Skip to content
Obituaries
Link copied to clipboard

Bernice Harris Heller, 91, editor

Bernice Harris Heller, 91, an editor for medical publications, died June 21 at Stapeley, a retirement residence in Germantown. Born to Russian Jewish émigrés, Mrs. Heller graduated from Olney High School. She hoped to pursue a career as a concert pianist, but after her father died in 1942, she had to help support her family, said her daughter, Irene.

Bernice Harris Heller, 91, an editor for medical publications, died June 21 at Stapeley, a retirement residence in Germantown.

Born to Russian Jewish émigrés, Mrs. Heller graduated from Olney High School. She hoped to pursue a career as a concert pianist, but after her father died in 1942, she had to help support her family, said her daughter, Irene.

During World War II, she worked for a company supplying the Army Signal Corps.

In 1946, she married Louis Heller. While raising a family in West Philadelphia and Wynnefield, she helped establish music classes and a day camp at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park.

When her husband became ill in the mid-1950s, she went back to work as a secretary for the meat cutters' union. She later was an editorial assistant for the Annals of Internal Medicine, the journal of the American College of Physicians. She then was an editor for W.B. Saunders, a medical publisher in Philadelphia, and for 13 years, she edited medical and nursing textbooks for McGraw Hill and J.B. Lippincott. After retiring from Lippincott in 1983, she was a freelance editor and indexer for medical books and articles until 1999.

Mrs. Heller was past president of the American Society of Indexers and the Delaware Valley Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association.

She taught editing and indexing courses and workshops at Drexel University and at what is now Arcadia University and was a volunteer docent at the Franklin Institute.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Gene, and a grandson. Her husband died in 1981.

A commemoration will be held later at Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks Memorial Chapel in Philadelphia.

Donations may be made to the Friends of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., Philadelphia 19103.