Life on My Terms: A Physician's Autobiography

By Norman E. Levan

It never would have occurred to me to record the story of my life; I believed it to be of little public interest . However, Professor Jonathan Halevy, director general of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, where I have helped to establish a center for humanistic medicine, and other friends believed otherwise. They maintained that the men and women who will learn from and be served by the institutions I have been able to help with gifts in support of humanistic values would like some idea of who I am. In response to their urging I have attempted to present an accurate portrait of a fortunate man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450270687

Norman E. Levan

NORMAN E. LEVAN, M.D. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916. He earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Southern California. In 1940, shortly after beginning his internship, Dr. Levan entered the U.S. Army. He served until 1946, primarily in the Central Pacific, and then returned to Los Angeles to begin his residency in dermatology. For twenty years he served as chairman of dermatology at USC. Now ninety four, he continues to practice his specialty near his home in Bakersfield, California, and to share his life’s good fortune with deserving institutions of higher learning and healthcare delivery.

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Contents

Foreword

Beginnings in Cleveland and Detroit

School and Early Life in California

World War II

A Life in Medicine;Women and Then Betty

Reflections At 94 and Philanthropy

Foreword

It was with a sense of both great humility and honor that I accepted the opportunity to write this forward on behalf of my dear friend, Dr. Norman Levan.

In all ways, Dr. Levan embodies the old-school American physician, straight out of a classic Rockwell painting. A devoted and distinguished healthcare professional, who is not only a service provider but a real advocate for his patient, for me Dr. Levan will always define what the modern doctor should be.

In today’s world, to remain a practicing physician for more than a couple decades is remarkable, so we can only admire with awe how he continues to see patients in the same dedicated manner as he has done for more than seventy years.

This period has spanned some of the most important developments in the entire history of medicine. To think that when he treated his first case, penicillin was not yet even developed, is only further testament to his truly incredible career.

While his specific field of medical expertise is dermatology, he is the first to recognize the relevance of this discipline for all areas of modern medicine, with skin acting as the ultimate reflection of the overall condition of the human body.

Despite my daily interactions with physicians of many levels, I believe that I have never met one doctor with such a strong command of all areas of medicine as Dr. Levan. Included in his amazing breadth of knowledge are more obscure fields like the treatment of tropical diseases and extremely rare skin conditions, making him a resource for fellow doctors far and wide. He is indeed a walking encyclopedia of medical knowledge.

Resisting the big-business nature often imposed on our profession by managed care and the pharmaceutical industry, he remains ever true to the ideals of personal care that have been his calling card over more than seven decades. His underlying passion for medicine has always been the desire to treat the patient from the human perspective. He knows better than any physician I have ever come across that without humanism, compassion and individualized care, drugs and advanced machinery will only go so far.

Dr. Levan remains one of the remaining heroic veterans of World War II where his medical prowess was practiced on the battlefields of Okinawa. Hearing his incredible stories are like taking a step back in time, and the chronicles of the period which fill these pages will offer all-important testimony of the sacrifices made by the U.S. forces to protect the liberties that we all take for granted today.

Beyond his uniqueness as a physician, he has in recent years quietly accepted another important title as a visionary philanthropist. With little fanfare, Dr. Levan has ensured that his life’s legacy will be known for his sincere desire to care for others, both in his local community and for those in need thousands of miles away.

Dr. Levan’s partnership with Shaare Zedek Medical Center here in Jerusalem was born out of his interest to support a cause that combined traditions of compassionate care with advanced medicine. Through his remarkable commitment to change, together we embarked on developing a center for humanistic medicine that today bears his name. The Dr. Norman Levan Center for Humanistic Medicine now enables thousands of patients each year to benefit from a superior level of care where one’s personal and emotional needs are placed at the forefront of their healthcare experience.

I have been deeply privileged to have developed a close and warm friendship with Dr. Levan. Through our many hours spent together in all parts of the globe, I have come to understand just what a special contribution he has to offer our world. Never one to mince words, and with a clear take on a wide range of issues yet always cognizant of the needs of the other, Dr. Levan is nothing short of a role model for the younger generations.

I am therefore very confident and hopeful that this volume will serve to better inform others about this man who I am privileged to call my close friend. For beyond being an extraordinary physician and devoted philanthropist, Dr. Norman Levan is most of all a distinctly caring and giving human being. His life and legacy deserve to inspire and educate all, so that his message of the power of humanity and humanism can be known and embraced for many years to come.

Prof. Jonathan Halevy, MD

Director General

Shaare Zedek Medical Center - Jerusalem

Beginnings in Cleveland and Detroit

I was born at home on March 17, 1916, in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of four children of Rose Steinberg Levin and Joseph Levin. I later changed the spelling of my surname to Levan because I thought the pronunciation was better as translation from the Hebrew letters, lamed, vav, nun. I did not want to be called Le-veen. My niece Jayne Rosenthal has suggested that another consideration may have been my desire to avoid immediate identification as a Jew. That may possibly be true. Certainly there was considerable prejudice in my generation. In any event, Norman Emanuel Levan is who I am.

My father was a tinsmith and later a toolmaker, my mother a homemaker. Both of my parents had come from Kiev guberniya (province), Russia. There was just about a ten-year difference in age: my father was born about 1879, my mother in 1888. I had three sisters, all considerably older than I: Mary, born in 1905; Goldie, in 1907; and Ruth in 1908.

My mother’s father was evidently a rather prominent rabbi. He died young and I never knew him. My mother was raised in a shtetl by her grandmother after her mother had died, probably of typhus, when my mother was very young. Her grandmother supported herself by selling goat’s milk. She was illiterate, so she’d chalk up her sales on the wall of the hut and then somebody would capriciously erase them. She had a nephew who had been in the Russian army. She passed him off as her son, and that military experience on behalf of Mother Russia gave her permission to move into Kiev. (Jews without special credentials were kept from living in the city at that time.) In Kiev my mother’s grandmother had a kiosk where she sold stamps and other small items. My mother claimed no involvement by her parents in her life. She remembered seeing her mother once in the room of the hospital where she died.

My mother’s grandmother evidently was very worried about what would happen to her grandchildren. In Kiev she arranged a marriage between my mother, who was only fifteen or barely sixteen, and my father, who was about twenty-five. Mother was rather pretty, short and still slim in those days, with brown hair and gray eyes. My father was a small man, short and sturdy, but very vigorous and very tough. He had been in the Russian army and enjoyed it. He remembered marching with his comrades down a road past a peasant’s cart loaded with watermelons and stealing the watermelons with their bayonets.

On October 17, 1905, after his nation’s defeat in the 1904-5 war with Japan, and in response to the early Russian Revolution, Czar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, who ruled from 1868 until his assassination in 1917, issued The October Manifesto. Its official name was The Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order. It pledged to grant civil liberties to all the people, including personal immunity, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and universal male suffrage . It was a precursor of the first-ever Russian Constitution. However, in our family it was said sardonically that what Czar Nicholas really did was free all the dead and arrest all the others.

That same year, 1905, my father’s brother—whose name I do not remember—left Russia and found his way to the United States; specifically, to Toledo, Ohio, which at that time was a center of automobile production. He soon sent for my father and may even have sent him money to come over. I believe my father came to America alone in 1906. My mother came later. She remembered that she and Mary came by way