Clinician was first dean of McGovern med school
Dr. Cheves McCord Smythe, who served as the founding dean of the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth during his long career as both a brilliant diagnostician and compassionate doctor, died May 11 at his Charleston, S.C., home. He was 95.
He treated thousands of patients and taught countless students, leaving a legacy around the world.
“It’s been astonishing, the number of people from all over the world who have emailed us and said, ‘Your father had a huge impact on me,’” said Alec Smythe, the oldest of Smythe’s five sons.
Smythe’s interest in medicine came as a child. The would-be doctor treated childhood pets that fell ill and found a passion for caring for others.
The clinician used to tell his son he had “100 years of medical training,” because when he attended Harvard
Medical School during World War II and his professors were drafted, doctors who retired at the turn of the century returned to the institution to teach. Smythe continued to learn innovation in medicine well into the next century.
“He could just look at someone and know what was wrong with them,” said Alec Smythe. “He was amazing at it.”
After Harvard, Smythe trained at Bellevue Hospital in New York. He was later chief resident at Boston City Hospital. He conducted medical research during the Korean War at the Naval Medical Field Research Laboratory at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.
He joined the faculty of the Medical College of South Carolina in 1955, where he was named dean in 1962. After three years there, the doctor moved on to a position with the American Association
of Medical Colleges, which allowed him to travel and learn about teaching methods at medical schools across the nation.
Smythe came to the Bayou City in 1970 to become the first dean of the University of Texas Medical School, now the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. There, he recruited the school’s first leaders, educators and students. He oversaw the planning and construction of the school’s facility.
For the medical school’s first five years, Smythe led it as dean and eventually became a professor of internal medicine at the college. While he was there, Smythe was recognized numerous times, winning the school’s Master Teacher Award, the Humanism in Medicine Award, and the Benjy Brooks Award for Clinical Excellence, among others.
“He knew how to bond with patients and make them feel better by being in the presence of a doctor,” said Dr. L. Maximilian Buja, a former colleague of Smythe’s.
“Rarely do medical educators have the ability to instill diagnostic and humanistic skills. He really was a paragon of that.”
Smythe took leave from the Houston campus in the early ’80s and ’90s to open a medical school in Karachi, Pakistan. He was the founding dean of the Department of Medicine at the Aga Khan University of Health Sciences, a professor and chair of the institution.
In 1995, he returned to the dean’s office at McGovern to serve temporarily during the search for the school’s new leader. Smythe helped recruit Buja, who would serve as dean of the school from 1996 to 2003, and took him under his wing during the transition period.
Smythe retired from McGovern in 2011.
“There was only one Cheves. He was really a character,” said Bujas, currently a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at McGovern. “He was a straightshooter, a frank-talker and he gave me excellent advice … I will always remember him being a real role model for me as a physician and a dean.”
Smythe also served as chief of medical services at Lyndon Baines Johnson Hospital, where he was recognized by his peers for strengthening the teaching at its medical school. He helped develop the geriatric medicine program there and the annual Cheves Smythe Distinguished Lecture was established in 2006. It brings distinguished speakers to the hospital’s campus to lecture on aging.
Smythe was full of energy and never gave up on his goals, but he didn’t have a problem stepping away for his family. He took his sons fishing and hunting nearly every weekend of their youth and was known to take colleagues along to bond outside of the workplace.
“He created a camaraderie atmosphere that I miss,” Nachum Dafny, professor of neurobiology and anatomy at McGovern, said of Smythe’s faculty fishing trips.
Smythe’s eldest son said one thing he admired about his father was his perseverance.
“He never gave up,” said Alec Smythe. “He taught us that if one approach doesn’t work, try a different one.”
Because Smythe was born into privilege, his son said he always strove to live up to what he’d been given in life.
“He had a sense that to whom much is given, much is expected,” said Alec Smythe. “God had given him a wonderful education, a nimble mind, a strong family and a tremendous amount of energy. He thought that when he showed up to the pearly gates, he better have something to show for it.”
The doctor is survived by his wife of 70 years, Isabella “Polly” Carr Smythe; their five sons;14 grandchildren; and three greatgrandchildren.