Herbert N.
Hultgren, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Stanford, died in October
1997 at age 80 of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia. Herb was
a native of northern California and graduated from Stanford University
in 1939 and from its School of Medicine in 1943. He completed residency
training in medicine and pathology at Stanford and served in Europe in
World War II with the US Army Medical Corps. He was a research fellow
in cardiology at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory in
Boston, Mass, and then returned to Stanford in 1948, where he
established the first cardiac catheterization
laboratory in northern California and in 1955 became chief of
cardiology at Stanford.
In 1968, after the Stanford Medical School had relocated from San
Francisco to Palo Alto, Calif, Herb was appointed chief of
cardiology at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration
Hospital, a position he held until 1984. I worked with him at Stanford
as a cardiology fellow and then as junior faculty
member in the cardiology division from 1970 to 1977. I
and numerous Stanford students, residents, and faculty benefited
enormously from contact with Herb, as he was a superb teacher, clinical
cardiologist, and clinical investigator. He was chairman of the
American Board of Internal Medicine Subspecialty Board on
Cardiovascular Disease from 1972 to 1975 and was a
founding member of the Association of University Cardiologists, serving
as its president in 1970.
Herb was recognized as a world authority on altitude sickness and was
the first US investigator to define (in Medicine
© 1998 American Heart Association, Inc.
In Memoriam
Herbert N. Hultgren, MD
1917–1997