The Associated Press State & Local Wire

The materials in the AP file were compiled by The Associated Press.

November 2, 2000, Thursday, BC cycle

SECTION: State and Regional

LENGTH: 261 words

HEADLINE: Bernard Fink, prominent anesthesiologist, dead at 86

DATELINE: SEATTLE

BODY:

Dr. Bernard Raymond Fink, former president of the Anesthesia History Association and a world-famous expert in pain relief, is dead at age 86.

Fink, who helped to design breathing tubes for anesthetic procedures and pioneered newer anesthetics such as lidocaine, died Monday of kidney failure.

Born in London, Fink grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, and wrote and spoke in seven languages. He entered the University of London at 16, completed his medical studies in 1938 and served as a medical officer in South Africa  during World War II. In 1950, after running a small mission hospital in South Africa, he and his wife decided they had had enough of apartheid, the nation's strict policy of racial separation at the time, and emigrated to the United States.

After 14 years of research at Columbia University and practicing anesthesiology, Fink moved west to become director of anesthesia research at the University of Washington, where he also was a professor until 1984 and continued doing research for years afterward.

In the past few decades he was involved in modernizing the collection of books, audiovisual materials, equipment and artifacts at the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology in Park Ridge, Ill. He also worked to compile autobiographies of leading anesthesiologists into books.

Survivors include daughters Susan Myers of Seattle and Jean Moore of El Cerrito, Calif.; sisters Violet Rothenberg of Teaneck, N.J., and Evelyn Reinhold of Israel; a brother, Newton Fink of New Zealand, and five grandchildren.

Services have been held.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: November 3, 2000