Norman Levinsky; BU chief of medicine championed ethics

For nearly four decades, Dr. Norman Levinsky, Boston University's chief of medicine and associate provost, wrote thousands of pages on the human kidney system and trained hundreds students to combat whatever diseases plagued it.

The 74-year-old Boston native, known for his rigorous standard of medical ethics, died Monday at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital.

"He was revered by people," Aram Chobanian, BU's interim president, said yesterday.

Dr. Levinsky's articles on ethics are widely read by policy makers and students of medicine, on whom he impressed the idea that the needs of the patient should trump their own financial interests.

"Physicians are required to do everything that they believe may benefit each patient without regard to costs or other societal considerations," he wrote in a 1984 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"He championed the patients as being what medicine is all about and not focusing on the business aspect of medicine," Chobanian said.

When dealing with patients, "it wasn't just a conference-room approach to things," he said. Dr. Levinsky explained a person's medical condition as well as the options for treatment, seeing the discussion as a teaching opportunity.

Author of more than 150 publications on subjects ranging from kidney function and renal disease to health policy ethics and education, Dr. Levinsky, a quiet and meticulous man, directed a kidney research laboratory for more than 30 years.

The graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School interned at Beth Israel Hospital, before becoming a clinical associate at the National Heart Institute and a fellow in the BU Medical Center laboratory of Dr. Arnold Relman, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Levinsky joined BU in 1967, working his way up to chief of medicine and associate provost.

While at BU, he oversaw the reorganization of the Evans Memorial Department of Clinical Research as its director, transforming it into the nonprofit Evans Medical Group, and adding a women's health unit.

More recently, he championed the cause of elderly patients in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Why have the elderly become the focus of proposals to reduce the cost of health care in America?" he wrote. "Envision the uproar if it were proposed that expensive but medically useful care for blacks or women be eliminated."

He also chaired a committee in the mid-1990s that considered the risks and benefits of transplanting organs from animals to save human lives, also known as xenografting. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, he warned against the dangers of moving quickly to do so, despite the shortage of human organs, saying

xenografting could encourage diseases to cross species.

Although usually reserved, Dr. Levinsky was known to break out in song and recite poetry at parties, extolling and teasing his students through homemade Gilbert and Sullivan-esque tunes.

Dr. Levinsky leaves his wife, Elena; two sons Harold and Andy; a daughter, Nancy Safran; his mother and stepfather, Gertrude and Louis Feldman; a sister, Ellen Sussman; and three grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held at noon today in Schlossberg-Solomon Memorial Chapel in Canton. Burial will be in Sharon Memorial Park in Sharon.