Sherman Mellinkoff died at home in Los Angeles on July 17, 2016, after a long, productive, and distinguished career. He had served as dean of the UCLA School of Medicine for 24 years, from 1962 to 1986, in what must have been a record for deanships, at least in modern times. He was a long-standing and devoted member of the Climatological.
Sherm grew up in California and received his medical degree at Stanford University. His residency training started at Stanford and culminated in the chief residency on the Osler Medical Service at Johns Hopkins, punctuated by military service in Korea. Following his residency, he pursued a fellowship in gastroenterology at the University of Pennsylvania. He developed an early interest in liver disease and wrote extensively on a variety of topics, including carbohydrate metabolism, medical education, residency training, the responsibilities of medicine, and many other subjects. He was a deeply cultured man and this was often reflected in his talks and papers. His initial paper at the Climatological, written with Philip Tumulty, a mentor at Hopkins and Climatological member, was on hepatic hypoglycemia in congestive heart failure. It was clear early in his career that he was an uncommonly scholarly, observant, and inquisitive clinician, characteristics that extended even to observing that his infant daughter developed a patch of sweat on her knee when she was feeding, a phenomenon that led Sherm to the literature on sympathetic innervation of the sweat glands and, together with his beloved wife June, a nurse, publication in JAMA of a paper entitled “Gustatory Hyperhydrosis of the Left Knee,” a careful consideration of the phenomenon and its physiological implications.
In 1953, following his residency training and a short stint on the Hopkins faculty, Sherm was invited to join the new UCLA medical school as chief of the GI division, and so began a long, happy, and remarkably productive relationship. After 10 years, at age 42, he was named dean. Under his leadership the school grew rapidly. Exceptional scientists and clinicians were recruited; an MD-PhD program inaugurated; and one of the earliest federally funded programs for PET research established; a comprehensive cancer center opened; the Jules Stein Eye Institute; a children’s center; brain and neurological research institutes; schools of public health, nursing, and dentistry opened; one of the first departments of geriatrics was established; and renal, liver, bone marrow and heart transplant programs were operationalized. Reflecting Sherm’s social commitments, he led UCLA into a partnership with the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science so as to provide students with the opportunity to serve needy patients in the Los Angeles area.
His success as dean was ascribed by faculty members to a sharp eye for talent, remarkable gifts of persuasion, and unwavering support for his faculty. To those factors one might well have added his personal warmth, his capacity for valuing others, and the breadth and depth of his scholarship. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UCLA School of Medicine, the Sherman Mellinkoff Faculty Award was established to honor the ideal of the finest in doctor-patient relationships and medical education. It is considered by the faculty to be the highest honor awarded by the school. Sherman’s other honors included membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians of London.
He was a devoted and active member of the Climatological following his election in the early 1950s. He was Vice President, along with Ed Maynard, in 1992 and contributed memorial notes for Howard Wilson Bosworth, John Lawrence, and Carol Johnson Johns, an old friend from Hopkins house staff days. In 1987 he was the banquet speaker and chose a title designed to intrigue if not astonish: “Historical and Cultural Associations of the Color Yellow.” It reflected Sherm’s capacity for combining ingenuity with scholarship and an intuitive sense of how to engage an audience even before they’ve heard the talk. It was quintessential Mellinkoff.
Sherm was predeceased by his beloved June and is survived by a son, Albert, and a daughter, Sherri. Another daughter, Cheryl, died in infancy.