Irwin Freedberg, 74, NYU Dermatology Department Chairman
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Irwin Freedberg, who died Sunday at 74, was the longtime chairman of New York University’s department of dermatology.
A nationally renowned physician and scientist, he was author of “Fitzpatrick’s Dermatology in General Medicine,” which Archives of Dermatology deemed “the mother of all dermatology textbooks.”
Freedberg’s most salient scientific contributions concerned keratin, skin cancers, and growths known as keratoses. He published hundreds of scientific papers and book chapters.
Freedberg was born in Boston and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, where he joined the faculty as an instructor in 1962. In 1977, he became director of the department of dermatology at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. In 1981, he moved to NYU as chairman of the department of dermatology, a position he held until his death.
Freedberg was often quoted in the press criticizing claims by the manufacturers of cosmetics that purported to eliminate wrinkles or age spots. “If the things you see on the labels of cosmetics had the effects they claimed, they would have to go through the FDA,” he said in 2003. He also challenged doctors who sold such products from their offices, saying they were “a threat to the medical profession.”
Intent on creating scientifically based products as an alternative, Freedberg and three of his NYU colleagues teamed with Pfizer and smaller pharmaceutical companies to research cosmeceuticals.
“They are clearly major problems for those who have them,” Freedberg told USA Today, speaking of liver spots, balding, and wrinkling. “If we’re successful, this will knock off all the snake oils out there because there will be products that work.”
Freedberg had great optimism for the future of his specialty. Speaking at the 19th World Congress of Dermatology in Sydney, Australia, in 1997, he said that in the future, “dermatological therapy will be as unrecognizable to those who follow us as the smelly concoctions of coal tar, balsam of Peru, and sulfur are to us today.”
Irwin Mark Freedberg
Born July 4, 1931, in Boston; died July 17; survived by his wife, Irene (Sybil Lisman) Freedberg, his children, Marjorie Bogdanow, Kenneth Freedberg, and Deborah Freedberg, and seven grandchildren.
