such as entire buildings displaced from their foundation, literally thrown across the beach.

"We came across a body that had been in the water since the hurricane. It was very poignant to see death firsthand," he said.

WCMC also has become an academic haven, hosting Tulane medical students Jonathan Elias, Andrew Morchower and Lucius Howell and Louisiana State University graduate student Antoine Panossia. Howell, a first-year graduate student in health sciences at Tulane, is adjusting to the dizzying sequence of events that planted an Alabama boy in New York City. Not a month into his classes at Tulane, he called four or five medical schools after the hurricane to ask if they would accept him. Though most were receptive, Weill Cornell was most attractive because of faculty efforts to secure him housing in Olin Hall. "It has really been great to see the outpouring of affection for New Orleans and all its displaced residents," he said. "I left New Orleans with a backpack of clothes and my dog."

He observed, "It's an amazing, serendipitous route to end up in New York for the semester," he said. "I don't consider myself displaced at all; in fact, I feel fortunate."

In addition, Dr. Albert Dreisbach, who had appointments in pharmacology and nephrology at Tulane, fled New Orleans for drier ground at Weill Cornell, where he had completed a clinical pharmacology fellowship in 1992. "It feels like a homecoming, returning to the division where I did my fellowship 14 years ago," he said. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology.

Dreisbach's New Orleans ranch home was submerged when the levees broke in his neighborhood. He helped with triage efforts to evacuate critically ill patients from Tulane Medical Center, carrying them down the stairs with flashlights after the emergency generators flooded. "The water was getting toxic; it was almost like an open sore," he said.

After the patients and their families were lifted to safety, he and other staff were evacuated by military helicopter Sept. 2. As they left, he recalled, they were fired on by snipers.