Dr. Morris Harold Saffron (1905-1993) was elected to The Lambs in 1943 as a Non-Resident member. He was a New Jersey doctor and veteran of World War II.
Saffron was an authority on American colonial medicine, past chairman of the Friends of the Columbia Libraries, an archivist, historian of the Medical Society of New Jersey, and a practicing dermatologist in New York and New Jersey.
Saffron was born to two immigrants from Poland in Passaic, New Jersey, January 28, 1905. He earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia in 1925 and M.D. from the University of Maryland in 1928.
Having qualified as a flight surgeon before the onset of World War II, he was called to active duty in 1940 and for two years was the chief medical officer of the New York Aviation Cadet Examining Board, the largest in the nation. He subsequently served as chief of dermatology at several Army hospitals. Discharged as a lieutenant colonel in 1945, he resumed his activities in New Jersey, where he became president of the Dermatological Society of New Jersey, the Academy of Medicine of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Academy of Science.
In 1958 he was appointed a professor in the newly opened Seton Hall College of Medicine and delivered the first formal series of lectures on medical history in New Jersey. He also taught at Kean College, Rutgers Medical School, and the New Jersey College of Medicine.
He returned to studies at Columbia and earned a M.A. in history and a Ph.D., at the age of 63, in 1968. He was the author of several books on medical history, including Surgeon to Washington (1977).
A bibliophile, Saffron was chairman from 1967 to 1972 of the Friends of the Library of Columbia University. On Nov. 2, 1967, Saffron presented to Columbia the original manuscript of a lecture delivered on the opening day of King’s College Medical School on its exact 200th anniversary. Columbia was called King’s College before the American Revolution. He had acquired the fragile manuscript in 1955 at auction, the only bidder to recognize its significance. The lecture, in clear longhand on 24 browned leaves, was by Samuel Clossy, one of six physicians who comprised the school’s first medical faculty in 1767.
Until his death he was a trustee of the New Jersey Historical Society, a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society, the Morgan Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also a member of the Century Association, the Grolier Club, and the Harmonie Club. An annual lectureship named in his honor was established in 1979 by the Medical History Society of New Jersey, of which he was one of the founders in 1980.
Dr. Saffron died of heart failure on April 28, 1993, at his Manhattan home. He was 88 years old. He is interred in Riverside Cemetery, Saddlebrook, New Jersey, next to his parents.