LEWISTON — Weeks after the U.S. Mint featured Lewiston native Bernard Lown on a new dollar coin, friends and family of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate gathered Friday to honor him during the unveiling of a new portrait.

“What an extraordinary man,” artist Robert Shetterly of Brooksville said.

Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline called Lown “a Lewiston hero and this portrait captures that.”

Even so, Shetterly said, the painting and ceremony were “not really to celebrate the magnificent accomplishment” of the famed doctor but a call “to carry on his work.”

Doug Rawlings of Chesterfield, founder of Veterans for Peace, told the 50 people attending that Lown’s spirit “lives with us.”

Lown’s youngest grandchild, Emma Lown, said her grandfather was “endlessly curious” and always reading two or three books at a time.

She said he wanted his family “to think critically, read prolifically and engage in social activism.”

Lown, who died in 2021 at the age of 99, invented the defibrillator – a device that has saved thousands of lives – and championed the effort to abolish nuclear weapons.

Shetterly said Lown viewed nuclear war as “an absurdity, an atrocity” that doctors could never cope with.

“There wasn’t a cure,” so Lown put his energy into prevention,” the artist said.

Lown, who was Jewish, fled Lithuania in 1935 as the Nazi threat in Germany grew ever darker, wound up in Lewiston, where he initially could only speak Yiddish.

He attended Lewiston High School and graduated in 1938 and earned acceptance into the University of Maine’s honors program, something he continued to support his entire life.

Lown later earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He promoted public health for years as a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, where he founded Physicians for Social Responsibility.

“He wanted to make a difference in the world — and he did,” Joan Ferrini-Mundy, UMaine’s president said.

Emily Cain, a former Democratic leader in the Maine House, said she met Lown while she was studying in Orono and became friends with him and his family in subsequent years. She credited him with telling her to “go directly into politics” where she could make her mark and help people.

“He had such an impact on my life,” said Cain, the emcee for the unveiling.

Former Lewiston Mayor Larry Gilbert Sr. said he came to know Lown during the successful effort to name the old South Bridge after Lown in 2008.

The new portrait is part of Shetterly’s series “Americans Who Tell the Truth” featuring individuals he views as courageous activists.

There are more than 275 portraits in the series, ranging from Civil Rights Movement leader John Lewis to Samantha Smith, a Manchester girl who became a symbol of the quest for peace after she wrote to the leader of the Soviet Union.

All of them will be on display at the Bates Mill atrium in November, Shetterly said, only the second time they’ve all been shown in one place.

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