Dr. Hambrick in his office at the quarters of
the American Skin Association in Manhattan

Devotion to the skin and its wellbeing keeps Dr. George W. Hambrick, Jr. going at the age of 85.

It keeps him coming and going, too. Two or three mornings a month, at the break of dawn, he leaves his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, drives 78 miles to the airport in Richmond, and flies to New York City. There he stays, usually from Monday to Thursday, to fulfill his duties as president of the American Skin Association, which he and a few others founded in 1987.

The American Skin Association, Dr. Hambrick made clear in an interview at its quarters on Park Avenue South and 25th Street, is not to be confused with the American Dermatological Association. The dermatological association is a purely professional organization with a focus on scientific and clinical presentations. Dr. Hambrick and his colleagues wanted to reach out to the public.

Accordingly, the American Skin Association has developed a curriculum on skin care that it says now reaches 1.7 million children in 22 cities. It puts out a quarterly newsletter called "SkinFacts" that circulates to 50,000 households. It has produced a series of free educational pamphlets, and it runs a user-friendly web site at www.americanskin.org.

Its research grants have supported work on auto-immune and inflammatory diseases, psoriasis, childhood skin disorders, vitiligo (a skin disorder manifested by smooth white spots), and melanoma and other skin cancers.

“I have a great vision that the American Skin Association will be a household word, like the American Heart Association,’’ Dr. Hambrick said, speaking in a quiet well-modulated voice that bears the trace of his Virginia origin. Its tone belies the passion he feels for the cause.

“He is extremely dedicated and passionate about dermatology – and a gentleman,” said Dr. Victoria Werth, who was one of his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. “He is a terrific example of dermatologists who remain active in the field and contribute long after many others have retired.”

Dr. Hambrick looking at papers on
his desk even before sitting down

Another colleague, Nora Jordan, vice chairman of the American Skin Association and a partner in the New York law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, said of him, “He has unbelievable energy and motivation. He knows everyone, he’s innovative and open to ideas. He brings the financial people to the table and he gets them to give money and be interested. He makes it all work.”

When Dr. Hambrick’s name was mentioned to Dr. John A. Carucci, director of dermatologic surgery at the Weill Cornell Medical Center, in Manhattan, his eyes widened. It’s fair to say, according to Dr. Carucci, that Dr. Hambrick was the top educator in the country in his field.

Dr. Hambrick’s career began in West Virginia schools and has taken him to university hospitals in seven states. His academic career has included administration, teaching and research, and he takes pride in the fact that at two of those hospitals – the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in Baltimore, Maryland, and Cornell Medical College (now the Weill Cornell Medical Center) – he arrived as chairman of dermatology divisions that were full departments when he left.

His medical education in the years after his graduation from Concord College in Athens, West Virginia, in 1944 took him to the University of Virginia Medical School, in Charlottesville, and to the State University of Iowa Hospitals, in Iowa City, for his internship. Then came one more year at Virginia for his residency and two years of military service with the Army at military hospitals in Yokohama and Okinawa.

A lighter moment during a picture-
taking session for Eldercountry

Back in the United States he completed his residency at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York (now New York-Presbyterian Hospital) and moved on to faculty appointments at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons before accepting an appointment to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in Philadelphia, in 1955. He started there as an associate in dermatology and ended as an associate professor in 1966.

Then a 10-year stint at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine began with an associate professorship. He became the first full-time professor of dermatology there and ended up with the post of acting chair of a full dermatology department.

The next stop was the Cincinnati Medical Center, for five years. Then, in 1981, Dr. Hambrick went to Cornell University Medical College as a professor and co-head of its division of dermatology. He retired in 1995 as acting chair. The medical school now has an endowed professorship of dermatology named in his honor.

Beyond all this there have been visiting professorships and lectures near and far – from North Carolina to Australia, from Montreal to Tokyo, from Miami, Florida, to San Diego, California, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Augusta, Georgia, and he has 75 publications to his credit. Ever since retirement, in 1996, he has been active in numerous organizations dedicated to promoting healthy skin.

