Jack M. Zimmerman ’48

Jack died July 23, 2023, at age 96, after several months in hospice care, an end-of-life option that he helped bring to the United States.

A graduate of the Salisbury School, Jack earned his degree with honors in biology in June 1949. He was a member of Elm Club and received the 1870 Sophomore English Prize. From 1945 to 1947, he served in the Army in the Pacific as an infantry leader and subsequently as a surgical technician. Jack’s Princeton ties ran deep, as his brother Edward was in the Class of ’44 and his daughter, Anne Zimmerman Morgan, is in the Class of ’79.

Jack spent his professional career as a surgeon. He completed his medical training and residency at Johns Hopkins University and became board-certified in general and thoracic surgery. His long medical career included serving as chief of surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Kansas City, followed by 32 years as chief of surgery at Church Home and Hospital in Baltimore and as associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins.

Jack, who noted in our 50th-reunion yearbook that he had developed an interest in the palliative care of the mentally ill early in his career, “considered his greatest achievement to be his role in bringing hospice care to the U.S.,” according to the memorial from his family. While on sabbatical in London, Jack had visited St. Christopher’s Hospice, the first hospice in the world, and was inspired to open one of the first hospices in the United States at Church Home and Hospital. He was the author of Hospice: Complete Care of the Terminally Ill.

Jack married Doris Lockett Perkinson in 1953. She survives him, as do their children Anne and her husband Walter Morgan III ’78, and J. Wickham Zimmerman and his wife Allison. He also is survived by five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.