IN MEMORIAM

Arthur J. Moss, M.D.

Professor of Pediatrics, Emeritus

Los Angeles

1914–2004

When the Department of Pediatrics lost Arthur J. Moss, M.D. on July 14, 2004, a piece of the Department passed into history. Art devoted five decades to the health of the young. He was an internationally recognized authority in the field of pediatric hypertension and made many impressive contributions to the field of pediatric cardiology, among them his findings on cardiovascular changes in newborns. He also studied pulmonary artery pressure in newborns and the cardiopulmonary status of cystic fibrosis patients. His book, Heart Disease in Infants, Children and Adolescents, has become the standard text in pediatric cardiology

 

Art was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1914, and attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he earned his medical degree in 1938. He performed his internship at Minneapolis General Hospital from 1937 through 1939 and completed a pediatric fellowship at the University of Minnesota in 1942. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1942 through 1946, where he rose to the rank of major.

 

Art came to California in 1946 and started a private practice in pediatric medicine in Inglewood, which he continued through 1960. He was chairman of the Pediatrics Department at Los Angeles Harbor General Hospital, now known as Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, in Torrance, California, from 1948 through 1951. He also served as head of the Department of Pediatrics at Methodist Hospital in Los Angeles in 1951. He joined the UCLA Medical School in 1952 as an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics. His other positions at the medical school included executive chairman of the Department of Pediatrics from 1967 through 1977 and chief of the Pediatric Cardiology Division from 1977 until his retirement in 1981.

 

He won many awards, including the Los Angeles County Heart Association Award of Merit for three consecutive years (1964–66), the Susan and Theodore Cummings Humanitarian Award (1967), the Leadership Award from the National Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation and the Outstanding Service Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics (both in 1973), the Outstanding Service Award from the American Journal of Cardiology (1978), the UCLA Pediatric Housestaff Teaching Award (1971–72 and 1977–78) and the Ventura County Medical Center Teaching Award (1992). Art is cited in Who’s Who in America and the annual Arthur J. Moss Lectureship in the Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA is named in his honor. The Moss Auditorium, in which the lecture is given, was also named for him.

 

He was a major contributor to the activities of many professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Heart Association, the American Pediatric Society, the California Heart Association, the California Medical Association, the California Society of Pediatric Cardiology, the Los Angeles County Heart Association, the National Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, the Western Association of Physicians, and UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, which pioneered the field of pediatric ophthalmology.

 

Art’s legacy in the Department of Pediatrics and the School of Medicine will be a lasting one.

 

Thomas S. Klitzner