Memories of Bill Epstein
By Harry Roth

I wonder if I am one of Bill Epstein’s oldest friends in this room.  I think back to the first time I met Bill Epstein.  It was 1948 and I had returned from two and a half years in the Maritime Service.  I enrolled at UC Berkeley as a physiology major and a premed student.  In a physics class, were two brothers – Bill and John Epstein, who had returned from military service and were both very intense and dedicated students.  We sat together in lecture hall and thus began a friendship that endured.

I quickly found out that Bill and his brother, John were hard workers.  But at the end of the week, were hard party animals.  Bill was a mature person in college as he was older than most college sophomores.  He was able to organize his work, study efficiently and perform to the level he knew was necessary in order to compete with the large influx of returning veterans who returned to college with a specific goal.

We consolidated our friendship when we found an eating club, which we called “Irvings” near the UC campus, run by a sad looking couple.  They rented a house, turned it into a makeshift restaurant, and served three meals a day.  The price was very low, even for the 1940’s era, and the food was great and plentiful.  We found out that the couple’s sad look was the result of being too generous and within a short time, led to the demise of this wonderful place.

Bill and John entered UCSF two years before me and I didn’t get to see them as much except when I would visit our medical fraternity house called Phi Delta Epsilon.  It was few blocks from the Parnassus campus and many students lived there.  On Saturday nights, it was the venue of parties, featuring pitchers of vodka and orange juice, various other spirits and the wild antics of Bill, and his brother, John.  Bill never had an angry or hostile side when he imbibed, rather, he became more articulate and would often engage in ideas he had about life, politics, and medicine.  I have always noted a person’s true personality came out when under the influence, but Bill’s true personality was friendly, kind, inquiring, and augmented with a great sense of humor.

I lost track of Bill when he left UCSF and went to the University of Pennsylvania for a dermatology residency.  While there, he became a devotee of Doctor Al Kligman, an innovative research dermatologist.  As a university professor, Kligman was noted to be acerbic and had a tone of voice to match this quality.  He was the man who molded bill from a clinical dermatologist to the person he would become in the academic world.

Bill returned to UCSF a few years before I finished my fellowship.  I started a clinical practice and joined the clinical faculty.  It was quickly apparent that Bill was interested in research.  I think he was one fo the first people in dermatology to subscribe to “evidence-based” principles.  He decried old adages, hand-me-down aphorisms, and wouldn’t believe things unless proven in a laboratory.  When he would get upset over some poorly proven medical concept, his voice would change and I thought I was hearing Al Kligman speaking in that same enquiring way – demanding proof and asking for decent evidence.

In the 1960’s, Dermatology was a division of the Department of Medicine.  It was headed by one of the best clinically oriented dermatologists in the country – Rees B. Rees.  It usually had three residents and a great esprit de corp.

The medical school realized that in order for a department to forge ahead, a full time chief was needed.  Bill Epstein was chosen to be the chief of the department.  And thus, a great era began.  The Division of Dermatology was changed to an independent Department; there was a renaissance of basic research, which included laboratories headed by Bill and later joined by Doctor Kimie Fukuyama.  Howard Maibach started laboratory research in bacteriology, mycology and later in patch testing.

Bill was a leader in encouraging and organizing subspecialty clinics within the general clinics.  He encouraged and backed clinical faculty members to run these clinics.  There were no “town and gown” frictions then.  We had psoriasis, atopic dermatitits, collagen-vascular, photobiology, surgical, and later; viral, cutaneous lymphoma, and hair and nail clinics which were to produce many prestigious papers and make the Department of Dermatology one of the nations top dermatology venues.  At the end of Bill’s tenure, our department was training as many as 21 residents in one of the most sought after residencies in the country.

Bill was concept oriented.  Molecular biology was at a beginning stage.  Bill was one of the first to realize mechanisms in the field of contact allergy, atopy, and granulomas formation.  While poorly understood, he used the sensitization of DNCB on atopic subjects to show their diminished reactivity.  He then later postulated that sensitizing atopic patients using DNCB could improve their clinical status.

I would like to say something about Bill Epstein as a human being.  My wife, Ann, noted it.  She said that he was one of the few men she had met who would actually listen to a woman in a conversation and would give lengthy relevant answers.  Once, at a dinner at his home, she noted a string bass in the living room.  He explained an interest in music and spoke about his ideas of music production.  Being a musician herself, she was fascinated by his conversation.  She put him in the same category as Marion Sulzberger, a brilliant speaker, but also an interested listener who could speak on many subjects besides dermatology.

Many of the best times of my remembrance of Bill were the many trips we made together with the Pacific Skin Research Club.  Bill and Kimie Fukuyama started a reciprocal meeting between Japanese occidental colleagues, and he will always be remembered for his support of young Japanese research dermatologists, who came and spent a year doing basic research in his labs and often returned to Japan as department heads.

I will always remember “Brother Bill” as a good supportive friend, a person who was the first to think “out of the box” and who made my years as a dermatologist at UCSF fun and enriching.

I will miss you, Bill.