In Memoriam: Hans von Leden 1918–2014

Excerpt

The voice of the voice went silent forever—Prof. Hans Victor von Leden, MD, ScD, died on 5 March 2014, at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 95 after a serious pneumonia. Born in Breslau, Silesia, now Poland, on 20 November 1918, he followed his father who emigrated to the USA in the late 1930s when realizing the threatening Nazi development in Germany. After medical graduation at Chicago’s Loyola University in 1941, he specialized in otolaryngology and plastic surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester and consecutively worked as a throat specialist in Chicago. In 1961, von Leden and his wife, Mary Louise, moved to Los Angeles, where he became a professor at UCLA Medical School and opened his Institute of Laryngology and Voice Disorders. In 1966, he took over the Chair of Biocommunication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Additionally, he worked as a consultant to the United States Navy, the Julliard School of Music, New York, and was member of the Honorary Staff of Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, and Curador of the Universidade Moderna, Portugal. Hans von Leden retired from his university work in 1985. …