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In 1985, still in the prime of life, brimming with energy, full of passion and concern for mankind’s survival, Herbert L. Abrams, MD, capped an illustrious 25 years as Chairman of Radiology at Harvard University by returning to Stanford University, where he had begun his radiology career, to pursue studies on the prevention of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war, a subject that he labeled the “central health issue of the 20th century.”
Abrams was born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents on August 16, 1920. He graduated from Cornell University in 1941 and received his MD degree from Long Island College of Medicine, now the State University of New York Downstate, in 1946. Following an internship at the Long Island College Hospital, he spent 1 year as a medical resident at Montefiore Hospital. At Downstate, he had met William Dock, MD, a cardiologist who, while at Stanford Hospital in 1929, had described rib notching as a manifestation of coarctation of the aorta. Dock ignited Abrams’ interest in cardiac imaging and convinced him to relocate his family to San Francisco in 1948, to train in radiology. After completion of his residency at Stanford in 1951, he joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor. In 1959, when Stanford moved its clinical operations from San Francisco to Palo Alto, Abrams was appointed Director of the newly formed Division of Diagnostic Radiology.
Henry Kaplan was the Chair of Radiology at Stanford and he inspired Abrams to build an academic department that performed research as well as clinical work. To this end, he secured grants to purchase the first biplane ciné apparatus in the United States to study the anatomy of congenital heart disease using small amounts of contrast material. Coincident with the introduction of corrective and palliative surgery on the heart, he wrote several books and articles on the radiologic findings in operable heart disease.
In 1959–1960, as a Special Fellow of the National Institutes of Health, Abrams traveled to Lund, Sweden, to study the new techniques of percutaneous angiography. He observed the differential effects of epinephrine on renal arteries in normal kidneys compared to those supplying renal tumors, and he elucidated renal artery stenosis as a cause of hypertension. He developed the first preformed catheters for selective coronary angiography. A PhD physiologist was hired as a member of the Division of Diagnostic Radiology to introduce basic research into the department, and a grant from the United States Public Health Service funded a fellowship program to train radiologists in cardiovascular imaging.
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