Dr. Edward Hotchkiss, retired South Shore internist from Roslyn Heights, dies at 86

If TV’s Marcus Welby, M.D., were a real-life person, he could well have been Roslyn Heights internist Dr. Edward Hotchkiss.

"He was an old-fashioned doctor who sat down with a person, listened to everything and examined them top to bottom. And he was my mentor and a mentor for a lot of doctors," said Dr. Nathaniel Epstein, of Commack, a partner with Hotchkiss and others for decades at Lynbrook’s South Shore Internal Medicine Associates.

"He always had medical students and nursing students following him around" at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, with which Hotchkiss was affiliated, Epstein said. "He went out of his way to teach and he shaped so many people's lives and careers. Before we had computers and everything was online and you needed to find something out, we went to books and journals and to him. He just was a wealth of knowledge."

"He was old-school medicine," said one of his daughters, Wendy Hotchkiss Kurtz, of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Added Sharyn Levine Hotchkiss, his second wife, following the death of his first, "He would treat his patients not just as patients but as human beings, as people who had lives, who had problems, who had issues. He would not just treat the illness — he would treat the whole person."

Edward Hotchkiss, who retired from his practice in 2020 after nearly 50 years, died July 7 at North Shore University Hospital, in Manhasset, "of myelodysplasia that met criteria for acute myeloid leukemia," said another daughter, Dr. Hilary Hotchkiss, of Manhattan. He was 86.

"He had charisma. People wanted to be around him," Hilary Hotchkiss said. "But he lit up a room with humility. His approach to life was always with humility."

Edward Joel Hotchkiss was born March 11, 1940, in Brooklyn, the second of two sons of Harry Hotchkiss, a furrier, and homemaker Pauline Pressman Hotchkiss.

He graduated from his borough’s New Utrecht High School in 1957, then attended Columbia University, in Manhattan. There he wrote for the college newspaper and was a member of the Jewish college fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. He earned an art history degree in 1961.

Earns medical degree

While a medical student at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, now SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, in Brooklyn, he married Judith Miriam Fradkin in 1962. The couple had three children. Judith died in 1998, at age 57, of kidney disease, inspiring Hilary to specialize in nephrology.

After obtaining his medical degree in 1965, Hotchkiss served with the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, providing medical care to prisoners at the low-security federal prison FCI Texarkana, in Texas. Afterward, the family lived in Queens while he trained at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park.

In 1972, the family moved to Rockville Centre, and he co-founded the Lynbrook practice South Shore Internal Medicine Associates. The family later moved to Roslyn Heights.

"I would run to him whenever I didn't know what I was doing," quipped Epstein, who joined the practice in 1988. "Everyone did. When you weren't sure what to do, that's who we went to."

Through the 1970s, he gave frequent public lectures at community centers and hospitals, on topics as diverse as nutrition ("Are We What We Eat?"), doctor-patient communication ("How to Speak to Your Physician") and sexual health ("Sex After a Heart Attack"). Also that decade, he was a supervising physician at the Jewish Institute for Geriatric Care in New Hyde Park, now the Parker Jewish Institute for Health Care and Rehabilitation.

From 1983-84, he was president of the Long Island Jewish Medical Staff Society. In the early 1990s, his family said, he was among the team physicians for the Jets.

Top LI internist

A fellow of the American College of Physicians, Hotchkiss’ accolades include a laureate award, bestowed to generally senior physicians of distinction, from that organization’s New York Downstate chapter. In both 2011 and 2012, he was among Long Island’s top internists in an annual list from the healthcare research and information company Castle Connolly Medical.

A lover of Classical music, he attended as many as 20 concerts each summer at Tanglewood, in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains, where he and his family often vacationed. And while not a devoted follower of sports, said Sharyn Hotchkiss, whom he married in 2008, "He liked football. He liked the Mets. He loved the Knicks — he watched every game this year. He watched the Knicks win" the NBA Championship.

In addition to his daughters and wife, he was survived by son Jon Hotchkiss, of Santa Monica, California; stepchildren Andrea Levine and Brad Levine, both of St. Paul, Minnesota; and seven grandchildren. His older Charles predeceased him.

Funeral services were held July 10 at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Donations may be made to Volunteers in Medicine — Berkshires; the Otis Scholarship Fund, sponsored by the town of Otis, Massachusetts; or Central Synagogue’s Breakfast Program.