About

Dr. Francis D. Moore

Dr. Francis D. Moore was a contemporary of Dr. Starzl, a groundbreaking surgeon whose innovations went beyond the world of organ transplantation. Born in Evanston, Illinois, Moore pursued his education on the east coast, attending Harvard University both as an undergraduate and for medical school. He began an internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1939, where he took an interest in treating burn wounds and learning more about the composition of the human body. Moore’s skill as both a surgeon and an administrator led to him catapulting towards career success early in his professional life; in 1948, he was made both Surgeon-in-Chief at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Moseley Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He ran the surgery department at the Brigham with integrity and determination, all while carrying on his own important research. His 1959 book Metabolic Care of the Surgical Patient is a seminal work, describing the composition of the human body and how each was affected by injury, illness, and the trauma of surgery itself.

Under Moore’s direction, a team of bright surgeons at the Brigham was responsible for some of the earliest successes in organ transplantation. In late 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray, a surgeon at the Brigham, performed the first successful kidney transplant between a pair of identical twins. Moore, heartened and intrigued by this early success, performed liver transplant trials in dogs as early as 1958, though all of these trials ended in death after rejection. Starzl met Moore at a meeting of the American Surgical Association in 1960, where Starzl was invited to discuss Moore’s paper on the results of transplantation at the Brigham. Starzl, only months out from his cardiothoracic fellowship at Northwestern University, asked to join Moore’s team to study antirejection drugs. Though Moore declined, Starzl saw it as a blessing in disguise: “I became (and still am) indebted to Moore for his decision which, because it was negative, moved me onto an entirely new level of development and responsibility.”[ref 1] Starzl was spurred to success, moving to Colorado where he would not only develop his own kidney transplant program, but would perform the world’s first liver transplants. Starzl kept up a correspondence with Moore, discussing surgical results and new successes with immunosuppressive drugs. (Doc. 1, Doc. 2)

After a prodigious career, Moore retired from his position at the Brigham in 1976. He remained a professor at Harvard until his death in 2001, achieving emeritus status in 1981. Though retired from active research and practice, Moore continued following developments in the field, particularly with regards to Starzl. (Doc. 3) Starzl sought Moore’s guidance when writing The Puzzle People, particularly with regards to his insight into the early days of transplantation in the late 1950s and 1960s; in return, Starzl critiqued the autobiography Moore was working on at the same time, which would later be released as A Miracle and a Privilege: Recounting a Half Century of Surgical Advance. (Doc. 4, Doc. 5) The two continued their correspondence right up until Moore’s death in November 2001. In a memorial article written in 2005, Starzl described his old colleague as “a figure of remarkable grace… He directed traffic, dominated conversations, and formulated consensus opinions with a determination and skill like no other person I have known.”[ref 2] (Doc. 6)

References 

1. Thomas E. Starzl, The Puzzle People (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 79.
2. Thomas E. Starzl: Francis D. Moore, obituary. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149:606-613, 2005. http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/5608/.