{"id":334300,"date":"2025-10-26T17:29:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T17:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/334300\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T17:29:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T17:29:12","slug":"dr-michael-zinner-innovative-chief-of-surgery-dies-at-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/334300\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Michael Zinner, innovative chief of surgery, dies at 80"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHe has been a father figure to me throughout my career,\u201d said Dr. Atul Gawande, the bestselling author of \u201cBeing Mortal\u201d<\/a> who is on the Brigham\u2019s surgery faculty. \u201cHe gave people an opportunity to take risks \u2014 over and over and over again \u2014 and that has made us all incredibly loyal to him. His legacy has really spread across the country and the world through the field of surgery and even beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Zinner, who left Boston about a decade ago to become the founding chief executive and executive medical director of Miami Cancer Institute and Baptist Health South Florida<\/a>, was 80 when he died in his Coral Gables, Fla., home Saturday of pancreatic cancer, 14 months after diagnosing himself with the illness.<\/p>\n

His engagement with pancreatic cancer had already crossed boundary after boundary before the illness ended his life.<\/p>\n

Along with having been a renowned pancreatic cancer surgeon, a researcher in the field, and a cancer center executive, he had remained by the side of his wife, Ronny, through her illness and death in 2014 from pancreatic cancer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As he faced the same diagnosis, \u201cseparating being the patient, and also the physician knowledgeable about a lot of the details, has sort of been a back and forth the last 10 months,\u201d he said in June.<\/p>\n

By then he was long familiar with the give and take of numerous medical relationships \u2014 between physician and patient, teacher and student, administrator and hospital.<\/p>\n

An innovative leader, he arrived at a top position in Boston\u2019s internationally respected medical community in 1994 without following the traditional route of rising through Harvard Medical School\u2019s teaching hospitals. Some health care leaders he encountered early in his Boston years made less than subtle comments about him having a medical degree from the University of Florida. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis was an outsider who came to Harvard and had an enormous impact, but who came as someone who wasn\u2019t necessarily anointed to have that,\u201d said Gawande, who was assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

As chairman of surgery at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital, Dr. Zinner \u201cbuilt an incredibly powerful and important relationship with the Dana-Farber that played a major role in the development of the Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center<\/a>,\u201d Gawande added.<\/p>\n

Dr. Zinner also turned Brigham and Women\u2019s into a national leader in medical training through the hospital\u2019s pioneering role in significantly reducing the traditional, 100-plus hour workweeks for residents.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was an early leader in changing the surgery residency in ways that enabled women to have families during surgical training and build very, very successful careers,\u201d Gawande said, \u201cand that made us quickly the top draw for talent across the board.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Zinner, the Moseley professor of surgery, emeritus, at Harvard Medical School<\/a>, also was instrumental in founding the Center for Surgery and Public Health<\/a>, a 2005 joint venture of Brigham and Women\u2019s, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.<\/p>\n

The center has made \u201csurgery safer, more patient-centric, and more accessible in the US and around the world,\u201d he wrote in a biographical essay, and \u201cis now recognized as a global leader in this field.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Jeffrey Zinner was born in Miami Beach on April 2, 1945, and grew up in the suburb of Coral Gables. His father, Doran Zinner, was a dentist. His mother, Eve Wernikoff Zinner, did hospital volunteer work.<\/p>\n

As a youth, \u201cI was a quintessential geek,\u201d Dr. Zinner recalled in June.<\/p>\n

Using pinball machine parts, he built a computer that placed first in a South Florida science fair, and he won a semifinal competition in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.<\/p>\n

His first two years at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore didn\u2019t go well academically, though. \u201cI began to do everything wrong,\u201d he wrote, and he spent his junior year back home at the University of Miami.<\/p>\n

Then he returned to finish a bachelor\u2019s degree at Johns Hopkins in electrical and electronics engineering<\/a> before getting his medical degree from the University of Florida.<\/p>\n

