Every year, the Nashville Health Care Council issues a new edition of its "family tree," showing the origins of and relationships between the healthcare enterprises that have sprouted, and often flourished, in Nashville over the past four decades.

Today, a man who planted some of the first seeds for that growth will be laid to rest. Dr. Herbert Schulman passed away on Sunday at the age of 84.

After graduating from West High School and serving in an Army infantry unit in New Guinea and the Philippines during the Second World War, Schulman earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from Vanderbilt University. He later interned at Vanderbilt and Harvard before setting up a general medical practice in Nashville with partners Ben Alper, Irwin Eskind and Larry Wolfe. Schulman would continue to see patients until his retirement in the late 1980s.

In 1968, within months after the founding of for-profit healthcare enterprises Hospital Corporation of America and General Care Corp., Schulman joined his medical partner Irwin Eskind, Irwin's brother Richard Eskind and Baron Coleman to create Hospital Affiliates International.

HAI did not start out with existing physician-owned hospitals, as HCA did. But it was innovative in marketing itself as a manager of not-for-profit hospitals rather than simply an acquirer. One of HAI's early wins was a contract to manage the medical center of Tulane University's hospital in New Orleans. According to Dick Eskind, Tulane was the first major university to outsource management to a for-profit company.

The various Nashville-based hospital firms competed fiercely in the 1970s, but one particular hire by HCA and one by HAI would have enduring local consequences well beyond the healthcare industry. When HCA hired Andrea Conte as a nurse consultant, she and her husband Phil Bredesen moved to Nashville – and Bredesen took a job with rival HAI.

By 1980, Bredesen felt ready to try to emulate entrepreneurs like Schulman. And Schulman, with his share of the $77 million that insurer INA Corp. had paid for HAI in 1977, was ready to back a new entrepreneur. "It was in his living room that he and I and three others joined together to start HealthAmerica," Tennessee's governor recalled yesterday, noting that Schulman was also his personal physician for years.

"I was very sad to hear of Herb's passing," Bredesen said. "He was a smart and deeply caring man."

Bredesen eventually sold insurer HealthAmerica in the 1980s to Maxicare Health Plans Inc.

Veteran Nashville banker Ed Nelson, who served on the board of ClinTrials Research Inc. with Schulman when that company was publicly traded, remembered a man who had a passion for contract bridge and Vanderbilt basketball, as well as a father's pride in son Tom Schulman, winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1989 for the Robin Williams film "Dead Poets Society."

"Even though he was a physician, he was one of the brightest minds I ever knew in the business world," Dick Eskind said.

Schulman's wife, the former Joan Friedman of Nashville, preceded him in death, as did a brother, George. Surviving him are sister Ruth Coleman, son Tom (Miriam) and daughter Janice, as well as two grandchildren.

The family has stated that donations in lieu of flowers may be made to the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, c/o Professor Daniel H. Janzen, Department of Biology, 415 South University Avenue, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104. The fund benefits a Costa Rican nature preserve that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The funeral service will take place at 11 a.m. today at Congregation Micah, 2001 Old Hickory Blvd. in Brentwood. Internment will follow at Congregation Micah Cemetery.