David Cannom, pioneering L.A. cardiologist, dies at 86

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Cannom, a longtime leading L.A.cardiologist, died at home in Palos Verdes on Aug.

9 at age 86.Cannom died from complications from Alzheimer’s disease, according to one of his daughters, Hannah Cannom.Born May 24, 1940, in Missouri and raised in Illinois and Minnesota, Cannom graduated from DePauw University in 1962.His father had been a Lutheran pastor, so Cannom attended Yale Divinity School for a year on a Rockefeller Fellowship before pursuing his passion for medicine, earning his M.D.

from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1967.“He carried that with him,” said Phyllis Cannom, his wife of 51 years, of his time studying the ministry.“People were full.

They were more than just hearts to him.They were hearts and minds and souls.”He joined the cardiology faculty at Yale in 1973, and it was there he met Phyllis Monroe, then a senior resident who would herself become a practicing physician as a general internist, and the two would be married in 1974.

They would remain together until Cannom’s death, having three daughters together.The couple moved to Los Angeles in 1976, and in 1985, Cannom joined the staff at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, where he would serve as medical director of cardiology for over three decades.He also held a clinical professorship at UCLA.“I don’t think that there are many people who worked harder than my dad,” said Hannah Cannom, recalling childhood weekends spent hanging out at nurses’ stations around the hospital as her father made his rounds.Cannom became one of the nation’s leading specialists on heart rhythm disorders and sudden cardiac deaths.

He was a pioneer in the emerging field of electrophysiology and in the use of implantable defibrillators, small electronic devices used to monitor the heart’s electrical activity and...