A GRATEFUL TRIBUTE TO MAURICE WOOD: FOUNDING PRESIDENT OF THE NORTH AMERICAN PRIMARY CARE RESEARCH GROUP

For more than 60 years Maurice Wood was a passionate advocate for primary care, best evidence, academic research, and the generalist physician’s role, in the United Kingdom, United States, and around the world.¹ He died at home on March 11, 2016 at 93 years of age, leaving a stunning legacy of friendship, doctoring, leadership, investigation, mentoring, and inspiration for generations of health professionals.^2–4 To add to the outpouring of gratitude and respect that burst forth for Maurice when news of his passing spread around the world, past presidents of NAPCRG and Wood Award winners voiced personal recollections about this amazing man, the person beloved by so many.

Kurt Stange: “Maurice taught me, (taught all of us), by deed more than by dialogue, that it is possible, actually that it is imperative, to marry intellectual rigor and perseverance with interpersonal kindness, when one is doing something as important as striving to discover how illness happens and how health can be strengthened. His approach lives on in our best individual and collective selves.”

Bill Phillips: “Maurice Wood was a man of short stature who cast a shadow long enough to cross the Atlantic and wrap the world around. His heart was big enough to embrace generations of family medicine and primary care researchers. Everywhere he went, he both earned and paid respect. He was devoted the details of classification but comprehended the whole. He founded NAPCRG in a minimalist tradition and lived in youthful amazement at how the organization and its people had grown. At his last NAPCRG meeting, Maurice marveled aloud: ‘Look at all the new, young members. I really feel like I can see the future.’”

Moira Stewart: “At the 1975 NAPCRG meeting in San Francisco, Maurice asked a friendly question in public, and he followed up with a quiet one-on-one chat with me querying where my research program was going next! This was the quintessential positive challenge. I heard him say, at workshops in the 1970s and 80s, that until we can describe our patients’ problems and our work to respond to these problems, the field of primary care will remain a mystery, unsolved and, some may say, therefore irrelevant. And it must be done correctly, reflecting the nuances of patients’ presentations and the providers’ responses. ICPC remains ahead of its time in recognizing the importance of coding what is unique about the discipline of family medicine.”

Perry Dickinson: “As NAPCRG President during a period of rapid growth of the organization, I had multiple conversations with Maurice regarding the need to keep the warm, personal, and supportive nature of the meetings despite the large number of new people arriving on NAPCRG’s doorstep. This is one of the things that has made NAPCRG meetings different and very generative, and Maurice deserves tremendous credit for instilling in our current leaders the importance of keeping that vision alive.”

Carol Herbert: “Maurice saw the promise in the presenters at NAPCRG, rather than their limitations. I recall his helpful and supportive comments to me after my first presentations in 1977, when I was a community-based researcher. That this important man spoke to me directly reinforced my commitment to family medicine research and to NAPCRG. He was a mentor who treated me as a peer from our first meeting. I recall Maurice running annual general meetings at NAPCRG in the early years when he was President/Executive Director. He received one dollar a year as executive director and the budget was not much. Meetings were short, but involved everyone at NAPCRG that year—registration made one a member. He would present what he was engaged in on behalf of NAPCRG, as well as the financial statement and then invite—and listen to—opinions from the floor. NAPCRG was the family of family medicine researchers, who were few in the 70’s and 80’s, and often isolated in our own communities—and Maurice was the dad!”

Bill Hogg: “I remember working with Maurice in the 1980s on the board of directors of the Ambulatory Sentinel Practice Network, a developing, bi-national practice-based research network. Maurice’s joy in research was contagious and his conviction of its importance an inspiration. Family was also clearly very important to Maurice. Over the years when seeing him at meetings, he always spoke about his wife and children.”

Jeannie Haggerty: “Maurice burned up the dance floor—enthusiastic dancer is putting it mildly. Dancing with one and all was a natural extension of his passion and supportiveness as a researcher. I welcomed and was inspired by his dedication to NAPCRG being a place of nurture and curiosity, not brutal critique and one-up-man-ship.”

Walter Rosser: “Maurice was a wonderful human being in every aspect. He visited us in Hamilton when I was chair there, promoting research and talking about NAPCRG. He drove on to London, Ontario, to visit Ian McWhinney and Martin Bass. On his way he discovered that there was something wrong with the car as it wasn’t steering properly. He stopped on the highway and discovered that someone had taken the new tires off the car and replaced them with threadbare tires. Cell phones were not available then so he had to wait at a gas station for a replacement car before continuing his journey. Such setbacks and delays must have happened on many occasions as he traveled the world promoting family medicine and primary care research, but it was Maurice the human being that absorbed such shocks without losing his kind and generous touch—at his next destination.”

Ann Macaulay: “Maurice was full of enthusiasm for life in general, and I enjoyed his stories from his very varied past, which included being put in control of the locks of the Suez Canal when he was stationed in Egypt at the time of the Suez crisis - and where he met his beloved wife Erica. Maurice’s vision of primary care research led him to continually support new ideas emerging at NAPCRG. In my case he was very supportive of those of us starting out in participatory research to develop research partnerships with community members and other stakeholders. Very early on he recognized this as an important research approach. How very perceptive he was—when we reflect on the continued growth of community-based participatory research and the current funding for community and patient engagement via the development of the United States’ Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.”

Frank deGruy: “In 1992, Maurice Wood pulled me aside at NAPCRG and said: ‘I’m really glad to learn that you’re on the NIMH’s Services Research Study Section. I just rotated off that thing and they really, really need a primary care person there. Those people don’t know anything about primary care, and you will just have to teach them over and over again that half their ideas about what they want to do in primary care won’t work. Remember, in primary care, you know what you’re talking about and they don’t, so be noisy. You are the expert, and they are not. Also, they’re not very nice to each other, or to the people they review. Help them learn to be more supportive.’ He was right, again.”

Larry Green: “I was 28 years old and still in residency when I met Maurice at a NAPCRG meeting. He not only tolerated my youth and inexperience; he became my friend, mentoring me as if I were his equal. It was Maurice that found the $1,400 in the NAPCRG budget to support exploration of a bi-national practice-based research network, the first investment in the US in such enterprise. I relish memories with him, eg his explaining to Kellogg Foundation representatives the necessity of practice-based evidence, meals and debates with Henk Lamberts about ordering principles of primary care, accompanying him to the Johns Hopkins celebration of the life and work of Barbara Starfield, joining him as his guest at the Metropolitan Opera before his last NAPCRG meeting—and his returning to the hotel after midnight, “a little tired.” I am ever in his debt for cultivating ideas and people and being relentlessly kind to me. My world shrank when he left us.”

Maurice Wood would be unhappy with this tribute if it did not acknowledge his own gratitude to his many colleagues, particularly Kerr White and Henk Lamberts, and especially to his home department of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University that provided him critical institutional support throughout his US career. Perhaps these words of song-writer Dan Fogelberg capture NAPCRG’s deep appreciation for Maurice:

“The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old.

But his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.

My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man.

I’m just a living legacy to the leader of the band.”⁵

Thank you, Maurice Wood!

• © 2016 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.