As dean of UM’s medical school, Bernie Fogel built on a Miami family legacy
Dr. Bernard “Bernie” Fogel’s favorite book was Harper Lee’s 1960 landmark, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
When Fogel stepped down from leading the University of Miami’s medical school after 14 years, he shared his thoughts with the Miami Herald. He expressed why that classic story resonated with him so deeply.
The book’s main character, Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer in racially divided Alabama of the 1930s, reminded Fogel of his father, Isadore, who died in 1981, just after Dr. Fogel was named dean of UM’s medical school.
Fogel died on March 30 in Maryland. He was 85.
HONORING A FATHER’S LEGACY
Fogel moved with his family to what is now the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami from New York at age 7.
He helped out in the family bakery business, Dortch’s, when he was at Miami Senior High. When the teen closed the bakery each weeknight he would take the leftovers to Variety Children’s Hospital — now named Nicklaus Children’s Hospital. Fogel felt it was an opportunity to share and honor the lessons he was learning from his parents, Izzie and Shirley, he told the Herald in 1995.
“My father had no patience with any form of prejudice, any intolerance,” Fogel recalled, noting how at his bar mitzvah guests were white and Black — which was not the norm in the Miami of the 1950s. Or the 1960s, for that matter.
“He was perhaps the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met,” Fogel said of his father. “He always knew right from wrong. He never saw people’s differences. He was as charitable and decent a human being as you could know. I’m not sure I ever lived up to him.”
Many, however, will say that the younger Fogel honored his father’s legacy quite well.
“Dr. Fogel brought his irrepressible enthusiasm and unimpeachable integrity to the complex job of managing an academic medical center with multiple hospital affiliations. He invoked in virtually all his faculty and many of his trustees a sense of respect and good humor which helped carry the institution and its people through some very challenging times,” said Dr. Laurence Gardner, professor of medicine at UM and senior advisor to the medical school’s dean, Henri R. Ford.
“The respect in which he was held was shared by the entire faculty, patients and students and produced an environment ready to accept some of the hardships and misfortunes which challenged every academic medical center. He was a remarkable leader for a challenging time in the development of this academic medical center,” Gardner said.
“He was a splendid treasure in our community for many years — smart and kind and wise,” said David Lawrence Jr., chair of The Children’s Movement of Florida.
When Lawrence was publisher of the Herald in 1995, he wrote the column in which Fogel detailed his upbringing in Miami and his reasons for stepping down from his leadership role.
REDEFINING MISSION
During his tenure leading UM’s medical school — which is where he had earned his medical degree in 1961 — Fogel forged a partnership with Jackson Memorial Hospital and oversaw the UM medical school’s growth. He expanded the institution beyond the traditional elements of a medical school, which are education, research and patient care. Fogel insisted that the later-named University of Miami Miller School of Medicine would foster a fourth mission: community service.
According to the university’s obituary, UM’s medical school under Fogel “started health fairs in marginalized communities, and faculty and students volunteered in great number to staff these clinics. That work earned the Miller School the Association of American Medical Colleges’ first-ever Spencer Foreman Award for Outstanding Community Engagement in 1993.”
When Fogel announced his retirement in 2014, Michael Foden, a former executive director for advancement at UM’s Miller School of Medicine, wrote a letter that was published on the Herald’s editorial page.
“When historians have written their dissertations on 20th-century South Florida and the ink has dried on the pages of the books that will line library shelves for generations that follow, there will emerge a small group of men and women who are recognized as having had the greatest influence on our community. Bernard J. Fogel is one of them,” Foden wrote. “Dr. Fogel played a critical role in shaping public-health services for four million people from the Florida Keys to the Palm Beaches.”
POST-DEAN LIFE
When Fogel stepped down from his role as dean in 1995, he told the Herald he felt “burned out” and that it was simply time for new leadership. He’d accomplished a great deal by that point.
After graduating from UM in 1961, Fogel spent five years at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research training in pediatrics and researching communicable diseases. When he returned to UM as director of the Division of Neonatology he was part of a medical team that performed the first successful thymus transplant on a 6-week-old infant suffering from DiGeorge Syndrome in 1967, according to the school.
He was considered a “bridge builder” after assuming the dean’s position in 1981 through the next 14 years.
Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., who earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, was a prominent advocate of care for the homeless and a UM faculty member during Fogel’s tenure. In 1995, when Fogel stepped down,
Greer told the Herald how gracious Fogel was when Greer sought backing for the Camillus Health Concern in the mid-1980s.
Camillus had wanted to treat the homeless and the poor for free and to utilize UM students and doctors.
“He didn’t even say,
‘Let me get back to you.’ It was just, ‘Fine.’ [Fogel] has brought the University of Miami to the forefront in doing things that no other medical school in this country has done,” Greer had said.
Fogel would continue to contribute to the school for another decade in dean emeritus status by guiding the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. He served UM as an advisor, mentor and a fund raiser. He continued as a professor of pediatrics, his specialty, for awhile. Fogel also became a chairman of the
National Parkinson Foundation.
After retiring, Fogel, who had Parkinson’s, moved to Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife of 63 years, Judy.
Fogel’s lasting impressions loom large on the University of Miami’s medical school that he helped transform and the community.
“When you called him, you were never bothering him. He was so much a ‘people’s doctor.’ Like so many others, I loved him,” Lawrence said.
SURVIVORS
Fogel’s survivors include his wife, Judy, and their daughters Lori, Wendy and Amy; grandchildren Michael, Daniel,
Sam, Rachel, Josh and Noah. The family requests that donations in Fogel’s memory be made to the charity of their own choosing.
Howard Cohen: 305-376-3619, @HowardCohen to collaborative performances.
Kalichstein gave his final performance in Phoenix on March 17, when the KalichsteinLaredo-Robinson Trio played music by Schumann, Zwilich and Brahms.