Dr. Tsai-Fan Yu, a physician and researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center, died of respiratory complications after a stroke on March 2 in Manhattan. She was 95.
Tsai-Fan Yu was born in Shanghai. She received her medical degree from Peking Union Medical College in 1936. Dr. Yu arrived in the United States in 1947, after initially studying diseases in citrus fruits and bacterial blight affecting beans in China. She taught at Columbia before moving to Mount Sinai as an associate professor of internal medicine in 1957. She lived in Manhattan and became an American citizen in the 1950s.
In the 1950s, Dr. Yu helped to found a groundbreaking clinic at Mount Sinai to treat gout, which causes a painful inflammation of the joints not unlike arthritis. Working with Dr. Alexander B. Gutman, who was a chairman of the department of medicine there, she helped establish a connection between elevated levels of uric acid and the pain in ankles and wrists experienced by patients.
In the 1960s, Dr. Yu, with Dr. Gutman and others, continued her pioneering studies of gout's mechanisms and evaluated allopurinol, a drug that helps interrupt the formation of uric acid and still is used in treating gout and kidney stones.
In 1973, she became the first woman to be appointed a full professor at Mount Sinai, a position she held until retiring in 1992, Dr. Yu is survived by a son, Yu Yu of Manhattan; a brother, Dr. Jiefei Yu, a surgeon, of Chongqing, China; and a niece, Dr. Hua Eleanor Yu, a cancer researcher, of Glendora, California. (Source: Jeremy Pearce, The New York Times, Mar 12, 2007).