Henry L. Jaffe M.D.
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif., March 7 /PRNewswire/ — Dr. Henry L. Jaffe, a pioneer in the development of nuclear medicine, radiology cancer surgeon and heart specialist, died on Tuesday, March 6 of heart failure after a short illness at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage. He was 96.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070307/LAW099)
Dr. Jaffe was one of the founders and first president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and pioneered the use of Cobalt treatments to treat cancer in the United States. In 1958, he designed a color scanning technology for nuclear medicine, which allowed doctors to diagnose cancer, strokes and many infections, and for which a U.S. patent was later issued.
In 1958, he and a small group of doctors founded the Society of Nuclear Medicine, based in Preston, Virginia, and he served as its first president. Today the society has thousands of members, and is recognized for furthering the use of nuclear medicine for the diagnosis and treatment of various life-threatening diseases. The society certifies American board specialists in nuclear medicine.
In 1942, he went on active duty with the U.S. Navy, serving as chief of Therapeutic Radiology at the U.S. Naval Hospital in San Diego and published a paper on research into war wounds of the chest. After the war, he moved to Los Angeles, where after a short time in private practice, he joined the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in 1948 as director of Radiation Therapy and Nuclear Medicine. At Cedars, he developed the so-called “atomic cocktail” treatment for the cure of overactive thyroid disease, thyroid cancer, leukemia and heart disease. The treatment is still in use today as a substitute for surgery, and in fact, was recently used to cure a thyroid condition in former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara.
Dr. Jaffe, born in Chicago Aug. 15, 1910, graduated from the University of Wisconsin and earned a medical degree from Northwestern University Medical School in 1934. He did his residency in radiology first at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, and later at the Pineville Cancer Hospital (Harvard Cancer Commission) in Wrentham, Mass.
Dr. Jaffe also developed a treatment that involved injecting atomic isotopes into the prostate for patients who were considered to have inoperable cancer of the prostate. In 1955, working with Dr. Tracy Putnam, a professor of psychiatry and neurological surgery at Harvard, Dr. Jaffe developed the use of radioactive injections into the brain for patients suffering from severe mental disorders, such as manic depressive psychoses.
In the mid-1950s, he developed a rotating chair device for the cobalt treatment of brain cancer — and later presented the results of his work at a symposium at the Federal Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. Beginning in 1950, he and others began to track 73 children and adolescents he treated with radioactive iodine for overactive thyroid, research which later proved that it was as safe to give radioactive treatment to young people as to adults.
Dr. Jaffe served at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center until 1972, when he moved to Century City Hospital in Los Angeles, as director of Radiation Therapy and Nuclear Medicine, where he served until 1982 when he and his family moved to Rancho Mirage, California. From 1982 to 1985 he was director of the Community Diagnostic Breast Institute.
Throughout his more than 35 years practicing medicine in California, Dr. Jaffe was a clinical professor of radiology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine and a senior attending radiologist at the Los Angeles County Hospital. He also served as co-chairman of the annual workshop in the management of cancers sponsored by the American Cancer Society. He was a director of that Society and charter member and vice president of the American College of Nuclear Medicine, as well as a founder and president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine of Southern California.
In the 1960s, he and physicist Ralph Adams developed a way of color-coding the recording of radioisotopes at they collect in normal and diseased tissues. This technology of color-coded scanning is used to diagnose diseases today. Later, Dr. Jaffe developed the use of hyperbaric oxygen, such as is used for decompressing miners and deep sea divers, and is also used, in combination with radiation treatment, to make malignant brain tumors and other cancers more sensitive to radiation treatment.
Starting in 1938, he developed a device to protect the normal eye, while the cancerous eye was being treated with radiation and later he did research on the use of radioisotopes for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer of the uterus, eye, breast, prostate, and the bladder as well as thyroid and heart disease.
Among his honors, Dr. Jaffe was a fellow of the American College of Radiology and the American Medical Association; and he was given honorary degrees by the Society of Radiology of Peru and of Panama; the Long Beach (Calif.) Surgical Society and the Texas Radiological Society.
Dr. Jaffe was married to the late Diana Gaines Jaffe, a noted novelist. He is survived by his three sons — Andrew, Stephen, and Bruce, as well as a grandson, Christopher. Dr. Jaffe’s interment will be at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park and Mortuary in Cathedral City. The family, which will have a private service, asks that donations be made to the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago or the Eisenhower Medical Center Foundation in Rancho Mirage, California.
Contact: Jaffe & Co., Inc., Stephen Jaffe, (310) 275-7327; (Mobile) (310) 713-4849
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Jaffe & Co., Inc.
CONTACT: Stephen Jaffe of Jaffe & Co., Inc., +1-310-275-7327, or cell,+1-310-713-4849