For the Love of People

John P. McGovern, M.D., balances the science and art of practicing medicine with heart

by Sandy Sheehy

 
In 1942, John P. McGovern, an undergraduate from Washington, D.C., stood nervously in the office of Wilburt C. Davison, founding dean of Duke University’s School of Medicine. He was waiting for the interview that would determine his admission status. Every time they began to talk, the phone would ring, and Dean Davison would take the call. So young Jack, as family and friends called him, got up and examined the pictures on the wall. One kept drawing his eye – a photo of a man with a walrus moustache and dark, piercing eyes. When the dean hung up at last, McGovern asked who it was. “Sir William Osler,” replied Davison, who had studied under Osler as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

The dean then embarked on a description of Osler’s myriad contributions to medical education and patient care. McGovern learned that during a career spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Canadian-born physician had initiated the medical residency system and had introduced the practice of bringing students onto the wards, where they could observe their professors treating patients. He had also authored the main textbook used for five decades in medical schools around the globe. Above all, Sir William Osler had exemplified care, compassion, and respect, both for his patients and for his students.

As the time allotted for the interview drew to a close, Dean Davison, who had yet to direct a question to McGovern, told him not to worry, that he’d been accepted, then urged him to read Osler’s collected essays. McGovern did just that. From then on, he took Sir William Osler as his model of professional values, embodying, as he puts it, “the humane aspects of the practice of medicine, the caring aspects.”

After training at Yale and Duke and in London, Paris, and Washington, and teaching at George Washington University and Tulane, he came to Houston in 1956 as a clinical professor in Baylor’s Department of Pediatrics. Meanwhile, he established the McGovern Allergy Clinic, which became the country’s largest allergy clinic, treating adults as well as children. Going on to hold seventeen professorships, twenty-eight honorary degrees, and both the Surgeon General’s Medal and Duke School of Medicine’s first Distinguished Alumnus Award, he somehow found time to author or co-author 252 publications, including twenty-six books, one of them a biography of Dean Davison.

Throughout this distinguished career, Jack McGovern continued to draw inspiration from the example of William Osler. In 1969, concerned that the emphasis on science in medical education was crowding out the art of patient care, McGovern co-founded the American Osler Society. Drawing together medical historians and physicians who share Osler as a role model, AOS is today a thriving organization with 180 members.

Like Osler, McGovern found the puzzles of disease and the body’s responses fascinating. But to him, the true joys of his profession came through giving. “In medicine, we all like philanthropy in the original sense – love of humankind,” he explains. “Most of us want to do something for other people. That’s one of the great things about being a physician. You can help nature.”

By living frugally and investing astutely, Jack McGovern assembled the means to give in another way. Inspired by his surgeon father, who had treated many Depression-era patients pro bono, and his grandmother, who had brought transients into her home for meals as well as taught young Jack the wonders of compound interest and took him to open his first savings account, he used his growing wealth to change his community, and the world beyond, for the better. His gifts benefited the Smithsonian Institution, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Baylor College of Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Texas Health Science Center, and Duke University. He endowed twenty-nine annual medal award lectureships and supported more than fifty substance abuse treatment or prevention programs. He helped establish Houston’s John P. McGovern Museum of Health & Medical Science, and has been especially generous to the city’s parks and zoo, a short walk from his apartment. He goes not to watch the animals, but to watch the children watching the animals and talking excitedly to kids from other ethnic and economic backgrounds about the animals’ antics. “The zoo brings people together,” he says.

In 1996, the Houston Chronicle called Jack McGovern and his wife, Kathy, “two of Houston’s most generous philanthropists,” a considerable distinction in a city with a vigorous tradition of individual largesse. Dr. McGovern’s most far-reaching gift may well be his endowment of the John P. McGovern Academy of Oslerian Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. McGovern was already a strong supporter of UTMB, having funded professorships in nursing and family medicine, a lectureship and research support in the Institute for the Medical Humanities (which he helped inspire), the McGovern Hall of Medical History (an installation of twelve life-size sculptures by Doris Appel), and other gifts. McGovern’s generosity took on a transformational role after John D. Stobo became president in 1997.

Dr. Stobo, who had held the William Osler Professorship in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins, shared McGovern’s enthusiasm for his role model. As the two Jacks became acquainted, Stobo confided an idea for helping educate medical students to deliver humane, patient-centered care in the tradition of Osler: Select faculty who excel in teaching and modeling these principles and charge them with developing ways to reinforce and enhance these qualities, through the curriculum and throughout the university culture. McGovern responded enthusiastically and, in 2001, endowed the John P. McGovern Academy of Oslerian Medicine with a series of three gifts ranking among the most generous in the university’s history.

Today, the Academy comprises eight faculty members, called Osler Scholars, and six medical students, or Osler Student Scholars, to be joined by another six in 2005. Academy members undertake individual and collective projects directed toward increasing awareness of and commitment to Sir William Osler’s ideals. Faculties from other medical schools across the country are beginning to explore the McGovern Academy as a model. “Dr. McGovern’s vision is helping us ensure that future generations of physicians will be trained to treat their patients with the utmost care and respect,” Dr. Stobo says.

McGovern would like nothing better than to see every medical school adopt Osler as a patron saint. The result, he hopes, will be generations of physicians who balance the science of medicine with the art – and the heart. “You’ve got to have work,” he explains, “but you’ve also got to have love – love of the work, love of the patient, love of your ability to help people.” For John P. McGovern, the satisfaction of medicine and the satisfaction of philanthropy spring from the same roots.