Dr. Christian Herrmann, Jr., 96, died of pneumonia on Oct. 23, following a distinguished career on the UCLA medical school faculty. Hired in 1954 as the second faculty member in what became UCLA’s Department of Neurology, no one could have foreseen that 63 years later, he would still be active there. For 17 years, he was vice chairman of the Department and Chair of the Residency Selection Committee. And his service continued after his formal retirement in 1986, the year he moved to the Palisades. In recent years, he attended Grand Rounds, did credentialing and assisted the education office.
A “Neurologist’s Neurologist,” Dr. Herrmann helped thousands of patients and generations of students with his kind, patient and thorough manner. UCLA honored him in 2008 when it gave his name to a conference room in the Reed Neurological Research Center. Similarly, he provided leadership at the Edgewater Towers HOA for three decades, including a term as HOA president.
The son of Christian Herrmann, a Lansing, Michigan, tailor and haberdasher, and Agnes (Bauch) Herrmann, a conservatory graduate who taught piano and voice, Dr. Herrmann grew into a proficient pianist, organist and pipe organ aficionado, who played both piano and organ in his Edgewater Towers condominium. And he credited his lifelong interest in electricity to his fascination with the plug for his mother’s curling iron.
His childhood home, known as Herrmann House, is now an official historical site, and the residence of the Lansing Community College’s president. Dr. Herrmann’s donated a 1995 addition that houses a solarium and conference center. The house and the family cottage in Petoskey, Michigan, were important to him.
Dr. Herrmann was a University of Michigan at Ann Arbor graduate and began medical school there in 1941. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy, attended its year-round school at the Naval Medical Center San Diego for two years, and graduated from medical school in 1944. He completed an internship and part of a residency in Detroit, then, after the war, took a residency at the Neurologic Institute of New York at Presbyterian Hospital.
This was one of this country’s first EEG (electroencephalography) laboratories, where the diagnostic value of brain waves was being investigated. “I read EEGs at night,” he later said. “This was the time of iron lungs and polio … I slept in an adjacent room to take care of these patients” and those with myasthenia gravis (a neuromuscular disease in which he later specialized).
His colleague, Dr. Yvette Bordelon, reported that everyone was speaking of Dr. Herrmann in the hallways the day UCLA’s neurologists learned of his death.
“They wanted to share how Dr. Herrmann changed their lives,” she said. On Oct. 28, he was remembered here. A graveside funeral will be held in Lansing, Michigan, by his cousins’ families when he is laid to rest in the Herrmann family plot.
Christian Herrmann, Jr.’s fine mind, enduring friendships, sense of humor, and unusual breadth of interests and knowledge will be sorely missed.
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