In the 30 plus years since leaving his medical practice, Pugliese has continued to dedicate himself to the wellness of the population.

In 1957, just out of medical school, he purchased a 200 acre farm in the country, and established what came to be known simply as The Big House, a 1795 stone farmhouse where Peter and Joanne Pugliese would spend over six decades of family life. The handsome, young doctor quickly grew a strong medical practice.

By the time Pugliese started getting around the skin care world, he had already doctored a generation of patients at his Bernville Medical Clinic; delivering babies, making house calls, occasionally being paid with a shoo-fly pie or homemade quilt. Ahead of the times, he diagnosed and treated patients silently suffering with the same disorders celebrities now openly discuss; anorexia nervosa, postpartum depression, domestic violence, incest, and addiction.

Born in Reading, Pa., the young doctor was proven to be a visionary in his views on community health while serving as the staff physician at Berks County Prison. He began, and self-funded, the first successful methadone clinic to treat heroin addiction, for which more than half of those prisoners were serving time in the late 1960s.

The toxic environment of Reading’s industrial economy led to the intensive research for Dr. Pugliese’s first published article on the lung disorder berylliosis among factory workers. That 1972 article was the beginning of a bibliography of published work which would grow to hundreds of published papers, presentations, and five books, which have been referenced by researchers around the world