Saul Farber, 88, Dean of NYU School of Medicine
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Saul Farber, who died yesterday at 88, was one of the leading medical educators in the nation and the longest-serving dean in the history of the New York University School of Medicine.
Farber was a noted researcher and advanced medical science by establishing the relationship between the kidneys and two serious diseases, hypertension and congestive heart failure.
He also served on the city’s Board of Health and was instrumental in developing the Do Not Resuscitate statute, which Governor Cuomo signed into law in 1987.
The author of “Lives of a Cell” and his longtime colleague, Lewis Thomas, ranked him among “the best clinician-scientists I have ever encountered.”
Farber was director of medicine at Bellevue Hospital between 1968 and 1998, and maintained his main office on the hospital’s 16th floor even while serving as dean at NYU. Thomas wrote that Farber was “in love with Bellevue — the whole hospital.”
Farber was born at home in a Lower East Side tenement. His devoutly religious parents, immigrants from Lithuania and Russia who had lived in Palestine, soon moved to Boro Park. Farber attended yeshiva school and New Utrecht High School, and retained a great affection for Brooklyn his entire life. He liked to call it “the brain basket of America.”
In 1934, Farber matriculated at NYU, beginning an association that would last nearly three-quarters of a century. He received his medical degree from NYU in 1942 and after an internship in Baltimore served as a physician in the Marine Corps. He helped set up hospitals on islands in the South Pacific after they had been liberated by American troops.
Farber joined the NYU research service as a resident at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in 1947 and moved to Bellevue the next year. He became a fellow in the NYU department of medicine in 1949 and chairman of the department in 1966. He continued in that role until 2000.
Farber first served as acting dean of the School of Medicine – the school’s 13th since its founding – between 1963 and 1966, and subsequently served as acting dean and then dean and provost between 1979 and 1998.
Farber retired from his administrative posts as the soon-to-be-aborted merger of NYU Medical Center and Mount Sinai Medical Center came to fruition. Farber opposed the merger, as did the senior associate dean at NYU, Martin Begun, who retired at the same time. “You could say it is a changing of the guard,” Mr. Begun told Crain’s New York Business in 1997.
“If I were to dramatize his career in a couple of words, I’d say he was a great teacher,” Mr. Begun told The New York Sun yesterday.
Farber liked to regale his third-year students in a gnomic style that some, including his successor as dean, Robert Glickman, compared to that of the great physician William Osler. Others thought the better comparison was to Talmudic texts, to which Farber was devoted. He was given teaching awards by the American College of Physicians and the NYU Alumni Association,
Farber never fully retired, giving lectures until he was slowed in recent months by illness. On September 11, 2001, he turned up at Bellevue’s emergency room, dressed in a tweed coat and leaning heavily on his cane, to see if he could help.
Saul Farber
Born February 11, 1918, in Manhattan; died October 11 at Tisch Hospital; survived by his wife of 57 years, Mary Bunim Farber, his children, Joshua Farber and Beth Farber Loewentheil, and four grandchildren.