Deaths

Deaths

Janet Elaine Adkins, 54, Alzheimer's patient, suicide aided by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, 12 June 1990.

Lyle Martin Alzado, 43, professional football player for the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and Oakland Raiders, who developed brain cancer thought to be caused by steroids taken to build up his body and increase his strength, 14 May 1992.

Arthur Ashe, 49, African American tennis star who acquired AIDS through a blood transfusion in 1983 during a heart surgery, 6 February 1993.

Oscar Auerbach, 92, American pathologist who examined thousands of slides of human lung tissue to document the anatomical link between smoking and lung cancer, 15 January 1997.

Charles P. Bailey, 82, pioneering heart surgeon; first person to repair a hole between the two sides of the heart; preformed first closed mitral valve operation in the United States, 18 August 1992.

Theodore H. Benzinger, 94, inventor of the ear thermometer, 26 October 1999.

Kimberly Ann Bergalis, 23, first patient known to be infected with AIDS by a medical caregiver, in this case by bisexual dentist Dr. David Acer, in Florida, 8 December 1991.

Leroy Edgar Burney, 91, Surgeon General (1956-1961) and first in the office to implicate smoking as a cause for lung cancer; established the National Library of Medicine (1956) and National Center for Health Statistics (1960), 31 July 1998.

Michelle Siarra Carew, 18, from leukemia while awaiting bone marrow transplant; daughter of baseball great Rod Carew, who became an advocate for minority and biracial transplant candidates, 17 April 1996.

John J. Conley, 87, New York otolaryngologist, developed operations for improving the speech of patients who had lost their voice boxes to cancer and for reconstruction of the jawbone after loss of the bone to cancer, 21 September 1999.

Norman Cousins, 78, holistic health pioneer and editor of The Saturday Review (1942-1972), 30 November 1990.

Hugh J. Davis, 69, developer of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine birth-control device, which was recalled in 1984 after eighteen patients using the device died, 23 October 1996.

Charles Dederich Sr., 83, founder of the drug rehabilitation program Synanon, 2 March 1997.

Gertrude Belle Elion, 81, researcher and Nobel Prize winner (1988) who helped develop the first drug to combat leukemia and herpes effectively, and oversaw the development of the and-AIDS drug AZT, 21 February 1999.

Robert H. Finch, 70, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (1969-1970) under President Richard M. Nixon, 10 October 1995.

Josephine Smith Fox, 92, pioneer in developing swimming therapy for the disabled, 16 September 1999.

Ray Fuller, 60, codeveloper of the antidepressant drug Prozac, 11 August 1996.

Gerald E. Gaull, 66, pediatrician who identified taurine, the amino acid in milk important in brain development, 1 April 1997.

Elizabeth Glaser, 47, AIDS activist, wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser and speaker at the 1992 Democratic National Convention; became HIV positive in 1981 after a blood transfusion following the birth of her child; galvanized the Hollywood anti-AIDS community, 3 December 1994.

Janet Good, 73, aide to Jack Kevorkian, championed the right to die and began the Hemlock Society chapter in Michigan; suffered from pancreatic cancer and appears to have taken her own life, 26 August 1997.

Robert Klark Graham, 90, optical physicist who developed shatterproof plastic eyeglass lenses and established a controversial sperm bank that included donations collected from Nobel Prize winners, 13 February 1997.

Arthur B. Hardy, 78, psychiatrist who pioneered treatment of agoraphobia (fear of going outdoors), 26 October 1991.

Robert G. Heath, 84, found a protein antibody called taraxein in the blood of schizophrenics, providing early evidence that the disease was of biochemical origin, 21 September 1999.

Christy Henrich, 22, world-class gymnast, of multiple organ failure caused by anorexia nervosa; weighed only sixty pounds at the time of her death, 26 July 1994.

Oveta Culp Hobby, 90, first secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (1953-1955), 16 August 1995.

Hamilton Holmes, 54, orthopedic surgeon who in 1961 became one of first African Americans admitted to the University of Georgia, 26 October 1995.

Evelyn Hooker, 89, UCLA psychologist whose research in the 1950s led to the removal of homosexuality as a psychological disorder by the American Psychiatric Association from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 18 November 1996.

Walter Hudson, 46, at 1,400 pounds he was the fattest man in the world in 1987; although he lost 800 pounds, he regained the weight to 1,125 pounds at the time of his death, 24 December 1991.

Charles Brenton Huggins, 95, Canadian-born medical researcher who won the Nobel Prize (1966) for hormone studies leading to the use of drug therapy in cancer, 12 January 1997.

Richard Joseph Hughes, 83, former Governor (1962-1970) and Chief Justice of New Jersey (1973-1981), who had ruled that the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan be allowed to remove her from life support in 1975, upholding the right to refuse medical treatment, 7 December 1992.

James J. Humes, 74, lead pathologist during the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy, 6 May 1999.

Nathaniel Kleitman, 104, physiology professor at the University of Chicago, pioneer sleep expert and codiscoverer of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep in 1953; established sleep research as a separate medical field, 13 August 1999.

Sarah Knauss, 119, the oldest person in the world at the time of her death, in Pennsylvania, 30 December 1999.

Margaret E. "Maggie" Kuhn, 89, crusader against age discrimination and in 1970 one of the founders of the Gray Panthers, 22 April 1995.

Rose Kushner, 60, crusader for women with breast cancer, who worked for obtaining a less-radical surgery for treatment of that disease, 7 January 1990.

Mary Lasker, 93, philanthropist, in 1942 founded the Lasker Foundation with her husband, Albert. The Lasker Awards annually recognize advances in medicine, 21 February 1994.

