David Posnett’s Gifts From the Sea
(02/17/2009) One has often heard of medical doctors
 Morgan McGivern
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playing musical instruments, or some who paint, but when was the last time one knew of a doctor, a hematologist, oncologist, teacher, and researcher at that, who became a jeweler on the side?
One such phenomenon is David Posnett, who was born in 1948 in Kampala, Uganda, to an English-Methodist father and a Swiss-Jewish mother from an artistic family. The family left Africa in 1955 for Switzerland, where he was brought up by his mother in Geneva and Zurich. With English as a first language — primary school in Geneva was in English — by the time he was a young man, he knew French and German as well (high school was in German).
Having to decide at the end of high school what career he wanted to pursue, he was torn between art and medicine. “It’s always been lurking there . . . as a young boy in middle school, I struggled in deciding what I wanted to do,” he said. His mother encouraged him, his brother, and sister to be interested in and adept at art: “At home my mother urged us to draw and read art books,” he added. She drew and painted and his maternal grandmother did, too. His mother’s circle of friends was filled with artists.
Many students his age were choosing medicine and, in spite of his interest in art, his mother as well as the rest of his family wanted very much for him to become a doctor. “I was drawn to the idea of a career as an artist, but I thought that was too dangerous,” Dr. Posnett said.
For six and a half years he went to medical school at the University of Geneva School of Medicine and lived with a French family, which helped him adapt to his courses, all of which were in French. While in medical school, he also took art classes on the side at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
In 1975, having earned a medical degree, Dr. Posnett took his internship and residency, in internal medicine, at Vanderbilt University. He did research in immunology with a famous immunologist call ed Harvey Kunkel, and was a clinical fellow in hematology and oncology at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (now New York Presbyterian Hospital), which involved taking care of patients with cancer and blood disorders.
After 1985, Dr. Posnett was on the faculty at Cornell and headed a research lab funded mainly by the National Institutes of Health and also took care of patients on the wards and in the clinics of New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Being an intern and resident, however, did not leave him any time for art and he “let that whole side slip away,” he said, until after his divorce, which left him feeling liberated. In 2001, he looked at a catalog of classes at the 92nd Street Y, “thinking I would draw nudes, but quickly realizing that they had lots of other things, too, even jewelry.”
He signed up for a beginner’s class with Jonathan Wahl, and “I thought this was really cool,” he said. “I had always done carpentry and liked doing things with my hands,” he said. He began to take classes, not only in jewelry design and craft but also silver and goldsmithing.
Dr. Posnett bought a house on Maidstone Park Road near the beach in 1980, where he and his family have collected stones, shells, and glass. He lives there now with his second wife, Maria, and their daughter. Because of his love of nature, it seemed a natural step to use the materials deposited by nature for his jewelry. “I said, hey, wouldn’t it be great to learn to make jewelry with all my rocks.” So he bought a tumbler and polished his stones over a four-week period, the first week with rough grit, working his way week by week to finer and finer grit until the stones were ready. “The first thing we would do when we came out would be to check the tumblers; we have nine now,” he said.
At the end of 2005, he began his own company and started a Web site, which made it possible for people to see his line of jewelry. Although he has lots of necklaces, rings, earrings, and other kinds of pendants for people to choose from, much of what Dr. Posnett sells people is custom designed and made. He made his own photo box in which he arranges his jewelry to photograph, providing illustrations for his Web site and fliers.
“I have a mailing list of 400 people; I get a lot of repeat customers,” he said, but, oddly enough, his jewelry does not sell particularly well at fairs. “It is very hard to make a living at this,” he admitted. He is also a member of the South Fork Craftsmen’s Guild.
Dr. Posnett started a line of wedding jewelry, in part a reaction to the economy, figuring that recession notwithstanding, people still get married — and that his prices are reasonable. He uses a technique called marriage of metals, mixing gold and silver, to make wedding rings. He recently posted a blog on his Web site discussing the history, lore, and rituals of wedding rings.
He also learned how to use two-ton epoxy, used to repair boats, on the jingle shells he makes earrings from. “With the epoxy on the shells,” he said, “you can sit on them and they won’t break.” The epoxy can also be mixed with pigment and made to look like semiprecious stones.
So, all in all, it is lucky he kept his day job and, as of last year, his third in the business, he covered his own expenses. Although he no longer sees patients, once a year he teaches hematology and oncology to second-year medical students at a school in Quatar, consults, sits on editorial boards of medical journals, obtains patents, and continues to write articles for medical journals and books.
He is redoing his Web site, maidstonejewelry.com, and advertising with TheKnot.com, a popular wedding Web site. Dr. Posnett also uses precious and semiprecious stones in his jewelry, as well as antique nails, copper, brass, gold, platinum, and silver.
On Monday at 7:30 p.m. at a meeting of the Suffolk Gem and Mineral Club in Bay Shore, Dr. Posnett will give a presentation on “Beach Stones of Long Island,” which will include information on the mineral nature and origin of the stones, and how to work with them to produce jewelry.