Honors have flowed in, among them the Dermatology Foundation’s first Lifetime Career Educator award in 1999, and designation in 2007 as a “distinguished medical alumnus” by Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Hambrick never married but he was a happy householder anyway. As he moved from city to city he would buy houses that he describes as “downcast” and fix them up. “I try to do this with people too,” he said, as illustrated by another current cause: he is an active board member of the Little Keswick Foundation for Special Education, which supports educational efforts of the Little Keswick School near Charlottesville. The student body of 30 consists of children from the United States and abroad with emotional or educational difficulties.

On both his mother’s and his father’s side Dr. Hambrick is descended from early settlers in Virginia. He believes himself to be one of the oldest survivors in his generation of the Coleman and Harris families of Virginia, both from England. His mother was a descendant of those families although she herself was a member of the McCallum family of Scotland.

The name Hambrick is derived from the Gaelic surname Hamrick, he said, and was used by the first Hamrick in America, Patrick, when he arrived from Ireland in 1699.

“The name today in Gaelic is ‘O’Hanvirra,’” Dr. Hambrick said. That name can be traced back to “O’hAinmhire” in 1094. There were 68,000 descendants of Patrick, it seems, and on a visit to Ireland Dr. Hambrick found one of them by looking up the name "O'Hanvirra" in the Galway telephone book. The two men took swabs from their mouths and sent their samples to a laboratory in Texas. Their Y chromosome matched.

For all its fascination, genealogy cannot match dermatology as a subject of Dr. Hambrick’s interest. Nor can the eye of an ordinary mortal match his for its awareness of skin. He notices skin conditions automatically, and they sometimes rouse in him an animation that contrasts with his usually placid temperament.

“Body piercing, artifacts like nose diamonds, they bother me tremendously,” he said. “I think, ‘Oh me, why, why, why?’ I see six different rings in the ears. They can cause infections! Scars!”

He is similarly displeased by tattoos, which are made with permanently insoluble pigments, although he reports that a team of scientists, led by Dr. R. Rox Anderson, at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, has developed a process for soluble pigments.

The great issue in dermatology these days is skin cancer, and how to prevent it. There is one basic rule: Don’t go out in the sun without sunscreen. The hours between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. are the most dangerous because the sun is closest then. And people with blue eyes and fair skin are at the greatest risk.

“I hate tanning salons,” he said. “When I was born women in the South wanted to be white-skinned. There were emulsions made of cow manure that would be rubbed on the face to produce a bleaching effect.” Tastes have changed.

As a dermatology professor and clinician, Dr. Hambrick over the years has been involved in the treatment of many serious skin conditions. But that has not diminished his awareness of the minor skin blemishes that he witnesses every day.

He concluded an hour’s interview in March of this year, for example, with a polite observation about the interviewer’s forehead.

“You have scaling on the forehead,” he said. “It’s an oil-flow-related dermatitis. How do you wash your hair? Do you use a shampoo?” Yes, he was told, and for many years a shampoo for dry hair and dandruff.

“But you have oily hair,” Dr. Hambrick said. “You should use a 1 percent hydrocortisone solution on your forehead. Rub it on wet skin and the scaling will go away. And use a standard anti-dandruff shampoo on your scalp.”

It will be done.

CECILIA BRAUER

Cecilia playing her armonica durng a talk in the
Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center, NYC

The Spotlight in our December 2007 issue was on Cecilia Brauer, who opened with the Metropolitan Opera this past December. She provided the ghostly sound of the armonica for Natalie Dessay's arias in Lucia di Lammermoor. Cecilia repeated that performance when Lucia returned to the Met in March of this year.

Cecilia has continued to give presentations on Ben Franklin and the armonica all over the New York City metropolitan area and beyond. This past April, she spoke about Ben Franklin and his armonica and played some selections for an audience at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, in Manhattan.

Cecilia took a great many questions from the audience at that presentation, and it was clear that she was pleased that several of them came from a youngster. Cecilia does her best not only to acquaint young audiences with the instrument that Ben Franklin invented but to inspire enthusiasm in them for Franklin's genius.

You can find out more about Cecilia on her website - click on www.gigmasters.com/armonica/index.asp.

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