Passing of Gerald Thomson, MD
Dear VP&S Community,
It is with great sadness that we share the passing of our colleague Gerald E. Thomson, MD, the Samuel Lambert and Robert Sonneborn Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Dr. Thomson, a member of the Columbia faculty for 48 years, was a pioneering nephrologist, exacting clinician, devoted teacher, and inspiring leader. At Columbia, he served in several leadership roles, including as director of medicine at Harlem Hospital Center, chief medical officer and executive vice president for professional affairs at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, and senior associate dean at P&S. Appointed the Samuel Lambert Professor in 1980 and Robert Sonneborn Professor in 1997, Dr. Thomson also established and served as president of Presbyterian Hospital’s Ambulatory Care Network of community primary care centers in upper Manhattan.
Dr. Thomson’s leadership extended to professional associations of national and international renown. He served as president of the American College of Physicians, chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and was a co-founder and president of the New York Society of Nephrology. He also served as a board member of Physicians for Human Rights, and as an honorary fellow of the Medical College of South Africa.
A Howard University College of Medicine graduate, Dr. Thomson was recruited to Columbia in 1970 from Coney Island Hospital and SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where he established and directed one of the nation’s first and largest dialysis units for the treatment of end-stage renal disease. He began a dialysis program at Harlem Hospital Center and was director of medicine at the hospital from 1971 to 1985—a time when New York City’s public hospitals operated under severe resource restrictions and community health challenges. Despite these obstacles, Dr. Thomson developed a full-service Department of Medicine with 40 full-time faculty members, 120 residents and fellows, divisions in all subspecialties, fully accredited residency and fellowship training and teaching of Columbia students, and research programs. He received an honorary VP&S degree in 1996, the Columbia Presidential Teaching Award in 2002, and the inaugural Kenneth A. Forde Diversity Alliance Lifetime Achievement Award at VP&S in 2015.
Dr. Thomson was deeply committed to addressing disparities in health and access to healthcare. Early in his career, he co-founded and was president of the Society of Urban Physicians, a group of several hundred senior faculty and attending physicians at New York City’s public hospitals that strived for improved funding, staffing, and conditions in the hospitals. As director of medicine of Harlem Hospital, Dr. Thomson helped to establish innovative hypertension detection and treatment programs, and his calls for public attention to the high death rates and poor health indices in central Harlem helped to secure federal funding to establish the Harlem primary care network that still functions today as the Harlem Renaissance Network. Later, Dr. Thomson chaired the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Committee that reviewed and reported on the National Institutes of Health Strategic Research Plan to Reduce and Ultimately Eliminate Health Care Disparities, including issuing the 2013 report, “Examining the Health Disparities Research Plan of the National Institutes of Health: Unfinished Business.” Dr. Thomson’s expansive work on health justice included such contributions to public policy as his congressional testimonies in 1995 on health care reform, and as a member in 2013 of the Constitution Project’s blue-ribbon Task Force on Detainee Treatment, which found that the U.S. had engaged in the practice of torture during counterterrorist activities abroad.
Dr. Thomson was dedicated to expanding access to medical education for underrepresented communities. Throughout his career at Harlem Hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, and P&S, Dr. Thomson trained and mentored hundreds of students and residents. As senior associate dean at P&S, Dr. Thomson launched programs to recruit, support, and advise underrepresented minority students at P&S, including through the development of pipeline programs with the Association of American Medical Colleges. He was a founder and past president of the Association of Academic Minority Physicians.
Memorial gifts in honor of Dr. Thomson can be made to a VP&S scholarship fund in his name: https://joinus.cuimc.columbia.edu/participants/GeraldEThomsonMDScholarship.
A consistent source of guidance and inspiration to many both within and outside our community, Dr. Thomson will be profoundly missed. Our thoughts are with his children, Gregory Thomson and Karen Thomson, their families, and his wife of over 65 years, Carolyn Webber, MD.
We will share details soon about a Department of Medicine remembrance event for Dr. Thomson.
Sincerely,
Ali Gharavi, MD
Chair, Department of Medicine
Physician-in-Chief, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Katrina Armstrong, MD
Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences, Columbia University