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Betty Banker Victor February 7, 2010 |
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Betty Banker Victor, an important figure in academic medicine, died on 7 February 2010, in hospital at Burlington, Vermont, of pneumonia. She was 88 years old. Betty Banker was born in New York City in 1921; the family moved shortly after to Freeport, Long Island. When her parents became estranged, she and her older brother were raised by their mother under difficult circumstances. She attended Ithaca College on a scholarship, earning a bachelor's degree in 1944. Convinced by an unsatisfying try at school teaching to return to her studies, she took an M.D. from Albany Medical College in 1950. She then obtained residencies at Harvard Medical School, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine, and an instructorship at Harvard Medical School. In these positions she worked with two of the greatest twentieth-century neurologists, Derek Denny-Brown and Raymond Adams, and developed an interest in all aspects of neuropathology, but especially in the pathology of muscle, which would remain her research specialty. She married Maurice Victor, a fellow Boston neurologist, in 1956. In 1962 the two took up professorial appointments at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. Betty worked there until her retirement in 1986, publishing numerous and important papers on muscle disease, and particularly on the muscular dystrophies. She is perhaps best known for co-editing, and writing large parts of, Myology (New York, McGraw-Hill, first edition 1974), considered the standard work of reference on muscle. In 1987 the second edition won the book award of the American Medical Writers Association. Betty Banker Victor spent her retirement in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she held faculty status at Dartmouth Medical School and became a familiar feature of the local medical community. She is survived by a son, Benjamin, and by two grandsons, Samuel and Nathan. Services will be held at the Rand-Wilson Funeral Home in Hanover, NH on Wednesday, 17 February, at 10:00 AM. Burial will follow at the Pine Knoll Cemetery in Hanover.
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