Libman
was the son of Fajbal Libman, a prosperous picture-framer who had emigrated from Prussian-Poland in 1865. He studied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1894. He interned at Mount Sinai Hospital 1894 to 1896, and then went abroad for further education in Vienna, Berlin, Graz, Munich and Prague, making valuable contacts with leaders of European medicine. In Vienna he worked with the paediatrician Theodor Escherich (1857-1911), of e-coli fame.Libman was a generalist in an era before specialization. He was legendary for his brusque, dazzlingly fast and unorthodox diagnostic methods. Some attributed his talent to a diagnostic sixth-sense. Sceptics said that he was superficial, or merely a good-guesser. A better observer than a listener, he claimed to be able to smell certain diseases, keenly sought the smallest details, and developed a unique method of applying pressure over patient's mastoids to ascertain their pain threshold. Examination by the famous diagnostician could be harrowing as is illustrated by the following account written by the short-story writer and playwright Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (1893-1973) in The Yorker Magazine (1939)
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