Within two years of assuming the medical directorship of Chicago’s Columbus Hospital in 1963, Dr. Joseph R. Nora helped establish the first intensive care and coronary care units in a community hospital setting in the Chicago area.
He also saw the opportunity to pool talent and resources and helped oversee the unification of Columbus, Cuneo and Cabrini hospitals into a single medical center. Dr. Nora’s service to the community earned him the 1983 Mother Cabrini Award from the trustees of the hospital, an honor he shared that year with Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
Dr. Nora, 86, who retired from his practice in 2001, died Friday, Oct. 10, at his home in the city’s Sauganash neighborhood on the North Side, of complications related to a stroke he suffered more than a year ago.
“He was just a wonderful guy, someone who enjoyed a good joke and laugh,” said Dr. Joe Leydon, a retired Chicago-area dentist and friend of Dr. Nora’s since childhood. “He was one of those people without a single vice. He filled his life with goodness and made things better for so many others.”
Dr. Nora was born and raised in Chicago, graduating in 1945 from Mount Carmel High School, which in 2010 honored him as its Humanitarian of the Year. He attended undergraduate school at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, and later received a medical degree from Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine in 1951.
“Even in college, he was disciplined and always put in the hours,” recalled Leydon, also a graduate of Loras. “We’d all be out messing around, and Joe would join us later after hitting the books.”
Following medical school, Dr. Nora interned at Cook County Hospital briefly and spent several years as a flight surgeon with the Air Force in the 1950s.
Upon his discharge, he held residencies in pathology at Harvard University Medical School in Boston and in internal medicine at the West Side VA Hospital, a teaching hospital for the University of Illinois. He then became an attending physician at the West Side VA Hospital, Chicago State Tuberculosis Hospital and Columbus Hospital.
In 1963, Dr. Nora helped form the Nora Medical Group with his three physician brothers, Ernest, Gerald and Paul on the North Side. He was preceded in death by all three.
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“It was a hoot seeing my father and uncles all practice together,” said his daughter, Dr. Mindy Nora, who joined the family practice in 1991. “They were excellent doctors, each with their own set of skills and an extremely strong work ethic. As brothers, they knew each other so well that they could communicate in a sort of medical shorthand that was amazing to watch.”
Additionally, three of Dr. Nora’s six sons also became doctors.
“When I was growing up I thought of becoming a nurse, because that’s what women wanting to go into medicine did back then,” his daughter said. “But I remember him saying to me, ‘That’s great, but why not become a doctor?'”
Dr. Nora was an associate professor of medicine, from 1958 to 1964, and later assistant professor, from 1964 to 1970, at the U. of I. Medical Center. He was an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s medical school for several decades, beginning in 1970.
“You’d never know that Joe was as accomplished as he was,” said Leydon, a patient of Dr. Nora’s for many years. “He was very humble, never tooted his own horn.
“One of the things that made him a great doctor was that he was such a good listener. “Whenever I talked about my health, I felt he was focused on my every word.”
Dr. Nora’s wife, Dorothea, died in 2001.
“My parents were inseparable, a real team,” his daughter, Mindy, said. “He liked describing my mother as the icing on his cake. In social situations, he was all too happy to hang back and let her shine.”
Dr. Nora also is survived by six sons, Joseph, Michael, John, Larry, Matthew and Daniel; two other daughters, Claudia Gatti and Kevin Mary Callans; 28 grandchildren.
Services were held.