‘Renaissance Man’ and Doctor, William Hyman Dead at 64

Dr. William Hyman, a Long Beach neurosurgeon who became known as the “family doctor of Oman” because of his medical treatment of members of the Omani government and royal family, died last week of a heart attack. He was 64.

Friends remembered Hyman as a dedicated physician whose interests extended beyond medicine.

“He was a Renaissance man,” said Dr. Bill Wild, Hyman’s friend and medical partner for more than three decades. “He wrote poetry and prose. He had an interest in other cultures. He was compassionate and extremely sensitive to other people.”

The son of a furniture salesman, Hyman was born in 1928 and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. He decided to become a doctor when he worked after college in a hospital morgue. In 1952, he graduated from Albany Medical College in New York, and interned at Queens General Hospital.

He met his future wife, another intern named Geraldine (Gerry) Stramski, while attending an autopsy. Hyman later joked about having his met his wife in the morgue. Hyman and Stramski, who became a pediatrician, were married in 1954.

Reflecting his lifelong interest in classical literature, Hyman once said of his wife, “Gerry is one of those rare gems who reminds me of Faust’s words on seeing Helen of Troy: ‘Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’ ”

Hyman chose a career in neurosurgery while serving as a U.S. Navy officer, and later entered a neurosurgery residency at Long Beach Veterans Administration Hospital. He served on a variety of medical boards, commissions and associations, and was president of the Long Beach Medical Assn. in the mid-1970s.

Hyman’s connection with Oman began in 1979, when he operated on an Omani government official who came to Long Beach seeking treatment for severe neck pain. Later, another member of a prominent Omani family came to Long Beach for treatment.

The two grateful patients spread word of the man they called “Magic Doctor Hyman” throughout the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation, and soon hundreds of wealthy Omanis were traveling to Long Beach for treatment by Hyman of everything from acne to stomach problems. Hyman referred most of them to specialists.

Hyman made many trips to Oman as an honored guest of Omani officials, treating patients and advising local health officials on the national health care system.

A writer and poet, Hyman often wrote about a subject near to all neurosurgeons--what he called “la danse macabre,” the dance of death.

“Each patient has his own special needs, his own nuances, his own circumstances of living and dying,” Hyman wrote in an article in the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. magazine, Physician. “They should be treated accordingly, with dignity and compassion and kindness, and with the intelligence and instinct that made us physicians in the first place.”

In the same article, Hyman wrote, “There cannot be life without some eventual loss.”

Hyman is survived by his wife, their sons Robert and Eric, two granddaughters and his sister, Arlene Ruderman. Funeral services were Sunday at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes.