Eugene Braunwald, the Vienna-born cardiologist who edited Braunwald's Heart Disease and founded the TIMI Study Group at Brigham and Women's Hospital, died April 22, 2026, at age 96. [1] Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley sent a campus letter on April 29 calling him "the father of modern cardiology." [2]

The TIMI Study Group, founded in 1984, has enrolled more than 450,000 patients across more than 80 trials in 50 countries — the methodological backbone of contemporary heart-disease evidence. [3] Braunwald's Heart Disease, in its current edition, remains the field's primary textbook. He published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed papers — one biographer noted in 2013 that he had more publications in top general-medical and cardiology journals than any of the 42,000-plus authors PubMed indexed at the time. [4] He was still publishing the month he died; his final paper appeared in Heart Rhythm in April. [5]

The arc was Vienna-Brooklyn-Bethesda-Boston: Braunwald and his family fled Austria after the Nazi takeover, trained at NYU and Johns Hopkins, became chief of cardiology at the National Heart Institute, founded UC San Diego's medicine department, then ran cardiology at Brigham and Women's and Harvard. [6] The Medical University of Vienna marked the official completion of its Eugene Braunwald Auditorium on April 23, the day after his death. [2]

Cardiology's Nancy Brown line — "few people have shaped cardiovascular medicine so profoundly or for so long" — is the kind of obituary cliché that, in this case, is also true. [3] The textbook outlives the field he taught it to teach.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago