Dr. Ernst R. Jaffe, a groundbreaking hematologist who helped reveal the workings of a hereditary disorder that impairs red blood cells’ ability to transport oxygen, died Feb. 16 in Port Washington, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was acute respiratory failure, said a spokeswoman for the Albert Einstein Medical College of Yeshiva University, where Dr. Jaffe was a teacher and an administrator from 1955 to 1992.
A clinician and a researcher, Dr. Jaffe worked on a type of anemia called methemoglobinemia, more widely known as blue baby syndrome when diagnosed in infants. A bluish pallor is often observed in patients with the disorder, which can be congenital or acquired by exposure to antibiotics or nitrites, and leads to a deficiency of oxygen in the bloodstream.
Dr. Jaffe and others studied the congenital type and helped determine that it was caused by the lack of an enzyme. In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Dr. Jaffe became a “leading figure in the elucidation of methemoglobinemia and a recognized authority on its treatment,” which in severe cases can require blood transfusions, said Dr. Irving London, a professor emeritus of medicine at Harvard and a former colleague of Dr. Jaffe’s at Yeshiva.
He joined Yeshiva after the medical school was founded in 1955, and twice served as acting dean. Yeshiva eventually named him a senior associate dean.
Dr. Jaffe was born in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Chicago and its medical school and received his medical degree in 1948.
After teaching at Chicago, Dr. Jaffe did postdoctoral work at Yeshiva and was appointed an instructor in medicine there in 1956.
