Raymond Herber, MD, a 1957 graduate of the Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists, was president of the Loma Linda University School of Medicine Alumni Association from 1988 to 1989 and was named Honored Alumnus in 1997.
Dr. Herber was born on March 1, 1932, in Shattuck, Oklahoma. He was the youngest of seven sons. He started his elementary education in 1937 at age five, in a one-room, eight-grade schoolhouse about a mile from his family’s farm. At the age of only 12, Raymond went away to boarding school in Keene, Texas, where he lived in a dormitory with college students.
Although Raymond had well-qualified teachers at Keene, he transferred to Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, because he had been told it would be easier to get into the College of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda if he had received most of his premedical education there instead of the two-year program at Keene.
Raymond started his medical education at CME in 1953. On June 27, 1954, after his first year of medical school, Raymond married Marilyn J. Dart, who had just graduated as a pre-med student from Union College. Raymond graduated from CME in 1957 and his wife graduated a year later.
The Herbers started their family after completing medical school. The Herbers have three children: Steven (born in 1960), Suzie (1962), and Sandi (1969).
After one year of his internal medicine residency at the White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, Raymond was activated into the United States Navy at the El Toro Marine Base, where he served in the outpatient department for two years. In 1962 he became chief of the medicine teaching clinic at the White Memorial Hospital for three years.
In preparation for the consolidation of the School of Medicine in Loma Linda, Dr. Herber completed a GI fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The most influential person in Dr. Herber’s career, the one who encouraged him to specialize in Internal Medicine, was Varner J. Johns, Jr., MD, twice chair of the Department of Medicine.
After semi-retiring, Dr. Herber was able to publish a number of books relating to Loma Linda history: The Giants of CME, was a compilation of caricatures of School of Medicine faculty painted by Wesley Kime, MD, Class of 1953, when Kime was a student physician, and Portraits, a compilation of 50 paintings by Dr. Kime in honor of the University’s Centennial Celebration, consisting mostly of people who were involved in the maturation of the School of Medicine in Loma Linda. He also wrote a documentary on the history of the Department of Medicine, a project he found most rewarding.
During Dr. Herber’s retirement, he enhanced his interest in art with needlepoint, a form of art he does by tying a series of interlocking, colored strings—as many as 24 stitches per inch—that are visualized as paintings.
One of Dr. Herber’s greatest challenges and greatest satisfactions has been building School of Medicine endowments—now worth around $300 million—that help fund research, education, and administration. At least $70 million of that came from former patients, alumni, and faculty, who appreciated Dr. Herber’s vision for the School of Medicine.