Years later at Brigham and Women\u2019s, he sought residents from diverse educational backgrounds like his own and encouraged some he mentored to attend graduate programs in business or education.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe fostered people who have changed how surgical education is done,\u201d Gawande said.<\/p>\n

After receiving his medical degree in 1971, Dr. Zinner finished his training at Johns Hopkins Hospital. <\/p>\n

Before going to Brigham and Women\u2019s, he had served as an Army Medical Corps major at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Maryland, as vice chairman of surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the university\u2019s medical school, and as executive chairman of the department of surgery at UCLA Health in California.<\/p>\n

His first marriage, to Ellen Scheiner, ended in divorce. They had two sons \u2014 Darren, who now lives in Boston, and Dan, who lives in London.<\/p>\n

The family\u2019s summer home in Marion became a place for bonding. \u201cA good day for the Zinner men was fishing and barbecuing and wine,\u201d Darren recalled.<\/p>\n

While there, Dr. Zinner would unwind \u2014 to a point. He expected men to wear shirts with collars to dinners that featured wide-ranging discussions.<\/p>\n

During the day \u201cwe could do anything we wanted,\u201d Dan said, but each evening it was \u201cthe three S\u2019s, he used to say: shirt, shaved, and showered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Zinner\u2019s second marriage, to Karen Sui Zinner, also ended in divorce.<\/p>\n

In 1997, he married Rhonda Shapiro. \u201cThe things that attracted me to Ronny were the kindness, the gentleness, the humanity, her sense of social justice,\u201d he told the Globe when she died in 2014.<\/p>\n

The two blended their families \u201cso seamlessly,\u201d said Jennifer Herman of Wellesley, Ronny\u2019s daughter from her previous marriage.<\/p>\n

She said Dr. Zinner \u201calways called me his daughter\u201d and was in the hospital when her children were born.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was grandpa to my kids. He was enormously loved. They adored him,\u201d she said. \u201cIn everything he did with them there was a lesson learned. Even when he didn\u2019t mean to, he always imparted some sort of knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to Darren, Dan, and Jennifer, Dr. Zinner leaves a stepson, Jonathan Segal of Los Angeles; a sister, Karen Zinner of Salt Lake City; and five grandchildren.<\/p>\n

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday in Temple Beth Am in Pinecrest, Fla., followed by burial in Mount Nebo Memorial Gardens cemetery in Miami.. Plans will be made for a remembrance of Dr. Zinner in Boston.<\/p>\n

Dr. Zinner, who held leadership positions with the American College of Surgeons and numerous other organizations<\/a>, was known for the care he took during operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was elegant and meticulous in not wanting to lose one drop of blood unnecessarily,\u201d recalled Gawande, whom Dr. Zinner regarded as a bright star among the many accomplished surgeons he trained.<\/p>\n

Speaking in June, Dr. Zinner said that in looking back on his work, \u201cthe thing that I\u2019m most proud of, and I have said this publicly and privately, are the young people that I have mentored, and that now accounts for well over 200. I am most proud of them carrying on and giving forward the way that I\u2019ve had a chance to do in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHe has been a father figure to me throughout my career,\u201d said Dr. Atul Gawande, the bestselling author…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":334301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[165586,165584,90066,165580,165581,165579,210,1141,1142,54249,165583,165582,165587,67,132,165585,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-334300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-atul-gawande","9":"tag-baptist-health-cancer-center","10":"tag-boston-ma","11":"tag-brigham-and-womens-hospital","12":"tag-chief-of-surgery","13":"tag-dr-michael-zinner","14":"tag-health","15":"tag-health-care","16":"tag-healthcare","17":"tag-johns-hopkins-university","18":"tag-miami-cancer-institute","19":"tag-pancreatic-cancer-surgeon","20":"tag-ronny-zinner","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-university-of-florida-college-of-medicine","24":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115441655368201192","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}