CLIFTON KIRKPATRICK MEADOR, M.D.

September 7, 1931 - October 12, 2021

Clifton Kirkpatrick Meador, Sr., M.D. died in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 11, 2021. He was born on September 7, 1931, in Selma, Alabama, the son of Mabel Kirkpatrick Meador of Cahaba, Alabama, and Daniel John Meador II of Myrtlewood, Alabama.

From the age of 5, he wanted to be a doctor, growing up with his veterinarian father and uncles who were physicians. Eighty-five years later, medicine remained the object of his endless curiosity and efforts to improve the care of patients and the practice of medicine. His love of medicine meant that he never worked a day in his life, he said.

He graduated from high school in Greenville, Alabama. At the age of 16, he arrived by train at Union Station in Nashville with a scholarship from the W. O. Parmer Foundation and no idea where Vanderbilt University was located. A member of Kappa Alpha Order, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1952. In 1955, he graduated from Vanderbilt School of Medicine with the Founder's Medal for first honors and as a member of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society.

From 1955-57, he completed his internship and first-year residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Driving through the city with Alabama plates was a bracing experience, he said. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps at Fort Hood, Texas, from 1957-59, where he diagnosed the hearing problem of a new recruit, Elvis Presley.

He returned to Vanderbilt to complete his residency, then practiced medicine in Selma for a year. In 1962, he joined the University of Alabama College of Medicine in Birmingham, as an assistant professor of medicine and director of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Research Center. From 1963-68, he was a Markle Scholar in academic medicine, which provided fellowships at Harvard's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, where he was certified in Nuclear Medicine.

In 1968, he became Dean of the School of Medicine of the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

He created the Medical Information Service by Telephone by which any physician in Alabama could call specialists in the medical center for a free consultation. MIST soon served 100,000 calls annually.

In 1973, Meador returned to Nashville, joining the Vanderbilt faculty to create the medical residency program at Saint Thomas Hospital. He served as Chief of Medicine at Saint Thomas and Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt until 1982, then as Chief Medical Officer of Saint Thomas until 1998.

Retirement lasted less than a year. In 1999, he became the first Executive Director of the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance, where he served until 2012 as Professor of Medicine at both Meharry Medical College and Vanderbilt School of Medicine. At the Alliance, he was one of the founders and first chairman of the Consortium of Safety Net Providers of Middle Tennessee, a consortium of 23 clinics that served uninsured people.

He served on a number of professional and nonprofit boards.

As much as he loved medicine, he was prolific in his creative pursuits as a woodworker, writer, and father. Tables, boxes, flocks of hand-carved birds; 14 books; 7 children.

For decades, he was a part-time completely uncertified amateur yogi, leading friends in weekly yoga. Stretching was everything, he believed. Exercise was key to long life.

Meador published more than 50 papers in the medical literature, and was known for his satires of the excesses of American medicine, among them “The Art and Science of Nondisease,” “A Lament for Invalids,” “The Last Well Person,” and “Clinical Man: Homo clinicus,” describing a new species of humans totally dependent on continuous medical care. Among his books are A Little Book of Doctors’ Rules and Sketches of a Small Town, a memoir.

He was preceded in death by his parents and brother, Daniel John Meador III. He is survived by his wife of 17 years,

Ann Peacher Cowden Meador, a portrait artist and mother of 3 sons by a previous marriage: Stephen Douglas Cowden, Mark Austin Cowden, John Brandon Cowden. His children survive as well. By his first wife: Clifton Kirkpatrick Meador, Jr. (Mary Neal); Aubrey Allen Meador (Celine); Ann Meador Shayne (Jonathan); Elizabeth Meador Elder (Jonathan). By his second wife: Mary Kathleen Meador; Graham Kirkpatrick Meador; Rebecca Ingram Meador. Grandchildren: Reed Wood Meador, James Clifton Meador, Wilson Laird Meador, David Meador Shayne, Clifton Meador Shayne, Lawson David Driskill, Ann Rembert Driskill. Great-grandchildren: Aubrey Reed Wood Meador, Aubrey Allen Meador.

He was a member of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville.

Memorial service on Saturday, October 30, 2:00 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 4815 Franklin Pike, Nashville, with visitation an hour beforehand. Visitation Friday, October 29, 5:00-7:00 p.m. at the church.

Memorial gifts may be made to the Clifton K. Meador Education Fund at the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance at https:// Give.VanderbiltHealth.org/Meador or by mail to 3322 West End Avenue, Suite 900, Nashville, TN 37203, or to the charity of one’s choice.

January 23, 2023

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is my honor and privilege to write in support of Clifton K. Meador MD for induction into the 2023 Tennessee Health Care Hall of Fame. Surely this wonderful physician and human being is on the very short list of distinguished people most deserving of this honor.

A bright young man born and raised in rural Alabama, Clifton arrived as a freshman at Vanderbilt at the tender age of 16 and graduated medical school there not long after with the highest student award, the Founders Medal for Scholastic Honors. He began to chisel out his destiny and honorable character by first serving as a front-line physician in an underserved region of his native Alabama.

