Happy birthday, Dr. Parsonnet
Local surgeon, musician, philanthropist turns 100
Okay, so Dr. Victor Parsonnet, who celebrated his birthday on Thursday, wasn’t quite born at the Beth.
He was born in Deal on August 29, 1924, close to his family’s summer house. (And no, that’s not a typo. Dr. Parsonnet has just turned 100.)
And neither of his two grandfathers, the original Dr. Victor Parsonnet and Dr. Max Danzis, was born at the Beth either.
Instead, they birthed it.
Dr. Parsonnet the Younger is an extremely influential cardiac surgeon; his work significantly advanced the construction and use of pacemakers, and he was instrumental in the development of the field. He was the first doctor in New Jersey to successfully transplant a heart, and also a kidney. But his interests have not been only medical. He was the chair of the New Jersey Symphony for 16 years, and he has been extremely active in the MetroWest Jewish community.
To further complicate his story, as outstanding as he is, he’s one of a family of extraordinary physicians, scientists, social activists, and philanthropists.
We can’t possibly do justice even to him, much less to his family, here, but we can give it a try.
Michael Nevins is a retired internist and cardiologist; he lives in Piermont, in Rockland County, now, but he was born at the Beth, and he lived and practiced in Bergen County for decades.
He’s also a dedicated amateur historian, with a particular interest in medical history, and even more particularly in Jewish and local medical history.
That means that he’s very interested in the Parsonnet and Danzis families — so interested that he’s worked with archival materials in the holdings of the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest, and he plans to give a talk about what he’s learned, on Zoom, on September 17. (To register, go to the Medical History Society of New Jersey, at www.mhsnj.org.)
Max Danzis landed on Ellis Island alone, from Ukraine, in 1889, when he was 15; he had only one ruble in his pocket, and that would have been hard to spend in New York anyway.
Victor Parsonnet — whose last name originally was some hard-to-spell Russian sounding combination of Ps and Ts and Zs, possibly Petzetzelski, and who likely took the name Parsonnet to honor Albert Parsons, the anarchist who was hanged because he was thought to have been the perpetrator of the Haymarket Riot, which means that Dr. Parsonnet was a complicated man — came to America at around the same time.
Max Danzis graduated from NYU Medical College, and Victor Parsonnet from Long Island Medical College.
Victor married Augusta Levine; like Victor, Gusta wanted to be a doctor, but they could afford only one tuition, so — of course — he went to medical school, and she went to work for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. They moved to Newark, he established a thriving practice, and they named their first child Eugene Victor Parsonnet, after Eugene Debs, the Socialist who ran for president five times, and lost five times.
Max married Jenny Reich, and they moved to Newark, where her parents lived, and the two couples became friends.
Dr. Danzis and Dr. Parsonnet soon realized that there was a problem in their community. Jewish patients couldn’t get into local hospitals, and Jewish doctors couldn’t get staff appointments at those hospitals.
The two men, allied with a local women’s organization, the Daughters of Israel, decided to change that. The Daughters of Israel had raised $4,000; that was enough to buy a house right across the street from Victor’s office, which had been in his house. “In 1901, the 21-bed Beth Israel Hospital opened,” Dr. Nevins said. “The rest is history.”
The two families lived next door. Their oldest children, Eugene Victor and Rose Danzis, born three weeks apart in 1900, got married in 1923.
Victor had been a heavy smoker; he worked hard, and that work was stressful. In 1920, even more exhausted than before because he also had been confronting the influenza pandemic, “he keeled over at his lab bench, dead from a sudden heart attack,” Dr. Nevins said.
He was a lifelong socialist, the father of two sons, and according to the accolades published after he died, beloved. His funeral drew thousands of people, who lined the streets, reports tell us. “When his body was carried out, a sob, a moan went up from the vast throng that lasted until the hearse passed on,” one says. “It was a cry of anguish from the heart.”
Dr. Parsonnet the Younger is named after him.
His paternal grandmother, Gusta, was an active Zionist and suffragist; she became president of Newark’s League of Women Voters. She was a vital presence in her city’s cultural life.
