Davidson ’92 remembered as beloved guitarist, friend, surgeon

Before Michael Davidson ’92 was an award-winning cardiovascular researcher and surgeon, he was a rock star —on campus, at least.

Davidson — who died after being shot at a Boston hospital on Tuesday, apparently by a relative of a former patient — was the guitarist for the bands The Change and Chicago Typewriter while on campus, among his numerous extracurricular activities. The Change was known for playing at campus venues like the Graduate School's Debasement Bar, and Chicago Typewriter played at Communiversity in 1992, among other events.

Later, in addition to performing innumerable surgeries, Davidson would work on creating a non-invasive method for heart valve repair, as many of the 93,000 valve repair patients every year are elderly and at a heightened risk of complications during open-heart surgery. For this research, Davidson was awarded the CIMIT-Johnson & Johnson Young Clinician Research Award in 2006.

Friends interviewed remembered Davidson as warm-hearted, multi-talented and unusually committed to becoming a heart surgeon and helping the sick at a young age.

Matthew Dearth ’92, who played drums for The Change and roomed with Davidson their senior year, said heremembered the band as one of the best parts of all of the members’ time at the University.Both had also signed in to Campus Club as part of a group during their sophomore year.

“We had a ton of fun mostly writing our own music,” Dearth explained. “We drove everyone nuts, I’m sure, practicing [in our room in Patton Hall]. Our high point was the band Social Distortion playing on campus, and we opened up for them. It was fantastic ... We were inspired by everyone from The Pretenders — we did a great cover of Middle of the Road — down to Fishbone and everything in between. It was definitely up tempo, fun.”

Marshall Levine ’92, the keyboardist for The Change and a roommate of Davidson, knew Davidson before attending the University from their hometown of Los Angeles.

“He was very close to his parents and his sister. He really looked up to his parents. They meant the world to him,” Levine said, adding that Davidson’s father was also a physician. “I remember a lot of pretty baffling conversations I had with him about philosophy because his interest in philosophy was pretty intense as well —way beyond the grasp of a computer scientist like me.”

Levine said Davidson had a way of making the best of bad situations through humor, recalling a particularly difficult chemistry class.

“He [also] used to have very funny, ironic telephone messages,” Levine said. “Voicemail wasn’t invented back then, and there were only answering messages. You’d call his machine and get a message like, ‘Welcome to the NORAD remote control center. Press 1 to raise defense level to DEFCON 1, otherwise have a nice day’ … He had a great sense of humor.”

Dearth added that Davidson’s commitment to medicine at a young age was remarkable.

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“It’s unusual to see someone at age 20 who really knows what he wants to do, and what he wants to do is really, really difficult, and he went off and he did it,” Dearth said. “Even junior year, he’s saying, ‘I want to be a heart surgeon.’ That’s pretty astounding to think that that is where he went."

"He went out and did it and did it exceptionally well. But that part doesn’t surprise me,” he added.

Taking a long and difficult but important journey was a theme that resonated with Davidson personally, who selected a quotation from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” for his Nassau Herald yearbook entry: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

The journey Davidson took was imbued with a concern for the underprivileged from the beginning.

Davidson’s thesis, “Universalizing Access to Health Care: Social Justice and the Duty of Beneficence,” argued that the United States had an affirmative duty to provide a basic level of access to health care to all of its citizens.

“By most counts, well over 30 million people in this country are without any health insurance,” the thesis began. “Effectively, these people have no recourse if confronted with catastrophic illness.”

His work also argued that small investments in preventative health would reap outsized gains and that health professionals too often stood in the way of beneficial improvements to the system.

One of his thesis advisers was then-professor Amy Gutmann, who is now president of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Michael Davidson was a wonderful student and wise at a remarkably young age. Above all, he was a caring person who dedicated his tragically short life to doing everything in his power to helping others in need, which was precisely what he provided with the most expert hands and caring heart,” she said in an emailed statement. “I'm heartsick at hearing this terrible news and send my deepest condolences to Michael's family.”

In addition to being in two bands and Campus Club, Davidson was also the photography editor of “Reality Sandwich,” a literary magazine; president of the Soaring Society, now called Soaring Tigers, which flies sailplanes; a member of the DeCamp Undergraduate Bioethics Committee; and a sabreur on the men’s fencing team who was a letterwinner in the 1990-91 season.

“I just remember having fun and being goofy with him during practice breaks and on away trips,” fellow sabreur Alex Suh ’93 said. “Mike was always even-keeled, and I remember in particular his laugh.”

Levine said he and Davidson both shared a passion for aviation.

“Unlike me, he actually did something about it,” Levine said. “He dragged me one day off to the glider club. I don’t think I’d even heard of it, and the next thing you know, the two of us were going off to Van Sant Airport and flying gliders. He stuck with it … I remember one year he gave me a book that was just a picture book on jet fighter pilots and enclosed was a note that said, ‘What you wish you could do with your life,’ teasing me for my bad eyesight.”

Levine added that the pair shared an interest in Los Angeles art.

“He and I both used to stare at posters and paintings by David Hockney of Los Angeles and Mulholland Drive in particular until it made us homesick,” Levine said. “I remember going to art museums with him a couple times when we were home on break looking at local L.A. artists. He was a very thoughtful, attentive and sensitive person.”