Too many people knew and understood his gifts and leadership potential, though, and he was soon to be recruited to the faculty of the fledgling Medical College of Alabama, now known as the UAB Medical School. Within 6 years, he would become Dean. Indeed, without a doubt, Clifton was a cornerstone figure in propelling that institution into its current era of greatness and excellence.

He was an innovative thinker and doer, as he sought to lead his institution into the modern era and establish her as a model worthy of praise and emulation. Among his many accomplishments as dean, let me highlight two:

As Clifton began his tenure, there was no good way for physicians outside of the medical school to reach the specialists who could otherwise help them with very sick patients, either with advice, or with their need to transfer a patient to a higher level of care. Dean Meador organized what came to be known as the MIST system, which streamlined access to better, quicker care throughout the state of Alabama. Many Alabama health care statistics immediately improved as a result, including a plummet in infant mortality.

As direct result of his helmsmanship, UAB ended racial segregation. Clifton has told me that this one thing is one of his accomplishments that he is most proud of, saying, “that was my small contribution to help end segregation in Alabama”

As many great professors do, Dr. Meador moved on to a new institution in 1973 to make his mark there and it was his beloved Vanderbilt. He established a robust Vanderbilt residency program at St. Thomas Hospital, where he served as Chief of Medicine and Chief Medical Officer for 25 years. He was an outstanding and deeply admired mentor to several generations of young doctors. He taught the high moral calling and ethics of medicine by his unwavering example in his own behavior toward all patients as well as students and colleagues.

Late in his stellar career, he spearheaded, and cheer led the genesis of the Vanderbilt-Meharry Alliance, a now much celebrated coalescence and cooperation of medical education between these two vital institutions. The result has been an ongoing success story of symbiotic growth and excellence for both medical schools, and just this past Fall of 2022, Dr. Meador was honored in a lovely tribute of gratitude at Meharry, and a new lecture series, named for him, was begun that day for his singular role in this gift to Tennessee medical education.

Perhaps more important than all mentioned above, though, is a remembrance and celebration of who the man was in a white coat. If there was as an overarching penchant or special talent that this doctor had, it was his understanding that many people are sick, sometimes with incapacitating and long chronic illnesses, where no identifiable disease is present. His compassion to try to help people such as this transcended mere psychiatry, or the assumption that a less discerning physician might have that these patients are malingerers.

Dr Meador was a brilliant professor of endocrinology and internal medicine, not a psychiatrist, but he behaved as though he was also a wise and gifted psychiatrist. Indeed, he regularly held clinics for enigmatic patients, referred to him by otherwise talented, but flummoxed colleagues. And he was a compelling and tireless teacher of that art of medicine. The late Roy Elam MD, another wonderful doctor to have graced Tennessee, said that Clifton’s “stamp on the world will be the large number of people he has taught to care deeply about trying to improve the human condition”.

It would be no surprise that Dr. Meador is the author of at least 14 books and countless other publications that are not only scholarly, and often ground-breaking, but are peppered with wisdom, and winsome humor.

Finally, about my own personal relationship with Clifton Meador: I certainly knew of Dr. Meador and held him in high esteem for my entire medical career. I matriculated UAB Medical School in 1975, two years after he had last been our dean. He was a storied presence throughout my time there, though I had yet to meet him. I was to eventually train at Vanderbilt in cardiology, and I practiced in Nashville for 30 years, retiring in 2017. I was a distant admirer of Dr. Meador throughout all these decades because I knew so much of what I relate above about him.

It was only after my retirement that I became Clifton’s neighbor, and he and I became fast and deeply genuine friends for only the last few years of his life. I count his friendship as one of the beautiful grace notes of my life. I know that I have never met a more enthusiastically curious person in my life. He delighted everyone around him by always asking more than he told.

He exuded joy in life and endless interest in others to his very last moments of consciousness before his end. He was a master at deflecting attention from himself so others around him could shine. He was the consummate educator to the end, literally teaching medical students and residents from his ICU final hospital bed about his own complex metabolic illness just days before he courageously chose hospice care for himself for the sake of those he loved.

I cannot imagine any person more deserving of this honor for which you consider for him, and I thank you in advance for your devotion to this considerable effort to honor those most deserving of this venerable recognition.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert H.

Christenberry

404 Charlesgate Ct

Nashville, TN. 37215

(615)-347-4743 bobcberry@gmail.com

MD

I have known Dr. Meador since 1963, when I was a medical resident at Vanderbilt Medical Center and he was a research fellow there, studying Endocrinology under Dr. Grant Liddle.

During that fellowship he discovered that Cushing’s Syndrome could be produced by non-endocrine tissues like the lung, by secretion of ACTH, formerly believed to be secreted only by the pituitary gland. He presented these findings at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society and subsequently was the first author on the paper describing these findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology. It was an important medical discovery.

