Youngsters throughout Washington and all through America are safer and more healthy due to the late Dr. Abraham “Abe” Bergman. He mixed the science of pediatric medication with the artwork of political medication.
The Seattle native and longtime resident handled native kids and households at what’s now Seattle Youngsters’s Hospital and later at Harborview Medical Heart. He additionally was professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of Washington Medical School, the place he mentored well being professionals as a professor, researcher and clinician.
He additionally knew that public coverage might save extra lives than a single physician. Many years in the past, Bergman made waves in Olympia and Washington, D.C., advocating for analysis into sudden toddler dying syndrome, then additionally known as “crib dying.” SIDS was so little-understood that public officers typically assumed the infant died of kid abuse. “In consequence,” he told The New York Times in 1972, “they deal with the mother and father like criminals.”
He enlisted key political allies, like Washington Sens. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson. After Bergman took Magnuson to the burn unit at Seattle Youngsters’s, the senator helped strengthen requirements for youngsters’s flame-resistant sleepwear.
Bergman campaigned with colleagues for Seattle-area kids to put on bicycle helmets and tried, unsuccessfully, to take that marketing campaign nationwide. In recent times, spurred by his own family’s experience with psychological sickness and drug abuse, he advocated for mandatory treatment.
And he fought for the creation of the Nationwide Well being Service Corps, bringing medical suppliers to underserved communities. In Seattle, he helped set up the Odessa Brown Youngsters’s Clinic. Working with Sen. Jackson, he helped go the Indian Well being Care Enchancment Act of 1976.
To of us who shared neither his imaginative and prescient nor his tenacity, Bergman might be a nagging ache To his followers, he was a transformative, compelling character who knew find out how to obtain change.
But for all his nationwide affect, Bergman at all times had a ardour for his hometown. He informed his son Ben that his proudest accomplishment was serving to create the Seattle PlayGarden, the place kids of all skills can work together and play collectively.
Bergman retired in 2016, however he was nonetheless penning passionate opinion pieces for The Seattle Times till his dying final month at age 91.
Abe Bergman spent a lifetime combating for higher well being care, more healthy households and more healthy communities in Seattle and nationwide. America was fortunate to have him. Seattle was luckier to name him a local son.
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