In Memoriam

William E. Bloomer, M.D. ’42, HS ’52, of Pasadena, Calif., who served for a short time on the Yale faculty, died of cancer on Jan. 14 at Long Beach (Calif.) Memorial Medical Center. He was 84. A graduate of Stanford University, Bloomer earned his medical degree at Yale in 1942. After an internship at Stanford University Hospital and service in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, he returned to New Haven in 1946 as a fellow in thoracic surgery and completed his residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was assistant professor at the School of Medicine for five years before moving to California, where he continued his lifelong career in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery and developed innovative techniques using injection-molded plastics to study the anatomy of the lung. Bloomer continued to teach, and at the time of his death was associate clinical professor of surgery at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine.

Howard E. Hornstein, D.M.D., of Guilford, Conn., a former faculty member at the School of Medicine, died March 9. He was 57.A 1963 graduate of Boston University, Hornstein received his D.M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine in 1967 and a master’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1971. Hornstein, a pediatric dentist and orthodontist, had a practice in New Haven until 1970, when he relocated to Guilford. He also was on the faculty at Yale as a clinical instructor in surgery from 1974 until 1981. Hornstein directed the section of pedodontics in the outpatient department at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1974 and established an inpatient service for the retarded and physically handicapped. In addition, he was an author, a publisher and a musician.

Theodore Lidz, M.D., who served on the Yale faculty for half a century, died Feb. 16 at his home in Hamden. He was 90. A native New Yorker, Lidz earned his bachelor’s degree in 1931 and his medical degree in 1936, both from Columbia University. He served in World War II as a lieutenant colonel in the Army at hospitals in New Zealand, Fiji and Burma. He also tended to several hundred psychiatric casualties of the fighting on Guadalcanal. Lidz came to Yale as a professor of psychiatry in 1951. He was chair of the Department of Psychiatry from 1967 to 1968. He gained emeritus status in 1978 and continued to publish, lecture and see patients into the mid-1990s. Lidz explored the background causes of schizophrenia and specialized in the treatment of the illness. He wrote extensively on the subject of schizophrenia in journals and books. He went beyond his patients’ personal histories to understand the familial, social and cultural factors. One of his longtime collaborators was his wife, Ruth Wilmanns Lidz, M.D., who died in 1995.

Send obituary notices to Claire M. Bessinger, Yale Medicine Publications, 1 Church Street, Suite 300, New Haven, CT 06510, or via e-mail to claire.bessinger@yale.edu