Marjorie Greta Lewisohn

Lewisohn, an alumna and benefactor of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was born in New York City. Her family has a long history with Johns Hopkins, and her grandfather, Adolf Lewisohn, had endowed a research fellowship in ophthalmology at the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute in 1929.

Lewisohn received her B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1940. She came to Baltimore to study at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, graduating in the class of 1943. She then spent six years at Bellevue Hospital treating tuberculosis patients. Lewisohn worked for many years as a staff physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and also taught at the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center, as a clinical instructor from 1955 to 1966, and then as a clinical professor until her retirement some thirty years later.

Lewisohn’s practice focused on internal medicine and diseases of the upper respiratory tract. She recognized early the importance of outpatient medicine, evidenced by her establishment of the Marjorie Lewisohn Professorship in Ambulatory Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1989.

In 1971, Lewisohn became the first woman elected to the board of trustees of The Johns Hopkins University, and she received one of the earliest Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Distinguished Alumna Awards in 1977. Since 1950, Lewisohn donated a total of over $300,000 to Johns Hopkins. She bequeathed to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine a Matisse painting from her inheritance of the collection amassed by her father and grandfather to support her professorship.

Lewisohn maintained her private practice until 1999, when she retired at the age of eighty.