Wurlitzer Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts Fund
Frederick Pabst Wurlitzer, MD, FACS, MBA, ABS was born in San Francisco. His four siblings were born in Cincinnati, where the family business, The Wurlitzer Music Company on the NYSE, had been located. After undergraduate studies at Stanford, while living at home typically with his parents near Palo Alto, California, he studied at the University of Cincinnati Medical School close to a beloved sister. He continued with post-graduate surgical training at UCLA. He finally did a fellowship in surgical oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Hospital in Texas. For a brief stint, he was an Instructor in Surgery at USC Medical School in Los Angeles.
Initially, he practiced as an oncological surgeon and later as a general, vascular, and pulmonary thoracic surgeon in California. He is still, while 84 years old, a board-certified surgeon.
He has published in multiple medical journals, including the prestigious Annals of Surgery, Vascular Surgery, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Journal of Pediatric Surgery, AMA Archives of Surgery, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, and Southern Medical Journal.
His medical publications, approximately a dozen books on Christianity, half a dozen books for children, one play, and one book about Stradivari musical instruments remain uncited. He wrote all his books after he became a Christian in 1981 and at the age of 81, a Catholic priest baptized him.
After retirement from active surgery in 1988, he volunteered in Umtata, South Africa, Congo, St. Lucia, and in the Cook Islands as a surgeon for a Nation. He also served about six months in Sierra Leone and stints elsewhere in West Africa and other places. In total, he worked over three years as an itinerant board-certified volunteer surgeon.
He now lives in Victoria, BC, Canada, and Florida with his Canadian wife, Ann, born in Quebec. They have known each other well for over 55 years