Obituary
An obituary for Irwin Schatz, MD, MACP, a former College Governor and pioneer who objected to the Tuskegee study.
Irwin Schatz, MD, MACP
Irwin Schatz, MD, MACP, a former College Governor and pioneer who objected to the Tuskegee study, died on Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at the age of 83.
Dr. Schatz was a native of Canada and studied at the University of Manitoba and the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. He trained as a cardiologist and was practicing at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit when he first read about the Tuskegee study, in which treatment was deliberately not provided to black men with syphilis. Dr. Schatz wrote a letter of protest to the lead author of the study in 1965, apparently the first objection to the ethics of the study, which was not halted until 1972.
In 1975, Dr. Schatz moved to Hawaii, where he served as chair of the department of medicine at the University of Hawaii and led the medical school's residency program for over 20 years. He was a major contributor to the Honolulu Heart Program, a landmark study of Japanese-American men in Hawaii. He received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Mayo Clinic in 2009.
Dr. Schatz served as Governor for the ACP Hawaii Chapter from 1985 to 1989 and became a Master in 1995. A full obituary is online.
