In Memoriam Nancy Thomson, MD Ralph O. Wallerstein, MD Dr. Ralph O. Wallerstein was born in Dusseldorf, Germany, on March 7, 1922, and died June 1, 2009, at his vacation home in Glen Ellen after a long illness. He was 87. He had a long and interesting medical career and was a researcher, teacher, healer, and an important figure in local and national medicine. Dr. Wallerstein’s father, also a physician, brought his family to San Francisco from Aachen, Germany, in 1938. Young Ralph graduated from Lowell High School in 1939, from U.C. Berkeley in 1943, and from UCSF Medical School in 1945, an unusually swift pace because of the World War II need for physicians. After interning at S.F. General Hospital, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in Japan from 1946 to 1948. Upon return he had postdoctoral training as a research and teaching fellow in hematology at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory, Harvard Medical Service, under Dr. William Castle at Boston City Hospital. Dr. Wallerstein joined the San Francisco Medical Society in 1949 and held increasingly responsible positions at UCSF and Children’s Hospital (later the California campus of CPMC), where he served as chief of staff from 1968 to 1972 and was chosen Physician of the Year at Children’s in 1989. He was a hematology consultant to Letterman Army Hospital and the V.A. hospitals, receiving the Outstanding Civilian Service medal from the Army in 1981. For nearly thirty years, from 1952 to 1981, Dr. Wallerstein was chief of clinical hematology at San Francisco General Hospital. He received the Charlotte Baer Award for outstanding teaching at UCSF in 1996. He was appointed clinical professor of medicine and laboratory medicine at UCSF in 1969 and, on retirement, named Emeritus Professor. He also maintained a busy private practice both as a hematologist and an internist. In 1964 he diagnosed the importance of the Rh protein in pregnancy and helped pioneer the treatments that produce a healthy baby. Dr. Lloyd H. Smith, associate dean emeritus of UCSF medical school, called Dr. Wallerstein a “superb generalist at a time when narrow specialization has become the mode.” Smith also called him “a delightful humanist and scholar and a natural leader.” Former U.C. Chancellor Dr. Julius Krevans remembered Dr.Wallerstein as a leader in medicine who was “absolutely devoted both to his patients and to the extremely important organizations on which he served.” According to Krevans, it was highly unusual for a physician in private practice to be asked to serve on the American Board of Internal Medicine, which is largely dominated by academic physicians. However, Dr. Wallerstein, who had joined in 1971, served as chairman of the organization’s Board of Governors in 1982 and 1983. He was also a member of the American Society of Hematology since 1960 and was its president in 1978. Ten years later he was elected President of the American College of Physicians, where he had been a member since 1953. He was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National
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Academy of Sciences, in 1982. After retiring, Dr. Wallerstein enjoyed travel and photography. He had several shows of his photographs and was published in several medical magazines. He was on the board of directors of the Fromm Institute of Lifelong Learning and enjoyed both the opera and the symphony. He was married for fifty-six years to Betty Christensen Wallerstein, whom he met while training in Boston. Their son, Dr. Ralph O. Wallerstein, Jr., predeceased him in 1996. He is survived by his wife, Betty, his son Richard and wife Lisa of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey; his daughter Ann Story and husband Ray of Fairfield, California; and seven grandchildren and one great-grandson. This obituary was adapted from a longer piece that originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Thomas R. Vaughan, MD
Dr. Thomas R. Vaughan, age 72, died November 30, 2009, at his home in Novato, after living with pancreatic cancer for more than a year. He was born June 18, 1937, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and grew up in Bronxville, New York. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and went on to Yale, where he decided to make medicine his career. He graduated from Cornell Medical School in 1964. Following his internship and his residency in internal medicine, he joined the staff of St. Francis Memorial Hospital. Dr. Vaughan served as chief of staff and on the hospital’s board. In addition, he was a fellow at UCSF’s Cardiovascular Research Institute and later a clinical professor and a staff physician at San Francisco Veterans Hospital. He joined the San Francisco Medical society in 1974 and was a member of the American Thoracic Society and the American College of Chest Physicians. In recent years, he practiced at Kaiser in San Rafael as a pulmonologist and critical care specialist retiring in 2009. Dr. Vaughan enjoyed teaching, and his ongoing intellectual curiosity kept him engaged in life, sharing his professional knowledge with his colleagues. However, he had many other passions in addition. He had a great love of the outdoors and appreciated the natural beauty of places near and far. At Yale he had gone out for crew, developing a lifelong love of rowing. He spent many mornings training in his singleshell kayak. He ran countless miles on the trails of Mt. Tamalpais and in the Tiburon hills, often accompanied by one of his beloved, naughty dogs. He traveled extensively, usually centering his trips on an athletic endeavor: mountain climbing, bicycling country roads, or kayaking beautiful waters. Ten years ago, he put his love of music into practice and began playing the flute, which brought him immeasurable joy. He was appreciated for his quiet wisdom, dry wit, unassuming kindness, and his overall humility. He is survived by his wife, Anne Sasaki; his sister, Cynthia Urfer; his three children, Geoffrey, Elizabeth, and Peter Vaughan; his former wife and mother of his children, Judy Vaughan; and six grandsons. www.sfms.org