May 28 — While thousands of patients facing life-threatening situations streamed into Erwin Hirsch’s operating room looking for any doctor, colleagues came to the Boston Medical Center seeking not only Hirsch’s renowned leadership in the field, but also his life lessons.
When trauma surgeon Suresh Agarwal was sifting through job offers five years ago, his wife insisted he take up BMC’s offer because Hirsch, chief of trauma surgery, would take care of her husband.
“We were offered positions in other places, but she made up her mind,” he said. “She wanted me to come here because of the earnestness and of how much he cared about not only me, but my entire family.”
Hirsch, 72, also a professor of surgery at the Boston University School of Medicine, died May 23 in a boating accident off the coast of Maine.
Hirsch was one of two men on board a blue dinghy that capsized in 48 degree water in Rockport Harbor, Maine, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. Hirsch was pulled from the water around 3:40 p.m. after a “good Samaritan” rescued one man and reported Hirsch was still in the water, according to a statement. He was pronounced dead at Penobscot Bay Medical Center shortly afterward.
“The man worked hard,” Agarwal said. “He had more experience than the rest of the department combined.”
Hirsch worked to save lives every day and night in the hospital, right up to the last on-call of his 25-year BMC career. During his final shift, Hirsch worked on four or five cases, including a stab wound to the heart and a stab wound to the pancreas, Agarwal said.
Hirsch helped make BMC the first hospital in Boston to be certified as an Adult and Pediatric Level One Trauma Center by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma in 1993, Trauma Program coordinator Joe Blansfield said.
“The trauma program certainly needs to continue the legacy, and we’ll do so by leaning on each other and making sure the standards he set for us will continue to be achieved,” Blansfield said.
Blansfield was a staff nurse when he first met Hirsch, then a trauma surgeon, 29 years ago. Like most surgeons, Hirsch came off as “somewhat intimidating and with a rough exterior,” Blansfield said.
“However, once you got to know him, he was very approachable and receptive,” he said.
One thousand family members, students and colleagues attended Hirsch’s memorial service May 29 at the Mokely Building in the heart of BMC, said center spokesman Ellen Berlin.
A Boston MedFlight fly-over opened the memorial. Hirsch helped to start the hospital to use helicopters and planes to transport patients.
Hirsch was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1935. His family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1939 to escape the rising Nazi regime. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in 1959.
Upon moving to the United States, Hirsch trained in surgery at the Washington Hospital Center and at the University of Maryland Hospital. During the Vietnam War, he served in the U.S. Navy as a staff surgeon.
Hirsch is survived by a wife, Susan, daughter Kathleen, daughter Christina Townsend, two younger brothers, Carlos and Cristobal, and six nephews.
The family declined comment for this story.
James Becker, medical school surgery department chairman and BMC surgeon-in-chief, said he knew Hirsch for 14 years as a friend and colleague.
“He was larger than life,” Becker said. “He was devoted to surgery and especially to trauma surgery . . . He was loyal to the medical school and the hospital.”
“He had a way of solving problems,” Becker said. “He would always say very quickly if someone asked him for help, ‘No problem’ and it would be done, and he would say, ‘Next one.’ They don’t make guys like that anymore.”
Hospital administrator Jim Kennedy said BMC has yet to find a chief of trauma surgery replacement for Hirsch due to the suddenness of his death.