David Servan-Schreiber (April 21, 1961 – July 24, 2011)[1] was aFrenchphysician,neuroscientist andauthor. He was a clinical professor ofpsychiatry at theUniversity of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He was also a lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine ofUniversité Claude Bernard Lyon 1.
Servan-Schreiber was born inNeuilly-sur-Seine,Hauts-de-Seine, the eldest son of French journalist and politicianJean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber (1924–2006). He became co-founder and then director of the Centre for Integrative Medicine at theUniversity of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Following his volunteer activity as a physician in Iraq in 1991, he was one of the founders of the US branch ofMédecins Sans Frontières, the international organization that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. He also served as volunteer inGuatemala,Kurdistan,Tajikistan,India andKosovo.
In 2002, he was awarded the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Society Presidential Award for Outstanding Career in Psychiatry. He is the author ofHealing Without Freud or Prozac (translated in 29 languages, 1.3 million copies sold), andAnticancer: A New Way of Life (translated in 35 languages,New York Times best-seller, 1 million copies in print) in which he discloses his own diagnosis with a malignant brain tumor at the age of 31 and the treatment programme that he put together to help himself beyond his surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
He was also a regular columnist forOde magazine and other publications.
Having been treated twice for a malignantbrain tumor, Servan-Schreiber became a leading figure in his engagement forintegrative medicine approaches to the prevention and treatment ofcancer. He popularized his knowledge through teaching seminars, lectures, books, ablog andaudiobooks. On July 24, 2011, almost 20 years after his cancer diagnosis, he died of brain cancer.[1][2]
