Marvin Hoffman (CAMED’47) owes his medical degree to Boston University—as well as his 60-year career, his marriage, and the golden opportunity he had to see the 1946 American League Champion Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park.

In gratitude for his education and his livelihood, he has used a charitable IRA rollover to endow the Marvin J. Hoffman and Nancy Yanes Hoffman Scholarship Fund, which will provide tuition support to medical students. Besides being a generous gift to BU, it’s a present to himself for a milestone birthday: Hoffman turned 100 in December.

Hoffman received a scholarship of sorts to attend medical school when the US military paid his tuition; he enrolled in 1943 knowing he would serve in the Army after completing his medical training. “I took my last exam at the University of Rochester, and the next day I went to Buffalo, took a physical, and was given a uniform,” Hoffman recalls. “I went to [Army induction center] Camp Upton in Long Island for 10 days, then to BU in uniform.”

That uniform provided a splendid benefit to its wearer: free admission to Fenway Park. Hoffman, who lived a block away, remembers cheering legendary Red Sox left fielder
Ted Williams.

While in medical school, Hoffman was smitten by Nancy Yanes, a Connecticut College of Women student he met at a dance one January. He immediately sent her a Valentine’s Day card and suggested they get together when she came back to Boston. “She said she’d be in town on March 8, we went to dinner, and that was the beginning of the end,” Hoffman says, laughing. The couple wed in 1948 and were married for 68 years. Nancy, an author and longtime English professor at St. John Fisher University in Rochester, passed away in 2016.

After graduating in 1947, Hoffman completed his internship and residency in his hometown of Rochester, New York, beginning his internal medicine practice there in 1951 while teaching at the BU medical school.

Drafted into the Korean War, he served as sole medical officer of the US Army’s 24th Division and became chief of the US Army base hospital in Otsu, Japan. Upon his return, he settled in Rochester, where he and his wife raised their family. Hoffman became

the senior medical director at Excellus Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rochester and helped establish its first HMO, Blue Choice. He retired in 2008 at age 85.

Medical careers run in the family. The Hoffmans’ son, William Hoffman, is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at University of California San Francisco and three of their eight grandchildren are doctors—including Rachel Hirshorn (CAMED’20), an internist.

Hoffman hopes the BU scholarship fund he endowed will ease the heavy financial burden most medical students carry and urges other alumni to support similar causes.

“The main reason for giving money was that I had money to give,” he says with a chuckle. “Do I have advice for people who want to make a gift to BU? I think it’s a great thing to do, and if you’re able to do it, you should do it. The medical school where you went is as good as any other place, because it’s the one that gave you your life.”