Los Angeles
County
Biographies
PHOEBUS
BERMAN, M. D.
When it is taken into consideration that the great majority of people never rise above the ordinary, but live out their lives in obscurity, and, dying, are forgotten, all the more credit is accorded those who have enriched their communities, benefited their associates, raised a higher standard for generations to come and demonstrated the worth of individual endeavor. The courageous, public-spirited men of any state plan for the future as well as the present, and so shape the coming history of the commonwealth. Phoebus Berman has long been accepted as a leader in his chosen field not only in California but nationally as well. As has been said by one specially familiar with his career, “His outstanding accomplishments as chief medical director of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, one of the largest and finest in the world, his contributions to medical science has won the highest respect from the medical world and has saved the taxpayers of California many hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
A native of Russia, he was born January 10, 1890, and represents an old and prominent family of that country tracing its ancestry back to 1735. It was in 1913, when a young man of twenty-three years, that Phoebus Berman came to Los Angeles and took up the study of medicine at the University of Southern California, from which institution he was graduated with the degree M. D. in 1919 with the highest honors. He then became an interne at the old Los Angeles General Hospital with which he has been continuously connected throughout the intervening period of sixteen years, having served the institution in every capacity. It was in 1931 that he assumed his present important duties as medical director. He is assisted in the administration of his department by the medical board and attending staff, all assisted in turn by the house staff and corps of internes. The attending staff of this hospital now numbers five hundred and nine; the house staff eighty-seven; and the internes one hundred and four.”
Transcribed
by: Jeanne Taylor.
Source: California
of the South Vol. V,
by John Steven McGroarty, Pages
647-648, Clarke Publ., Chicago, Los Angeles,
Indianapolis. 1933.
© 2013 Jeanne Taylor.
GOLDEN NUGGET'S LOS ANGELES
BIOGRAPHIES