(February 20, 1943 – July 18, 2009) was one of the first to identify a pattern of illnesses that was ultimately diagnosed as AIDS during his work as a general practitioner in the United States.
In 1980, a series of patients came to a medical office he had opened in Sherman Oaks, all gay men who had a pattern of what appeared to be immune system disorders exhibited by significant loss of weight and swollen lymph nodes, accompanied by fever and rashes, in addition to two patients with chronic diarrhea, depressed white blood cell counts and fungal infections.
[2] Weisman referred two of these cases in 1981 to Michael S. Gottlieb, an immunologist at the UCLA Medical Center, who had a patient of his own with a similar pattern of symptoms.
[2][4][5] A more detailed report regarding the pneumocystis pneumonia found in a series of four patients was published in a December 1981 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
[2] In Weisman's obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Gottlieb described him as "a very astute physician" who recognized "that something out of the ordinary was happening" by being "alert to unusual symptoms in his patients".