John P. McGovern, MD: A Lifetime of Stories

Foreword

McGovern Medical Magic Many of us recoil at the thought of mixing idealism and money in medicine. Surely our best students go into medicine to help people, not to get rich. Surely medicine is a vocation, a calling. Its greatest reward is the satisfaction that comes from having served the sick, or, for a researcher, from having added to human knowledge of sickness and health. We do not think that concern for material rewards should be a driving factor in health care. We worry that high principles have a way of dissolving when they are immersed in dollars. Dr. John P. McGovern, an allergist and immunologist, became fabulously wealthy practicing medicine in Houston, Texas. He did it all the while focusing his life on the highest humanist values. He proclaimed himself a disciple of the great physician Sir William Osler, and the evidence of the biography you are about to read is that Jack McGovern was indeed a great “Oslerian” physician and human being. Instead of selling out his ideals for more dollars, Dr. McGovern reversed the formula. He gave away his dollars to advance his ideals. It was money that proved soluble in idealism. This is a book about one of the most influential medical philanthropists of our time. The key, as an old pork-packer once said, is to make the best bacon possible and you’ll find that profit is one of your by-products. I won’t give away any of the terrific stories that Bryant Boutwell, the perfect McGovern biographer, has to tell in these pages. But his main point is this: if you take a young American of boundless energy and eagerness to serve, have a great educator (Wilburt Davison of the Duke Medical School) introduce the lad Foreword x | verso runninghead to Oslerian principles of medicine, plunk him down in a fertile environment (Houston, Texas) in the golden age of modern medicine after 1950, you can sit back and watch his smoke. Laboring unceasingly at his vocation, Jack McGovern practiced good Oslerian medicine, and for him (as in fact for Sir William Osler himself), a by-product of success was a high income. He then practiced good investing , the by-product of which was even more income. He created a charitable foundation, which has concentrated on using its wealth to supply medical and community and Oslerian needs. These pages detail the remarkable extent of the McGovern Foundation’s work in Houston—its name seems to be everywhere in the awe-inspiring Texas Medical Center—and they also remind us that another of John P. McGovern’s significant legacies is the perpetuation throughout the medical world of the Osler name and values. Dr. McGovern himself was one of the founders of the American Osler Society. A fledgling medical fan club when it was formed in 1970, the AOS has become the senior organization in North America devoted to memorializing Osler’s life and perpetuating his humanitarian values in medicine. The American Osler Society’s philanthropic activities have extended to Osler sites in Canada and Great Britain as well as in the United States. Because of his frailty, Dr. McGovern had to curtail his public activities in years well before his death. I was very fortunate that he was able to come out for a lecture I gave on Osler at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 2001. The occasion was part of the ceremonies marking the creation of the John P. McGovern Academy of Oslerian Medicine on that campus, yet another living monument to the two great physicians. The Jack McGovern I met that day was a gentle, soft-spoken physician, warm, friendly, and encouraging in the best Oslerian manner. Here, clearly, was a man cut from Osler’s cloth. I wish I could have spent more time with him. Fortunately Bryant Boutwell, an accomplished writer and historian, did spend many, many hours with McGovern, and in recent years he has also lived with the McGovern archive and with the memories of people close to his subject. He gives us a rare and well-told story of how high principles in medicine can generate great material success, which in turn can be put to good and lasting use in the best of all causes, serving humanity. —Michael Bliss Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto x | foreword ...