Mervyn Samuel Gotsman was born in 1935 in the town of
Hermanus in
South Africa to
Benjamin, a
physicist, and Ada, a housewife. The family originally came to South Africa from
Lithuania, with an intermediate station in
England. He studied medicine at the
University of Cape Town, graduating summa cum laude. In 1958, following a relatively early death of his father, he worked as a general practitioner in a small mining town in
Rhodesia. In the early sixties, he specialized in
tropical medicine, and later completed his internship in
internal medicine and
cardiology in
London and
Birmingham, England. In 1964 he returned to South Africa and joined the cardiac clinic at the
Groote Schuur Hospital in
Cape Town. In 1967 he referred
Louis Washkansky for the first successful
heart transplant performed by Professor
Christiaan Barnard. In 1968 he was appointed the director of the Department of Cardiology in
Durban, South Africa, and was appointed professor of
medicine at the
University of Natal. He served as the chief cardiologist of the former
Natal Province. In 1973, he immigrated to Israel with his family and served as the director of the Department of Cardiology at the Hadassah Medical Center in
Ein Karem, Jerusalem, a position he held until his retirement in 2000. He served as the personal physician to Prime Minister
Menachem Begin, and accompanied him on his trips overseas. He received the
Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem award in 2007 for his contribution to cardiology in Israel. ==References==