Abraham spoke of his life journey on Sunday. I met him at his handsome home amid stands of oaks and the vineyards of Harborcreek, Pa., and we drove to Erie and sat in his S.U.V. outside UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, which sits on a bluff overlooking the gray-white chop of Lake Erie. This was Abraham’s professional home. He worked 100-hour weeks here, loving the challenge, the camaraderie, the purity of each birth. When he resigned in 2018, his partners, women and men, put their heads on his big shoulders and sobbed.

He felt himself in a bad dream, and that he had no choice.

He had for several years tried to ignore the gathering clouds in his brain. He learned to fill his daily phone calendar to overflowing, dozens upon dozens of reminders. He forgot the names of patients and nurses. He misplaced his pager and lost his hospital badge. He attributed this to the wages of too many hours and stresses. He downloaded apps so that he’d know which antibiotics to prescribe, which birth control pills to recommend. Some days, by evening, he grew scared and he would think to himself: Tomorrow I’ve got to see someone about this.

He would forget that by the time he awoke.

“I had been lying to the nurses and tell them I had to pee so that I could go and look up how to finish a surgery,” he said. “Finally I said enough. No more.”

To talk of his present is to wind back to his past, and to football. His memory is of hit upon hit upon hit, that was life on an offensive line. His experience is consistent with the direction of much of the new research. Football’s threat to the brain now is less about concussions, those most catastrophic of head collisions, than repeated hits, the sheer repetitive smacking around of the brain inside the skull. Boston University’s C.T.E. center has estimated that the average college football player experiences 800-1,000 hits in a single season.

The rituals of practice pour fuel on the fires of aggression. Abraham recalled bull in the ring, that most primal of football drills. The players would form a circle and a player would step into the middle, shuffling feet, eyes darting, as player after player hurtled at the “bull,” smacking pads, cracking helmets. Sometimes Abraham would fall to the ground, his head spinning.

The training grew tougher in college. Abraham was no small fellow, 6-foot-1 and 260 pounds, and for his size quick as a panther. But at Duquesne, for the first time, he found himself facing bigger, stouter, faster players, and coaches who demanded freshmen prove themselves by facing off against the junior and senior starters. “They wanted to see who was not afraid to hit and get hit,” he said. “Man, there were guys with biceps the size of my head.”

As they clanked and whacked, he said, the coaches yelled: “Don’t be a sissy, hit him!”

This is not to suggest Duquesne was particularly brutal. These are simply the wages of major college football.