We reconnected for several years beginning in the early 1970’s at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville. I was practicing medicine there and Dr. Meador was the Chief of the Vanderbilt -allied Medical Service there for several years. Dr. Meador served as a role model for the Vanderbilt house staff St. Thomas and additionally for many of the community internists there. He became particularly adept and knowledgeable about the diagnosis of unexplained disease, and often helped all the physicians there, both house staff and practitioners, in the diagnosis of these difficult patients who had been incorrectly labeled as psychosomatic. During this period St. Thomas was quite a busy hospital and had the fourth highest number of coronary bypass patients in the country. Dr. Meador’s clinical, administrative, and interpersonal social skills played a definitive role at the hospital during those years. He had the unique ability to gain the trust and confidence of his fellow physicians, hospital administration, Vanderbilt faculty and the entire medical community in and around Nashville.

I never missed one of Dr. Meador’s weekly clinical conferences, which routinely packed a conference room, and was faithfully attended by the house staff and attending physicians, both for the clinical information but also for Dr. Meador’s methods of interviewing and understanding patients and gaining their confidence and trust We became close friends during this period.

Subsequently, because of his variety of skills and his reputation in the community, Dr.Meador was appointed as the Director of the Meharry-Vanderbilt

Alliance, a problematic area in which little progress had been made for several years. His office was at Meharry Hospital. One of his duties included serving on the Nashville Consortium of Safety-Net Clinics. As an active participant of the Consortium, he found that its major problem was the care of chronic diseases, particularly diabetes mellitus.

The Consortium asked Dr. Meador to direct a plan to improve this medical situation. Dr. Meador asked me (recently retired then), to join him in this difficult problem. At the Alliance we established a computerized database to analyze the care and treatment of hundreds of these patients, and we held clinical and educational sessions at each clinic on multiple occasions Additionally, we held monthly sessions at the Alliance Office. It was a typical example of the respect he had earned over many years in Nashville, both medically and ethically, and as a role model to other physicians and health care providers.

Sincerely yours,

Alan L. Graber, MD

Upon having read just a few chapters, I became increasingly cognizant of the profound, critical importance of fostering and developing a sense of evaluative introspection for an adequate assessment of one’s formation and education. It should certainly behoove any soon-to-be physician to cultivate such an intrinsic understanding of their future profession by means of nurturing their spirit with the compassion and benevolence that Dr. Meador always strove to instill upon his readers with his example.

I was honestly astounded to see that the environment Dr. Meador learnt in did not differ much from mine, despite his stories offering a glimpse into the s Nashville whilst I live in a relatively small college town in Venezuela in the s: Medicine has indeed progressed and changed much, but the essence of forming the key competences of caring, thorough physicians seems to be ubiquitous and atemporal.

Dr. Meador’s memoir has profoundly impressed me and inculcated in me a sense of moral responsibility to abide by the opinions and perceptions that ultimately lead to the greater good, especially that of the patient. I was touched by Dr. Meador’s video to previous Dr. Paez’s students and despite it having been recorded years prior, I felt as if it had been filmed for us. I’m very grateful to have had the chance of having had Dr. Meador inculcate much of his genius and compassion by reason of his powerful voice and writing.

With gratitude,

Antonio J. Sosa Méndez.

Letter in support of Clifton K. Meador MD to the Tennessee Health Care Hall of Fame 2023

My interaction with Clifton Meador MD extends back to the early 2000s. This was after he had already made an impact on his colleagues in neurology and was in a position of leadership and administration over medical affairs of a tertiary care hospital.

My recognition of his impactful methods and manner of guidance was not fully realized until I myself became more involved in the house of medicine. Expanding beyond the academic and clinical practice of Dermatology, I had the opportunity and privilege of helping to oversee the regulation of medicine in my own State of TN. This provided me with a broader perspective of the delivery and standards of medical care not only in TN, but also across the nation as a liaison to other state medical boards.

During this time in my career, I maintained frequent contact with Clifton and his evolving role of bringing not only physicians but also institutions together. It was not until my tenure with the ACCME, when I saw the level of ability and dedication to the advancement of medical learning of its national leadership, that I realized how Clifton Meador made leadership and advancement in our own state appear so natural and easy. Leading medical professionals who are at the peak of their specialty and careers is no simple task, nor is it easy to bring institutions with their declared goals and missions to realize there are shared benefits to work together.

I have tried to further the maturation of Competition to Cooperation to Collaboration over the past four years. Clifton Meador fostered this concept a decade ago. He did it in a constructive and unpretentious manner, inspiring selfless leadership. Others should aspire to this admirable goal. Clifton’s legacy and actions can continue to serve as a role model in the years ahead through the recognition associated with his induction to the Tennessee Health Care Hall of Fame.

Michael Zanolli MD Dermatologist

Past President and Chair of NAM

Past member and President of the TN BME

Past Board member of the FSMB

Past member and Chair of ACCME

NAM – Nashville Academy of Medicine

TN BME – Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners

FSMB - Federation of State Medical Boards

ACCME – Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education