Cheves was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 25, 1924, and died in the same city only two weeks from his 96th birthday, on May 11, 2020.
In his earlier years, Cheves was an innovative builder of medical schools, programs, and people. He navigated complex issues in the United States and in Pakistan using unconventional ideas and charisma to attract outstanding faculty to join his efforts.
Cheves graduated from Yale and joined the U.S. Navy before attending Harvard Medical School where he met Isabella Carr Leighton (Polly). They were married while Polly was still in high school. After marriage, Polly attended and graduated from Vassar. Cheves completed his internal medicine residency at Bellevue Hospital and at Boston City Hospital. In 1955, after a tour with the Navy, he joined the faculty of the Medical School of South Carolina as an entry-level assistant professor. Just seven years later at the age of 37, he was named dean of the medical school.
In 1966, he assumed the position of associate director of the American Association of Medical Colleges in Chicago and became intensely interested in medical school curricula. In 1970, he was enticed to move to Houston to lead the development of the new University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Cheves was an effective faculty recruiter and set up the key administrative units as programs, not departments, preferring to build traditional vertical units with conventional divisions and later adding horizontal units that cut across the divisions. The first such horizontal program, known as the Program in Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology, was the school’s only program dealing with microbiology and infectious diseases. To this program, infectious disease faculty in both internal medicine and pediatrics were recruited along with PhD microbiologists. As an example of Cheves’ risk taking, I was recruited to fill this position in early 1973 as a full professor at age 33. What Cheves did was magical. Faculty joined him without tenure and with only the promise of medical school buildings, leased space in the medical center library, and teaching opportunities in a local hospital.
As dean, Cheves was supportive of all medical school programs, both basic and clinical sciences. The clinical program directors felt he was not sufficiently supportive of their efforts and convinced the newly appointed inaugural president of the University of Texas Health Science Center, Charles Berry, MD, to make an administrative change. In 1975, in an emotional meeting of the program directors, Cheves was released from his duties as dean. His comment to the senior faculty was “Firing me is not going to fix your concerns, but good luck!” He then told his colleagues that he would gladly return to his first love, medical education, through student and resident teaching. During this transition, Cheves was interviewed by Texas Medicine, the publication of the Texas Medical Association, about his experience as dean of the University of Texas Medical School. Cheves was quoted in the journal as saying, “When I came here, I didn’t really understand what I have now come to appreciate, and that is Texas is different!” Hours after the change in leadership, the faculty leaders, except for me, voted to change their units from programs to departments, so the medical school for many years had a series of departments and one program, a remaining vestige of Cheves’ original innovation.
In 1975, he retooled his clinical skills and taught internal medicine to students until 1979 when he signed on as a consultant to the Aga Kahn Foundation to help it build a medical school in Karachi, Pakistan. He and Polly then moved to Karachi in 1982, and he served as the founding dean of the Aga Kahn University Medical School. In 1985, Cheves and Polly returned to Houston. Cheves spent a year in Los Angeles as a fellow in geriatrics after seeing a need for this specialty in Houston. Upon returning to Houston, he continued teaching students, residents, and junior faculty and regularly received teaching awards. He accepted a one-year term as chairman of the Department of Medicine at Aga Khan in Karachi in 1991 when it had a serious need for leadership. Four years later, the University of Texas Medical School asked Cheves to serve as interim dean, allowing him to use the office he earlier designed but never occupied. He was later given the title of Dean Emeritus by the University of Texas. He formally retired from the University of Texas in 2012. The following year he and Polly moved back to Charleston where his story began.
Cheves loved duck hunting, fishing, and boating, and Houston was an ideal place for weekends where he could be found anywhere along the Texas Gulf coast.
The Texas Medical Center Library in Houston has a collection of Cheves’ papers (1924–2013).
Herbert L. DuPont, MD, MACP
