Ron Roessler ’96 Is Both an ER Doctor and a Latin Teacher

As a senior at Princeton, Ron Roessler ’96 wrote his thesis on Horace’s concept of the golden mean, the idea that “you get fulfillment in life through moderation,” as he describes the Roman poet’s philosophy. “Any one thing taken to an extreme isn’t going to make you as happy as you thought it would,” Roessler explains.

The idea resonated with Roessler, who fell in love with Latin as a freshman in high school but also wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Instead of leaning hard into one field, he took Horace’s advice and balanced both. Recently he co-published a book where the two came together: Arbor Medicinae: Latin Roots of Medical Terms.

At Princeton, Roessler majored in classics, took the courses required for medical school, worked in the Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad as an EMT, and as a senior completed Princeton’s Teacher Preparation Program.

He went on to graduate from Northwestern University’s medical school in 2000. But rather than go into neurosurgery, he opted for emergency medicine, a field that allows doctors more predictable hours than those in many specialties because they have scheduled if often erratic hours and aren’t on call. Once again, he was thinking of balance.

“I wanted to be married, have kids, coach sports and academic teams, and pursue my career passions,” says Roessler, who with his wife Anita has two children, Amanda, now a graduate student in museum studies at Harvard, and David, a Princeton undergrad.

Roessler and Anita moved to the Milwaukee area for his residency. There, one of Roessler’s supervising physicians told him about Brookfield Academy, a prep school that mandated Latin starting in middle school and sent students to the same Latin competitions Roessler attended when he was in high school. He and his wife ended up sending their children to the school.

Their daughter started taking Latin in seventh grade and also wanted to participate in Certamen, a team-based quiz bowl competition where middle and high school students answer questions about Latin grammar, mythology, history, and culture. Roessler volunteered to start a middle school Certamen program and then greatly expanded the high school’s program.

“I absolutely loved teaching,” a passion sparked at Princeton, he says. “Just about my entire adult life I almost had a guilt complex because I didn’t go into teaching. I think about what my high school Latin teacher did for me, and I felt I had to pay that forward to other students.”

Roessler ended up coaching not just multiple Certamen teams at Brookfield but Wisconsin’s all-star Certamen teams. He also coaches students for other Latin competitions, teaches multiple free classics seminars for students all over Wisconsin, and is a substitute Latin teacher at Brookfield. In 2023, Roessler started an online tutoring business that offers videos and study guides as well as tutoring for students in classroom Latin or the extracurricular competitions.

It was two students Roessler tutored, brothers Eshaan and Krish Vasudev, who proposed writing a book on the Latin origins of many medical terms with Roessler. The volume was published digitally in February. “It was a passion project for me, but my student wanted to find a publisher,” Roessler says.

The book done, Roessler is continuing with both Latin and his medical practice. On one recent day, he says, “I worked overnight in the ER for eight hours and shocked someone’s heart back to life, then slept for a few hours, spent an hour planning a trip to Greece, where I plan to run my first marathon from Marathon to Athens, and the next couple of hours helping one student translate Caesar and prepping several others for a national Certamen competition.” As always, balance.