Toby Levitt

Tobias Levitt (2 February 1908 – 22 February 1958) was a South African medical doctor who wrote a textbook on the thyroid.

Career A distinguished student at the University of Cape Town, obtaining first class honours in anatomy (1929) and physiology (1930), Levitt was an outstanding anatomist and assistant lecturer in the university for a short time before continuing his medical education at the Middlesex Hospital in London, qualifying in 1934. After working as demonstrator of anatomy at the Middlesex, Levitt was house surgeon at Bedford County Hospital and Gloucester Royal Infirmary and surgical assistant medical officer at the Paddington General Hospital. He was a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Ireland (1934), Edinburgh (1946) and England (1948); he was almost unique in obtaining all three surgical Fellowships by examination in the days before the primary was "reciprocal."

During the Second World War Levitt served as a major as surgical specialist in the Royal Army Medical Corps, seeing service in North Africa and Italy – where he found a love of Italian art and architecture, to appreciate which he learned Italian. After the war he became surgical first assistant to the Thyroid Clinic at the New End Hospital, Hampstead, gaining wide experience in thyroid surgery and making his mark in researches in endocrinology, publishing several papers on the subject. The knowledge he gained at the New End thyroid clinic – where for a long time he was associated with Sir Geoffrey Keynes and Mr JE Piercy – culminated in his election to a Hunterian Professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1952. the British Medical Journal and the Medical Proceedings - Mediese Bydraes, a South African journal) describe him as a generous, sincere, modest and genial gentleman of high moral principles. An excellent and inspiring teacher, it was said of him that he poured out his life's blood for his students, often refusing financial recompense, and that many who had abandoned hope of ever passing their examinations found new hope with him. Levitt was a constant reader in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons during the years between the end of the war and his final illness. He had practiced at 10 Harley Street. He never married, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Bushey, Watford.