Dr. Christian Herrmann, Jr.

The son of Christian Herrmann, a Lansing, Michigan, tailor, and haberdasher, and Agnes (Bauch) Herrmann, a conservatory graduate who taught piano and voice, Dr. Herrmann grew into a proficient pianist, organist, and pipe organ aficionado, who played both piano and organ in his Edgewater Towers condominium. And he credited his lifelong interest in electricity to his fascination with the plug for his mother’s curling iron.

His childhood home, known as Herrmann House, is now an official historical site, and the residence of the Lansing Community College’s president. Dr. Herrmann’s donated a 1995 addition that houses a solarium and conference center.

Dr. Herrmann was a University of Michigan at Ann Arbor graduate and began medical school there in 1941. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy, attended its year-round school at the Naval Medical Center San Diego for two years, and graduated from medical school in 1944. He completed an internship and part of a residency in Detroit, then, after the war, took a residency at the Neurologic Institute of New York at Presbyterian Hospital. This was one of this country’s first EEG (electroencephalography) laboratories, where the diagnostic value of brain waves was being investigated. “I read EEGs at night,” he later said. “This was the time of iron lungs and polio. . . . I slept in an adjacent room to take care of these patients” and those with myasthenia gravis (a neuromuscular disease in which he later specialized).

Hired in 1954 as the second faculty member in what became UCLA’s Department of Neurology, no one could have foreseen that 63 years later, he would still be active there. For 17 years, he was vice-chairman of the Department and Chair of the Residency Selection Committee.

Dr. Herrmann established the Christian and Agnes Pauline Bauch Herrmann Endowed Fund in 2018 with a charitable gift from his estate upon his passing. The fund was established to support LCC students who share the many interests Dr. Herrmann pursued in his life.