Kids throughout Washington and throughout America are safer and more healthy due to the late Dr. Abraham “Abe” Bergman. He mixed the science of pediatric drugs with the artwork of political drugs.
The native and longtime Seattle resident handled native kids and households at what’s now Seattle Kids’s Hospital and later at Harborview Medical Middle. He was additionally Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics on the College of Washington Medical College, the place he mentored healthcare professionals as a professor, researcher and clinician.
He additionally knew that public coverage may save extra lives than a single physician. Many years in the past, Bergman made waves in Olympia and Washington, DC, championing analysis into sudden toddler dying syndrome, then additionally referred to as “crib dying.” SIDS was so little understood that public officers typically assumed the child died from youngster abuse. “Consequently,” he informed The New York Instances in 1972, “they deal with the mother and father like criminals.”
He enlisted necessary political allies, comparable to Washington Sens. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson. After Bergman took Magnuson to the burn unit at Seattle Kids’s, the senator helped strengthen requirements for youngsters’s flame-resistant sleepwear.
Bergman, alongside along with his colleagues, campaigned for youngsters within the Seattle space to put on bicycle helmets and tried, unsuccessfully, to take the marketing campaign nationwide. Lately, spurred on by his circle of relatives’s expertise with psychological sickness and substance abuse, he advocated obligatory therapy.
And he championed the creation of the Nationwide Well being Service Corps, which introduced docs to underserved communities. In Seattle, he helped set up the Odessa Brown Kids’s Clinic. Working with Senator Jackson, he helped cross the Indian Well being Care Enchancment Act of 1976.
To individuals who shared neither his imaginative and prescient nor his tenacity, Bergman may very well be a nagging ache. To his followers, he was a transformative, persuasive character who knew tips on how to result in change.
But Bergman, for all his nationwide affect, all the time had a ardour for his hometown. He informed his son Ben that his proudest achievement was serving to to create the Seattle PlayGarden, the place kids of all talents can work together and play collectively.
Bergman retired in 2016, however he continued to put in writing impassioned opinion items for The Seattle Instances till his dying final month at age 91.
Abe Bergman spent a lifetime preventing for higher well being care, more healthy households and more healthy communities in Seattle and throughout the nation. America was fortunate to have him. Seattle was luckier to name him a local son.