Morton L. Levin, 91, epidemiologist and one of the first medical researchers to link tobacco and lung cancer (Journal of the American Medical Association, 1950), 7 July 1995.

C. Walton Lillehei, 80, surgical pioneer who performed the first successful open-heart surgery on a five-year-old girl (1952), 5 July 1999.

Jonathan Mann, 51 , founder of the Global Program on AIDS (1986) of the World Health Organization (WHO), and his wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, a professor of international health, on the Swiss Air Flight 111 crash, 2 September 1998.

Shirley Ardell Mason, 75, the real-life model for "Sybil," the first well-publicized multiple personality disorder (MPD) patient, 26 February 1999.

Jean Mayer, 72, nutritionist who was a pioneer researcher in the relationship between food and poverty, aging, and obesity; established the first U.S. school of nutrition at Tufts University, 1 January 1993.

Barbara McClintock, 90, geneticist, revolutionized genetic science by showing that heredity can work in dynamic and irregular ways; received the Nobel Prize (1983), 2 September 1992.

Karl A. Menninger, 96, father of American psychiatry and in 1925 cofounder, with his father, C. J,, and brother, Will, of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, 18 July 1990.

Anne Sheafe Miller, 90, believed to be the first patient in the United States saved by penicillin (1942), when it was still an experimental drug, 7 June 1999.

Victor Mills, 100, inventor of the disposable diaper, 1 November 1997.

Richard Overholt, 88, chest surgeon and pioneer in U.S. anti-smoking crusade, 16 July 1990.

Linus Carl Pauling, 93, a two-time winner of the Nobel Prize (1954, 1962), advocated vitamin C as a preventive and virtual cure-all, 19 August 1994.

John Peters, 67, supreme medicine man for the Wampanoag Nation who fought for legislation recognizing such Native American customs as the ritual use of peyote, 10 November 1997.

Joseph Quinlan, 71, pioneer of the right-to-die movement, who led a successful legal crusade to allow his daughter Karen Ann Quinlan to "die with dignity" after she slipped into a coma, 7 December 1996.

David Platt Rail, 73, toxicologist, Assistant Surgeon General (1971-1990), and pioneer in the environmental health field; former associate scientific director of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland; and founding director of the National Toxicology Program, 28 September 1999.

Richard "Ricky" Ray, 15, AIDS patient who, along with his two brothers, was barred from school in Arcadia, Florida, after becoming HIV positive during hemophilia treatments, 13 December 1992.

Albert Bruce Sabin, 86, microbiologist, developer of the oral polio vaccine, 3 March 1993.

Jonas Salk, 80, virologist, developed the first polio vaccine in 1955, 23 June 1995.

Harold Glendon Scheie, 80, noted ophthalmologist and founder of the Scheie Eye Institute adjacent to Presbyterian Hospital, Pennsylvania; treated and saved the eye of Lord Louis Mountbatten in the China-Burma-India theater in World War II; in 1964 he retired as a Brigadier General from the U.S. Army, 5 March 1990.

Jeffrey Sehmalz, 39, New York Times reporter who wrote movingly of his fight against AIDS, 6 November 1993.

Florence Barbara Seibert, 93, biochemist who invented the process that made intravenous transfusions safe and refined an accurate skin test for tuberculosis, 23 August 1991.

Elizabeth Sherouse, 26, thought to be the first female prostitute in the United States charged with attempted man-slaughter for risking transmission of AIDS to her clients, 22 January 1990.

John L. Simon, 86, psychiatrist who served as a medic during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and as assistant to the surgeon of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner, 86, pioneer of behavioral psychology and inventor of the "Skinner Box," 18 August 1990.

George Davis Snell, 92, Nobel Prize-winning biologist whose work on mouse genetics laid the basis for organ transplantation, 6 June 1996.

George Speri Sperti, 91, inventor of Preparation H hemorrhoid treatment and Aspercreme for arthritis relief, 29 April 1991.

Benjamin Spock, 94, revolutionized child care with The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), which sold almost fifty million copies. He later was a strong antiwar protestor, feeling that this continued his support of the lives of the children he helped rear, 15 March 1998.

Philip Strax, 90, championed early detection of breast cancer and helped lead the sixty-two thousand woman study in 1960 that found that mammography could reduce fatalities, 8 March 1999.

Michael Sveda, 87, researcher who discovered the sugar-substitute cyclamate (1937), 10 August 1999.

Michel M. Ter-Pogossian, 71, scientist who led the team that made the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner into a practical diagnostic tool, 19 June 1996.

Lewis Thomas, 80, scientist and writer of The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979), which unlocked the mysteries of life for a broad audience, 3 December 1993.

William B. Walsh, 76, heart specialist, former physician to President Owight D. Eisenhower, founder of Project HOPE (1958); he was the first American physician on the ground to treat victims after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (6 August 1945) at the end of World War II, 27 December 1996.

Josef Warkany, 90, pediatrician, who in 1940 demonstrated that dietary deficiencies in mothers during pregnancy could cause birth defects, 22 June 1992.

Karen E. Wetterhahn, 48, chemistry professor at Dartmouth College, who studied how toxic metals inhibit DNA repair, from exposure in her lab to a rare mercury compound, 8 June 1997.

Carrie C. (Joyner) White, 116, in Palatka, Florida, the oldest living person in the world at the time of her death, 14 February 1991.

Allan C. Wilson, 56, leading researcher on human evolution and author of theory that all humans descended from one woman in Africa two hundred thousand years ago, 21 July 1991.

Ernst Wynder, 77, co-authored the 1950 landmark study linking cigarettes and lung cancer, 14 July 1999.