(Hypertension. 1999;33:611-612.)
© 1999 American Heart Association, Inc.
In Memoriam |
Alvin Philip Shapiro, MD 1920–1998
1 University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Alvin Philip Shapiro, born December 27, 1920, died November 20, 1998. In the intervening 78 years, he made seminal contributions through writing (>250 publications) and teaching to our understanding of hypertension, the relationship of renal disease, and of psychological factors in the development and maintenance of elevated blood pressure.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Al was the son of a Russian immigrant peddler and socialist who had come to this country after the failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia. In the mid-nineteen twenties, his father moved the family, which was then a wife and two children, to New York because the elder Shapiro feared the intolerance of a place that would support the Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution.
Al attended New York City Public Schools and then entered Cornell
University, receiving his AB in the spring of 1941. On graduation from
Long Island College of Medicine in 1944, he interned at Long Island
College Hospital and then began an internal medicine residency at the
Columbia Division, Goldwater Memorial Hospital, New York. In
April of 1946, he left to serve in the Army as a Captain and Medical
Officer in Adek, Alaska. He remained there until late 1947.
After an eight-month period as an Assistant Resident in Psychiatry at
Long Island Hospital, he went to Cincinnati to work as a research
fellow with Eugene B. Ferris at Cincinnati General Hospital. His
object was to perform clinical, physiological, and
psychiatric studies of hypertension. With the exception of a few
detours,