Researching William Schwartz

He was professor of law at Boston University from 1955 to 1991, and Dean of the Boston University School of Law from 1980 to 1988. He was Vice President for Academic Affairs (Chief Academic Officer) at Yeshiva University between 1993 and 1998, and still serves as Professor of property law at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva. He was a professor of Law at Boston University, and a faculty member at the Frances Glessner Lee Institute of the Harvard Medical School. He became the first honorary member of the National College of Probate Judges, was a member of the Legal Advisory Board of the New York Stock Exchange, and has served in the Office of Public Information of the United Nations.

He has been a corporate director of Viacom since 2006, having served for Former Viacom since 1987. He has been counsel in the New York office of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York City since 1988, where he concentrates on trusts and estates, business law and family law.

Schwartz attended Duke University after serving in the Army in World War II, earning undergraduate and medical degrees. His pioneering observation that the antibiotic sulfanilamide increased excretion of sodium in patients with heart failure led to the discovery and development of modern diuretic drugs. The Lancet.

Early in his career, he joined what is now Tufts Medical Center, and founded its Division of Nephrology in 1950. He served as its head until 1971, following which he became the Chairman of Medicine and chief physician at Tufts, positions he held until 1976. Then, he left his administrative position at the medical center, becoming the Vannevar Bush University Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Professor of Medicine until joining the faculty of the University of Southern California Medical School in 1992.

Beginning in the 1970s, Schwartz developed an interest in medical decision-making, and was an early researcher into artificial intelligence applications to medicine. Later in his career, he focused on the US medical system more broadly, and investigated issues such as costs, possible rationing of health care, availability of specialist care, and malpractice insurance. With economist Henry Aaron, he co-authored The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care in 1984. Further advancements in medicine—such as widespread availability of transplant surgery, Cardiac surgery, and MRIs strengthened his views of the need to contain spiraling costs through some form of rationing.

The syndrome Schwartz-Bartter's syndrome is named after him, along with Frederic Bartter.