David Silverstein

David Morton Silverstein was an American-born cardiologist who made Kenya his home and helped build modern heart medicine there over more than fifty years. Widely described as a pioneer of cardiology in Kenya, he established early cardiac catheterisation services, taught generations of doctors, and for decades served as personal physician to President Daniel arap Moi.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1944 to Norman Silverstein and Sarah Peshe Khan, who had migrated from Poland in the 1920s, Silverstein showed early academic drive. He graduated from the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1967 at about 22, then trained in internal medicine and cardiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. United States Air Force service in Taiwan deepened his wish to practise medicine outside America.

When his cardiology fellowship ended in 1974, he weighed posts in the South Pacific, Israel and Kenya. He wanted a place with a cardiac catheterisation laboratory. Kenya offered that chance at Kenyatta National Hospital and a teaching role at the University of Nairobi. He arrived expecting a short stint. The stay became a lifetime.

In Nairobi he helped run an early cath lab, headed cardiology services at Kenyatta National Hospital, and taught from the university's early graduating classes onward. In 1977 he was appointed chief cardiothoracic physician for the Government of Kenya. That same year he first treated then Vice-President Daniel arap Moi at Kenyatta National Hospital. After Moi became president, Silverstein was formally named his personal physician in 1983, succeeding Antonia Bagshawe. He kept that role through Moi's presidency and into retirement, remaining close until Moi's death in February 2020.

From State House and presidential travel he saw Kenya and the world at close range, including journeys that took him into China's Great Hall of the People in the Deng Xiaoping era. He insisted his duty was medical, not political, yet friendships formed. He and Moi, a devout Christian and a practising Jew respectively, talked scripture, Israel, history and health. At Moi's burial in Kabarak, Silverstein recited the Jewish memorial prayer El Malei Rachamim in Hebrew and English.

His patients also included former Attorney-General Charles Njonjo and, on a Kenyan visit, Nelson Mandela. After Mandela later recognised him in a hotel corridor, the former South African president joked that he was still alive and that Silverstein was a better doctor than he had thought.

Silverstein practised for years at The Nairobi Hospital, where colleagues and residents sought rotations with him. He became a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the American College of Physicians, and Kenya later honoured him with national recognition including the Elder of the Burning Spear (EBS) and, in hospital tributes after his death, the MBS. In 2023 he published the memoir Heartbeat: An American Cardiologist in Kenya, recounting medicine, presidents, crises and an unexpected life in East Africa.

He met nurse practitioner Channa Commanday while treating casualties after the 1998 United States Embassy bombing in Nairobi; they later married. He had four sons and found refuge on a farm near Lake Naivasha, jogging among wildlife when hospital days allowed. He learned Swahili, kept long clinic hours, and said he had not found anything more fun than being a doctor in Africa.

His career was not free of controversy. After Chief Justice Zacchaeus Chesoni died of cardiac arrest in 1999, negligence claims led to a tribunal that absolved Silverstein in 2000. Spy suspicions occasionally followed him because of his American and Jewish identity; he rejected them and kept treating patients across political lines.

Dr David Silverstein died on 13 September 2026 in Kenya, aged 82, while under treatment. President William Ruto, KANU chairman Gideon Moi, The Nairobi Hospital, Israel's embassy in Kenya and many colleagues mourned a physician who helped found specialist cardiology in Kenya and who stood for decades at the intersection of medicine and public life.