David Gurewitsch

NPS Photo

Quick Facts

Significance:

Friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and First Medical Director of the United Nations

Place of Birth:

Zurich, Switzerland

Date of Birth:

1902

Place of Death:

New York City

Date of Death:

1974

As Eleanor Roosevelt's friend, confidant, personal physician, housemate, and traveling companion during her post-White House years, Dr. David Gurewitsch ultimately became one of the most important figures in the latter part of her life.

Born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Gurewitsch attended medical school in his native Switzerland and then practiced medicine in British-administered Palestine before coming to the United States in the 1930s. He worked for a number of hospitals in the New York area in the late 1930s, joining the staff of the Neurological Institute at Columbia-Presbyterian where he specialized in the treatment and care of poliomyelitis victims. He also maintained a private medical practice of his own. Numbered among his personal patients was Trude Lash, the wife of Eleanor Roosevelt’s close friend Joseph Lash. While visiting the Lashes in New York City in 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt became acquainted with Dr. Gurewitsch, and when she moved from Washington to New York after FDR's death, she asked him to be her personal physician.

Gurewitsch and Roosevelt were cordial and friendly, but their friendship did not begin in earnest until late in 1947 when Gurewitsch was diagnosed with tuberculosis and needed to return to Switzerland for treatment. Unable to find adequate passage on his own, Roosevelt arranged for him to travel with her on the same plane that was taking her to Geneva for a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. When the plane was grounded because of heavy fog in Ireland, Roosevelt looked after Gurewitsch and over the course of their two-day delay, a bond was struck that would last until ER's death in 1962.

Gurewitsch was an open and sympathetic man. Roosevelt felt comfortable confiding in him many of her anxieties and preoccupations. They corresponded with each other regularly and, over the next fifteen years. Gurewitsch would accompany Roosevelt to no fewer than thirteen different countries on her international trips. In 1958, Gurewitsch married Edna Perkel at a ceremony in Roosevelt’s New York City apartment. Soon after, Roosevelt and the Gurewitsches jointly purchased a townhouse located on Manhattan's Upper East Side, revealing just how close Roosevelt had become with the Gurewitsches, especially David. As Roosevelt battled severe anemia and tuberculosis of the bone marrow, she increasingly relied on Gurewitsch for medical and emotional support. He remained her primary physician until her death on November 7, 1962.