Local doc to be feted for decades of work with cancer patients

MARBLEHEAD – Marblehead resident Dr. Donald Perlman has spent his 57-year medical career specializing in breast and skin cancer and will be awarded next month for his longtime efforts in cancer treatment and prevention on the North Shore.Perlman is the 2012 honoree of the Hope Begins Here Award, given by the Boston North Cancer Association, which will have an awards reception at Spinelli?s Function Facility in Lynnfield on May 9. The event will also have a scholarship awards presentation to three individuals seeking higher education.The association?s board president, John Romano, said Perlman has exemplary compassion for his patients, is highly respected by his colleagues and has given “life-saving care to generations of North Shore residents.”?He really epitomized what the Boston North Cancer Association values as far as dedicating your profession and your life to wiping out cancer – and at least treating it,” Romano said.Perlman, 81, a Mattapan native who graduated Boston University School of Medicine in 1955, and said his interest in the medical field came through friends with a similar career direction.During his undergraduate time at Northwestern, Perlman said he developed an inclination toward becoming a surgeon. While visiting a fraternity mate?s home in Green Bay, Wis., the friend?s father had the two sit in on one of his surgeries.?I was struck by the fact that I immediately liked the idea of doing something in medicine where I would be working with my hands as well as my brain,” Perlman said in a recent interview at his Marblehead home.After completing surgical training and spending two years in the Army as a surgeon at bases in New York City and Ayer, Mass., Perlman settled in Lynn in 1962, working at both Union Hospital and the now-shuttered Lynn Hospital.Prior to his time in the Army, Perlman had a one-year fellowship with the American Cancer Society, and he decided to then focus his surgical skills on treating cancer. The focus took on increased importance after he started in Lynn because he said a cousin of his developed breast cancer.?It inspired me to do a lot more thinking about breast cancer,” Perlman said.Perlman said that early in his time in surgery in the 1960s, radical mastectomies were the course of treatment for breast cancer, but in the following 20 years, surgery was minimalized in favor of radiation, chemotherapy or hormone treatment.?They developed a body of knowledge, which indicated that some cancers had spread before the surgery had been carried out, and that the surgery they were doing was in fact was more extensive than necessary,” he said.In the 1970s breast cancer prevention advanced with the introduction of mammograms, and it gained more notoriety after famous figures, such as Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller, received breast cancer diagnoses, Perlman said.?Once [the mammogram] became available, and the knowledge about these very famous women, women became interested in getting a mammogram,” he said.In 1985, Perlman said he established a mammography clinic at Lynn Hospital, which he counted as one of his professional accomplishments.Perlman said he also valued his time as the clinical instructor of Massachusetts General Hospital surgical residents at Lynn Hospital and Union Hospital, teaching the individuals surgery at the operating table from 1962 to 1987. Besides serving as an instructor, Perlman was an associate chief and chief of surgery at Lynn Hospital from 1970 to 1986 and in solo private practice in Lynn from 1962 to 2008.The survival rate of someone who has an early breast cancer detection has increased over the years, Perlman said. When he started out in the 1960s, Perlman said the individual had a 60 percent chance of getting through the cancer.?Now a woman with early breast cancer can expect to have between a 95 and a 99 percent survival of many years, maybe even lifelong survival,” he said.Perlman said he has enjoyed seeing major improvements in cancer treatment and prevention