“She was an amazing person,” Julie Parsonnet, Dr. Victor Parsonnet the Younger’s daughter, her granddaughter, said. Dr. Parsonnet, who lives in California and like so many in her family, including her husband, is a physician, in her case in Stanford, is in New Jersey for her father’s birthday. “She was a real community leader, always fighting the good fight.
“She was legendary, and my dad adored her.”
Max was Beth Israel’s chief of medical staff from 1920 to 1940, responsible for the creation of new specialty services. He was well liked, we’re told; he also was well grounded in Jewish texts, often quoting the Bible or the Talmud. He published in medical journals, he lectured, and he was the first physician in New Jersey to remove a patient’s gall bladder.
His wife, Jenny, like Gusta, was a suffragist. Together, they had been instrumental in founding the Beth — their husbands didn’t do it alone. Jenny chaired the hospital’s Women’s Guild for many years; she worked with immigrant women, helping them to acculture to their new world.
Julie’s father’s father, Dr. Eugene Parsonnet, “was a very well-respected surgeon,” she said, and Gene Parsonnet’s wife, Rose Danzis Parsonnet, who graduated from Wellesley, were childhood sweethearts. Rose “was a social worker and then a piano teacher, so there was always music in our home,” Julie said. “And there was always a commitment to community.”
One of the lessons that her father got from his childhood is that “he is fearless about what he does, and he is generous. He accepts people as they are, and he loves everybody. He doesn’t care if you work in the basement and live in the penthouse.
“He has a surgeon’s personality in that he is very self-confident. He is a good decision-maker.” But he is not at all a stereotypical surgeon because “he is not arrogant, and he is not egotistical. He is very community-oriented.
“And the Newark Jewish community, and the Jewish community in Essex County, has been a very important part of his life.”
Julie’s father married another physician, an internist named Mia Eimer. “Her family were refugees from the Nazis,” Julie Parsonnet said. “They moved to Vienna from Ukraine during World War I, and she was born there. The family got out in 1939, right after the Anschluss, when she was 16 and her brother was 11.”
That brother, Manfred Eimer, who was not a physician but a Ph.D. physicist with a degrees from Cal Tech, worked in the Reagan administration; among other positions, he was the assistant director of verification and intelligence at the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. That’s particularly striking because one of Ronald Reagan’s aphorisms was “trust, but verify,” and there was Dr. Eimer, doing it.
“My uncle Fred was very right wing, and the rest of the family was very left wing,” Dr. Parsonnet said. “But we really liked him.”
Some time after they got married, the Parsonnets moved to Millburn, although they never gave up their connections to Newark in general, and of course to the Beth in particular.
Mia Parsonnet worked for Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, doing drug trials, because it would have been too hard to have two doctors seeing patients, and at the time drug companies allowed employees to keep regular hours. She was a brilliant pianist, her daughter said.
“They were very good parents. They were very social; they had lots of friends, bridge clubs, wine-tasting parties. They had a very close-knit group of friends in the Jewish community — all their friends were Jewish, mainly from Milburn, South Orange, and the Beth.
“During the summer, my dad was a doctor at Camp Winaukee. He went off to camp for a month every year.” So kids’ runny noses and bug bites were tended to by a world-class cardiac surgeon.
“It was a different world, and a wonderful way to grow up,” Dr. Parsonnet said.
Meanwhile, her father’s career grew.
“In around 1960, when I was 3, we moved to Houston, so my dad could train for heart surgery with Dr. DeBakey,” Dr. Parsonnet continued. That’s Dr. Michael DeBakey, the famous cardiac surgeon. “DeBakey was still working with Cooley then.” That was Dr. Denton Cooley, another world-famous cardiac surgeon, who performed the first successful heart transplant. “That was before they became famous enemies. When my father got there, DeBakey acted like he didn’t know who he was. He had to just follow him around.
“And then my dad ran into Cooley, and Cooley took him under his wing, and he ended up really working for Cooley.
“My dad did the first heart transplant in New Jersey, and the first kidney transplant in New Jersey.” He did a great deal of revolutionary work with pacemakers, he spearheaded research into their makeup and use, and “he put in the first nuclear pacemaker,” his daughter said.
There were some hiccups to the development of pacemakers, Dr. Nevins said. “At first, they used mercury batteries. They would run down in about two years, and they’d have to be replaced. That’s why he got interested in nuclear pacemakers. Those batteries could last for 40 years — they’d long outlast the patients — but they still were rather primitive.
