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Obituaries
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Norman Levinsky |
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Norman Levinsky, acting provost of the Medical Campus, died on March 8. He was 74.
Levinsky was chief of the renal section in the department of medicine from 1967 to 1968 and again from 1971 to 1987, and chairman of the department of medicine from 1972 to 1997, one of the longest serving chairs of an academic medical department in the nation. He was named associate provost of the Medical Campus in 1997 and in 2003 was appointed acting provost by Aram Chobanian, president ad interim.
“Norman Levinsky was the quintessential physician,” says Chobanian. “He was a dedicated and profound clinician, an insightful researcher, an outstanding teacher and mentor of medical students, residents, and other physicians, and a brilliant administrator who led the department of medicine for a remarkable span of 25 years. He was also a medical ethicist who combined passion with clear and uncompromising analysis. We will miss him dearly.”
Levinsky graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1954 and completed his residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He was a clinical associate at the National Heart Institute and then became a fellow in medicine at the BU Medical Center.
He was the author of more than 150 publications, on subjects ranging from kidney function and renal disease to health policy ethics and education. He was a member of many academic societies, including the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the Association of Professors of Medicine. He chaired two Institute of Medicine national committees: the Committee to Study End-Stage Renal Disease Program and the Committee on Xenograft Transplantation: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy. Each committee's report influenced federal regulations in their respective areas. He was director until recently of a kidney research laboratory that received 30 continuous years of funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Levinsky was an outstanding teacher, whose renal rounds were legendary. He received a Distinguished Teacher Award from the American College of Physicians and recognition as an Outstanding Faculty Member from MED students and as a Teacher of the Year from the medical residents. “I enjoy teaching enormously,” he said recently. “I love interacting with the students, the trainees, and the residents. They bring fresh, new ideas and have interesting viewpoints on every issue. I have reached the stage where the children of some of my first students are here at the school or in the residency program. It is gratifying to see that.”
Levinsky's funeral was on March 10 in Canton, Mass. He leaves his wife, two sons, a daughter, a sister, and three grandchildren.
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Creighton Gabel in 1989, with photographs of archaeological sites in Africa, where he directed excavations. Photo by Michael Hamilton |
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Creighton Gabel, a CAS professor emeritus of archaeology and anthropology and cofounder of the department of archaeology, died February 22 of cancer. He was 72.
Gabel joined Boston University in 1963 as a research associate at the African Studies Center and a CAS associate professor of anthropology in what was then the department of sociology and anthropology. During more than three decades at the University, he helped create the department of anthropology, chairing it twice in the 1970s. Gabel cofounded, with James Wiseman, a CAS professor of archaeology, first an interdepartmental program in archaeology, in 1979 and then, in 1982, the department of archaeology — the first of its kind in the United States. He retired in 1996.
Gabel was director of graduate studies in archaeology from 1982 to 1995, acting chairman of archaeology from 1983 to 1984, and editor-in-chief of the international Journal of Field Archaeology from 1985 to 1995. A distinguished scholar of African archaeology and ethnography, he maintained his association with the African Studies Center throughout his career at BU and was acting director from 1973 to 1975.
“Creighton Gabel was an excellent teacher, an internationally respected scholar, and an honest and good man,” says Wiseman, director of the Center for Archaeological Studies and former department chairman. “He played a critical role in the creation and development of the department of archaeology and earned the admiration, respect, and affection both of his colleagues and students. We shall miss him.”
Gabel began his studies in anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he earned a B.A. in 1953 and an M.A. in 1954. He chose to pursue doctoral studies in archaeology, he once wrote, “as an independent subject, rather than within the context of a traditional anthropology curriculum,” and so moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he studied under Stuart Piggott and received his Ph.D. in prehistoric archaeology in 1957. As a young instructor and assistant professor in the anthropology department of Northwestern University from 1956 to 1963, his interest in African studies was prompted and nourished by his friend Professor Melvin Herskovits, director of Northwestern's African Studies Program. Gabel subsequently directed excavations in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), excavations and surveys in Kenya, and the archaeological survey of Liberia. He returned to Africa as director of BU's Archaeological Field School at Marea in northwestern Egypt summers from 1979 through 1981.
In an evocative and elegantly written essay on his career in archaeology published in 1995 in Context, the Center for Archaeological Studies newsletter, Gabel wrote of his great personal satisfaction in participating in the creation of the department of archaeology at BU, and “enjoying the company of students and colleagues who all share the same basic interest in trying to document the long and variegated course of human history.”
He leaves his wife, Jane, three children, and four grandchildren.
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March 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations