Sholom Omi Waife M.D.

Sholom Omi Waife, MD, of Tequesta, FL, passed away on March 6th at the age of 92. Dr. Waife was a physician, writer and researcher, and a pioneer in medical education. Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1919, Dr. Waife completed his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins and his medical degree at New York University. He served the war effort in a number of clinical care and research positions in the Northeast. After the war he was briefly in private practice in Baltimore, and then joined the staff at Philadelphia General Hospital where he created one of the first continuing medical education (CME) programs in the country for hospital staff. He was recruited to join Eli Lilly & Co., in Indianapolis, as a researcher in nutritional medicine. Called back to the service in 1954 as a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, he served as one of the editors of the Armed Services Medical Journal. After returning to Lilly in 1956 he became Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and was National Secretary of the American Medical Writers Association. During this period he also published a column for the Physicians Bulletin entitled The Doctor Writes, which was later collected and published in book form. He was also co-author of The Clinical Evaluation of New Drugs. As Director of Medical Affairs at Lilly, Dr. Waife created a series of educational texts, beautifully printed and illustrated, which were distributed to each graduating medical school student in the US. Subsequently he wrote and produced medical education films. In each case, these were innovative initiatives for their time. Dr. Waife was a great lover of music, fishing, and in later years, golf. A drum player in his youth, his love of music led to Board positions with the Indianapolis Symphony, and WFYI public radio in Indianapolis. He hosted weekly radio programs on WFYI on both jazz and Gilbert & Sullivan. Dr. Waife came from multiple generations of writers, including his grandfather Sholom Aleichem, the leading Yiddish writer, and his father B. Z. Goldberg, longtime columnist in the Jewish Press and former Editor of Der Tag (The Day) in New York. Dr. Waife is survived by his wife Margaret, his daughter Wendy Lebson and husband Dr. Robert Lebson of Mount Carmel, CT, his son Ronald Waife and wife Susan Maxwell of Needham, MA, his brother of Boynton Beach, FL, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His first wife, Jane Silverman Waife, passed away in 1988.