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Doctor spent lifetime caring

By MARTY CLEAR Times Correspondent
Published September 14, 2007

"He didn't do it for the money, I can tell you that," said his son, Mark Wolfson.

"In high school I was the only doctor's son who didn't have his own car. He did it because he loved children and because he wanted to help people."

Dr. Wolfson died Sept. 2 after several months of declining health. He was 80.

He grew up in Tampa, and as a teenager he would walk to work every day from his Tampa Heights neighborhood to his father's clothing store in Ybor City, where a building on Seventh Avenue still bears the family name.

He developed an interest in medicine while serving as a corpsman on a Navy ship off Greenland during World War II. After the war, he went to the University of Florida on the GI Bill.

"The GI Bill would pay for four years of college," his son said. "He knew he wanted to go to medical school, so he said, 'If I finish college in three years, then I can use the GI Bill to pay for the first year of medical school.'"

But after finishing his undergraduate work in three years, and finishing near the top of his class, Dr. Wolfson faced a problem. Medical schools around the country had quotas for how many Jewish students they would let in at one time, Mark Wolfson said. He couldn't get admitted.

It was a minor setback. Dr. Wolfson came back to Tampa, where he sold insurance for a year, and then entered Vanderbilt University's medical school.

He returned to Tampa to open his first practice in the late 1950s. But his specialty, pediatric blood diseases, was unusual for that era in the still-small town of Tampa.

"He didn't have any patients," his son said. "Then he got a call from a man in Havana. There was a sick child there, and there weren't any specialists. So my father flew down there on a small private plane to treat him. He never got paid for that case, but the word got around that this was a doctor who would go the extra mile for his patients, and that got his practice going."

Dr. Wolfson would drive all over west central Florida to visit patients, and once every two weeks he would close his practice and drive to Gainesville to teach at Shands Hospital. He also served as the head of pediatrics at Tampa General Hospital.

But as devoted as he was to his work, he was even more devoted to his family.

"Every year he would close his practice, and the whole family would go on a monthlong vacation," Mark Wolfson said.

"Actually we wouldn't think of them as vacations. We'd call them experiences or adventures. We drove across the country to the Grand Canyon; we spent four weeks in Europe. He wanted us to see the world for ourselves, not just read about it in books."

When the University of South Florida opened its medical school in the early 1970s, Dr. Wolfson signed on as a professor. He also continued his research work and authored pioneering papers on topics related to childhood poisoning and the treatment of hyaline membrane disease.

He loved academia, but his medical practice began to put a strain on him.

"My dad got tired of having so many kids die," his son said.

So in 1980, Dr. Wolfson entered a residency program in radiation oncology at Northwestern University.

It was an unusual move for a distinguished doctor and teacher who was already in his 50s, but he was eager to learn skills that would help him cure, not just treat, his young patients.

That's what he did until just last year. "He was still seeing patients when he was 79 years old," his son said. "He just wanted to be able to help people."

Besides his son Mark, Dr. Wolfson is survived by his sons Aaron and David, daughter Sharon Wacks and seven grandchildren.

[Last modified September 13, 2007, 08:02:06]