In memoriam

Create PDF

Herbert Derman, MD
1921–2019

February 2020—Herbert Derman, MD, CAP president from 1983 to 1985, died Dec. 18, 2019, seeking a remedy to his chronic heart failure.

Dr. Derman was CAP vice president from 1981 to 1983 and a member of the Board of Governors from 1971 to 1980. He was the chair and a member of several CAP councils, committees, and commissions.

Dr. Derman was named CAP Pathologist of the Year in 1986. He received the ASCP/CAP Pathology Continuing Medical Education award in 1974 and 1978 and the ASCP/CAP Joint Distinguished Service award in 1993.

Dr. Derman

Dr. Derman retired as director of pathology at Riverside Methodist Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, in 1990. He held longtime faculty positions at Ohio State University College of Medicine and Albany (NY) Medical Center. He was a past president of the New York State Society of Pathologists and the New York State Association of Public Health Laboratories.

“Herb was a big picture kind of guy,” says George D. Lundberg, MD, editor in chief of Cancer Commons and editor at large at Medscape. “I would call him a visionary.”

Dr. Lundberg recalls Dr. Derman as “driven, intense, and goal-oriented” when the two served together on CAP committees in the 1970s. “He felt very strongly about issues and would take strong opinions on them,” he says. Dr. Lundberg often found himself on opposite sides of a discussion with Dr. Derman, owing to the fact, he says, that Dr. Lundberg came up the ranks as an academic and Dr. Derman advanced on the private practice pathway. “Our points of view seemed to coalesce in the early 1980s,” he says, when Dr. Derman invited Dr. Lundberg to serve as keynote speaker at a CAP strategic planning retreat in Michigan. “That was an interesting weekend with the leaders of American pathology, trying to figure out the future, which is always hard to do.”

One of Dr. Derman’s most significant contributions to the CAP was establishing a lobbying effort to represent the pathologist’s viewpoint. “Herb, with his vision, recognized that government, which had not had a lot to do with pathology for a long time, was going to have a lot to do with the field in terms of how it went forward with laboratory accreditation,” Dr. Lundberg says. “He saw that it would be necessary for pathologists to have an active voice in Washington.”