James Haviland was born in Glen Falls, NY in 1911. After attending Union College in Schenectady and completing medical school and residency at Johns Hopkins, he spent a post-graduate year studying infectious diseases at Yale. In 1940, he moved to the Northwest; Jim said he drove west until he found a place he really liked, and then he never left. His first job was in Olympia, Washington with the state Department of Social Security working on projects to provide health care for the indigent elderly and to deal with the raging polio epidemic. There he met and married Marion Bertram, a social worker, and they began a wonderful life and family together. During World War II, he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands for almost 2 years, then worked on building a hospital in Klamath Falls, Oregon to care for returning marines with malaria, filariasis and other infections acquired in the tropics.
After the war, Jim opened his private practice of Internal Medicine in Seattle and volunteered to teach at the new University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine. His intellect and leadership abilities were quickly recognized. The school's founding Dean, Ed Turner, made him an Assistant Dean, and at the same time Jim became an officer of the county and state medical societies. When Dean Turner left the school in 1954, Jim filled in as the Acting Dean and successfully led the major task of raising money to build a clinical facility and plan a hospital for the university campus. This was a transforming step in the development of the UW School of Medicine.
For the rest of his career, Jim effectively combined his interest in academia and the practice of medicine. When Belding Scribner developed the plastic shunt that made hemodialysis and long-term survival possible for patients with chronic renal failure, Jim led the effort to develop a community-supported, not-for-profit, outpatient dialysis program-originally known as the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center, the first of its kind in the world. A major concern was to decide who should receive dialysis treatment. Jim described how this was handled, including how to provide dialysis to deserving patients irrespective of their ability to pay, in his paper, “Experiences in establishing a community artificial kidney program” published in the Transaction in 1966.
Another of Jim's major contributions to Northwest medicine was the establishment of the “common source system” for paying resident salaries. He had returned to the school part-time as the Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs for the UW School of Medicine in the early 1970's when the school was developing its four state medical education program, the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho) program. At that time, each hospital paid its own residents, which made the rotating of residents complicated and created gaps in their education, insurance coverage, the arrangements for vacations, etc. Jim brought the hospitals and school together, creating a low cost mechanism for paying everyone from a common account. Thereby he created the foundation for the University of Washington's multi-institutional, multi-state program for graduate medical education. The outcome of this effort was described in a paper in the Journal of Medical Education in 1988, “The regional graduate medical education program of the University of Washington.” A year later, Jim wrote, with the assistance of Nancy Rockafellar, the history of Washington medicine, Saddlebags to Scanners: The First 100 Years of Medicine in Washington State.
Jim served as President of the American College of Physicians from 1970–1971. His presidential address, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1971, was entitled “We are One” and emphasized the need to maintain unity in internal medicine and its sub-specialties for the sake of our patients. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1973 and served as the President of the American Clinical and Climatological Association (ACCA) from 1981–1982. His ACCA presidential address was entitled “A moment in history: the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.” He reviewed some interesting family history and a bit about his great-great uncle Alfred Haviland's book, Climate, Weather and Disease, written in 1855, presaging in some ways the beginning of ACCA. He went on then to talk about the nature of volcanoes, their eruptions and the social, medical and economic consequences of such events.
I had a great affection and appreciation for Jim. I recall when we worked together with Clem Finch in writing the history of the UW medical school and our efforts to create a lasting memorial to our first dean, Ed Turner that culminated in the dedication of a new Turner Conference Center. I recall how much he loved to sing, particularly in the choir of Seattle's Emmanuel Episcopal Church. I recall evenings at his home with the good friends and conversation, the mountains of books, his stories about his cars, particularly those about the white Chevrolet convertibles, and driving up to 100 Mile Post in British Columbia for family vacations. Later on there were the baked beans and brown bread suppers he had for friends after Marion was gone.
Jim was a farsighted and also a lucky person. He was particularly fortunate when he broke his hip at age 85, the event that led him to meet Mary Burden whom he married in 1997. His friends could easily see his spirits soar, and Mary's care and love made his latter years an extraordinary time for Jim. A letter that Mary wrote to friends after their 10th anniversary trip to the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho spoke about their caring relationship. The grand 95th birthday party at the Seattle Yacht Club in 2006 was a fitting climax of a life fully spent and extremely well-lived. Jim Haviland was a great contributor to medicine, medical education and to the spirit of the ACCA.