William L. Hewitt; Teacher at UCLA Medical School

William L. Hewitt, professor of medicine emeritus at UCLA and former head of the UCLA Medical School’s infectious disease division, has died.

Hewitt died of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day, his 77th birthday.

Hewitt joined the UCLA faculty shortly after the medical school was founded in 1949 and was one of the core group of faculty members who built it into a major institution. An internist, he established the school’s division of infectious diseases--a relatively new discipline in the 1950s. He served as its chief for almost three decades and for much of that time was also a professor of pharmacology.

Born in Nebraska and brought up in Altadena, Hewitt received a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley. He earned a medical doctorate at UC San Francisco and interned at San Francisco General Hospital. During World War II, he served as shipboard medical officer in the Pacific and on the staff of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He later was a resident physician and held a specialty fellowship at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston.

A pioneer in antimicrobial therapy, Hewitt published regularly on the uses of various antibiotics in treating infection. He also taught and lectured across the country as a clinician.

Hewitt was an enthusiastic pianist, playing both classical and ragtime, and an avid collector of stamps, art and books, almost all of which were lost when his Malibu home burned down in the recent fires.