Vanderbilt supporter gives from her heart

Longtime local philanthropist Annette Eskind says medicine has been a touchstone throughout her life. From her graduate school days in Boston studying how families react when a child has a fatal illness to her years as a case worker at Nashville’s Jewish Family Service, where she helped resettle Jewish physicians from what was then the Soviet Union, “Somehow, medicine has come into it,” says Eskind, who recently turned 80. Even the Eskind grandchildren have inherited the interest in medicine along with a loyalty to Vanderbilt. Sons Jeffrey and Steven served residencies here. This fall, a grandson will enter Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Eskind and her late husband, Irwin Eskind, M.D., often chose medical causes to support. She will receive the Vanderbilt Medical Alumni Association’s Distinguished Service Award in October in recognition of her work supporting the Medical Center. She’s a reluctant recipient.

“My immediate reaction was this community has been more than generous to me,” she said. But with repeated entreaty, and a promise that no speech had to be made – “I despise, despise public speaking” – she relented.

Support of education hasn’t been far behind medicine in Eskind’s life. As a member of the Metropolitan Nashville Public School Board for nine years, she campaigned for school nurses. She started a “wild crusade” for kindergarten in public schools some 50 years ago when she went to register her older son and found there was none. She founded the Nashville Public Education Foundation to support the professional development of public school teachers and administrators.

“I feel like somehow I started a little bubble in the pot for some of these things to happen,” she says modestly.

Her interest in Vanderbilt’s Kennedy Center, where she was the founding chair of the advisory board, fits neatly into the profile. Having a granddaughter – the youngest of five grandchildren – with learning issues only added to that, she says.

“I’m a great one for collaboration,” Eskind observes, noting how the Kennedy Center includes faculty members and investigators across the disciplines pursuing clinical and research answers for developmental disorders.

“This is not an isolated thing,” says Eskind, who easily puts herself in the place of patients and their families looking for assistance. Last year she endowed the Annette Schaffer Eskind Chair; Kennedy Center Director Pat Levitt, Ph.D., is the first to hold it.

Eskind says she likes to lend support to “something that is very much in my heart.” In 1994, she and her husband enjoyed seeing the completion of the Annette and Irwin Eskind Biomedical Library. Then, they turned their interest to diabetes. After years of visiting multiple doctors with Irwin, who died in 2005 from complications of diabetes, she told him, “I want it all in one building for patients with diabetes.” He agreed and the care-integrated Vanderbilt-Eskind Diabetes Clinic was born.

“Irwin never saw the diabetes center completed,” she says of her husband, who graduated from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and returned home after advanced study in Boston to establish his practice and teach medical students at his alma mater.

“The diabetes center – it was personal and important, something that was needed and was right,” she explains.

“Once I do something and I feel good about the people there, I don’t drive them crazy,” she says. But she still enjoys visiting the Diabetes Clinic every few months “to get caught up,” she says. She’s especially proud of
the children’s area there, and was instrumental in the addition of an outreach program to Nashville’s Hispanic population.

“The waiting room is wonderful,” she explains. “I’m a common sense person,” Eskind observes, the Boston lilt still evident when she talks.

“I’ve been fortunate,” she says. “I’ve been lucky.”
- ELIZABETH OLDER