Dr. Erwin Hirsch, 72; leader in the treatment of trauma

Dr. Erwin Hirsch supervised treatment in 2006 for a hit-and-run victim, who arrived at BMC with barely a pulse. (Essdras m suarez/globe staff)

Nearly 20 years ago, when Elaine Ullian was head of Faulkner Hospital, she got an inkling of the high regard with which Dr. Erwin Hirsch was held across the country.

"I was recruiting a surgeon and he said, 'It will be fun to come to Boston because the best trauma leader in the world is Erwin Hirsch and I'll get to see him,' " Ullian, now president and chief executive officer of Boston Medical Center, said yesterday. "Erwin had rock star quality in the trauma community - he really was a rock star. And he would be very amused to hear me say he was a rock star. He would giggle."

Drawing lessons from a life that spanned three continents and vast changes in medicine, Dr. Hirsch spent more than three decades turning Boston City Hospital and its successor, Boston Medical Center, into the city's premier trauma center, all the while training physicians who used the knowledge he shared in careers throughout the country.

Dr. Hirsch, who was 72 when he drowned Friday in a boating accident in Rockport, Maine, "was iconic," Ullian said. "I cannot think of anybody at this medical center who was held in the same esteem that Erwin Hirsch was."

"He had an impact not only at the Boston Medical Center, but also on how trauma is practiced in the city and in the state as well - and in the country, it would not be unfair to say," said Dr. Peter A. Burke, chief of surgical critical care at Boston Medical Center. "He had a national reputation as a person with an enormous amount of experience. Trauma, unlike other specialties, is something that requires experience because no trauma is alike and you're always dealing with the unknown, really."

Beginning in the early 1970s, when he was an assistant professor of surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and had a clinical position at Boston City Hospital, Dr. Hirsch began building the trauma program that would become his legacy. Appointed assistant chief of surgery in 1977, he worked with Dr. Lenworth Jacobs to secure for the hospital a Level 1 trauma center designation.

"First and foremost he was for the patient and it didn't matter to him who that patient was - rich person, poor person, whatever," said Jacobs, a professor of surgery at the University of Connecticut and director of the trauma program at Hartford Hospital. "He was going to take good care of that person, that was his defining moment. This might sound a little trite, but with trauma, you get to know your patients very, very well and Erwin was a people person. He would really go out of his way to make sure his patients got anything they needed to get better."

In the early 1980s, Dr. Hirsch worked behind the scenes to create Boston MedFlight, a nonprofit financially backed by several of the city's hospitals that uses helicopters, a small jet, and ground vehicles to transport patients. He served on its board of directors since the service was created.

"My crew will tell you he's the father of MedFlight, and they say it with reverence," said Suzanne Wedel, medical director and chief executive officer of Boston MedFlight.

"He also was one of the earliest people to welcome women into surgery," she said. "Even when women in surgery were an unusual breed, there were many women in surgery at Boston City Hospital and Boston Medical Center."

Dr. Hirsch, who became chief of trauma surgery at Boston Medical Center, was also a professor at Boston University School of Medicine for more than two decades.

"Trauma is a social issue as much as a medical one," he told the Globe in 1984. "The reasons [this society] sees so much of it are obvious. We drive too fast and drink too much. We batter our children and stab strangers on the street. We glamorize violence on television, then permit every Tom, Dick, and Harry to own a gun."

Born in Mannheim, Germany, Erwin Federico Hirsch was the oldest of three sons and left the country with his family in 1939 after his father was released from a Nazi concentration camp, according to information from his family. He graduated from the medical school at the University of Buenos Aires.

Dr. Hirsch trained at Washington Hospital Center in the nation's capital and at the shock trauma unit of the hospital affiliated with the University of Maryland.

He volunteered for the Navy during the Vietnam War, served as a surgeon in Da Nang, and then remained in the Naval Reserves and was briefly in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm.

"He was a citizen of the world," Ullian said. "He just was full of life and he loved his family."

Dr. Hirsch leaves his wife, Susan of Marblehead; two daughters, Christina Townsend of New York City and Kathleen of South Boston; and two brothers, Carlos of Sao Paulo, and Cristobal of Buenos Aires.

A memorial service for family and friends will be held at 10 a.m. today in Old North Church in Marblehead. A memorial service open to the public will be held at noon tomorrow at Boston Medical Center in front of the Moakley Building on Harrison Avenue.