“And then along came lithium batteries, which last for about 10 to 15 years. They’re much more sophisticated. So there were maybe 100 or so implanted.
Now, “we have really tiny pace-makers, that go outside the heart,” Dr. Parsonnet added. The field has changed rapidly. “My father was a visionary in that field,” she said.
“I was the next generation of doctors after Victor,” Dr. Nevins said. “I looked up to him. He was one of the pioneers in the field.”
Her father worked closely with other doctors, Dr. Parsonnet said. “My dad was very collegial. He was not egotistical. He cared about the outcome.”
Her father loved four things most of all, she said. “He loved his family. He loved tennis. Hje loved the piano. And he loved surgery. And he was great at all of them. Nothing else was on the menu.”
Julie Parsonnet has two brothers. Jeffrey, the older one, is an internist specializing in infectious diseases at Dartmouth. Brian, the middle child, is an engineer, “the amazing CEO of a company, and he is the best musician of the three of us.
“We all play two instruments, but Jeff and I mainly sing,” she added.
Victor Parsonnet has five grandchildren, his daughter said. Jeff’s son Nathan “works in the mushroom industry, growing restaurant mushrooms, and his daughter, Myra, works for energy conservation. And she’s pregnant!
“Brian has two kids. Nick has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and Eric has a Ph.D. in physics.
“And my daughter, Sienna, is in medical school — in Rutgers. We still have very strong roots in New Jersey.
“My father also was very close to his sister, Annd Lieberson, who lived in Livingston and died a few years ago, and to her children.
“She was a wonderful violin teacher, and a big contributor to the New Jersey Symphony.” Most of her children and grandchildren also are doctors.
Then there’s the music.
“Victor and I worked together for almost 30 years,” Susan Stucker said. Ms. Stucker, who “started at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in an entry-level position, and recently retired as COO,” said that “Victor joined the board in 1986.
“His family was always very involved. His father, Eugene, was on the board before that.
“Victor became board chair in 1990, and was chair for about 16 years. He had the longest tenure as board chair
“It was an amazing time. That’s when NJPAC was built.”
Dr. Parsonnet is “an amazing human being,” Ms. Stucker said. “He’s amazing in so many ways. He’s an acclaimed cardiac surgeon, and he also believes in social justice, and in the power of art, and in community.
“He not only supported the symphony and NJPAC, he also was very involved in the Jewish community. With Eugene Zimbarg, he came up with the wonderful idea of a partnership between the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest and NJPAC. I think about 10 couples gave funds for an endowment for the symphony to give a concert at NJPAC, and the benefits would go to the federation. That went on for years.
“The symphony still has a partnership with the federation, and it does programs with various entities of MetroWest every year.
“We have remained friends. I just adore Victor.
“Basically, Victor cares deeply for people. He is so humble. He just wants to help people. If you’re part of the symphony, whether he knows you a lot or just a little bit, if you have a medical problem, he will be there.
“A concert master cut his finger while he was slicing a bagel, and he was freaking out, because he was a violinist, and if you’re a violinist your fingers are your life. So he went to Beth Israel. Victor had all these people who met him, ready to do anything he needed.
“They looked at it — and then basically blew on it and put a Band-Aid back on it. He was fine.
“But on the other hand, there was someone at the symphony who had a very serious health issue and needed surgery. They went to New York to have it done. It took hours, and when they woke up, there was Victor. He was the first person they saw. Victor wanted to be there.
“Victor has done that for three members of my family. You’re so relieved to have him there — but for him, that’s just what you do as a human being.”
Even now, at 100, facing serious health concerns, Dr. Parsonnet has not lost himself.
His family had a birthday party for him last year, when he turned 99, and another one this year. When she visits him now, as she does regularly, Ms. Stucker still is moved by him.
He is an important, innovative surgeon, from a family of innovators and surgeons and physicists and musicians and suffragists and philanthropists, deeply connected to his community. Generation after generation of children born at the Beth — his Beth Israel — have given birth to their own children there.
Now, still, “he is just so full of joy,” Ms. Stucker said. “I love him.”
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