Content area
Full Text
Past President of A.S.P.E.N.
C. Richard "Dick" Fleming was born in 1943 and was educated exclusively in North Carolina, having attended Durham High School, the University of North Carolina, and the University of North Carolina Medical School, receiving an MD degree in 1969. With aspirations toward academic medicine, he was accepted into a medicine internship at the Shands Teaching Hospital at the University of Florida in 1969. While an intern he learned of a potential residency opening at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he began his internal medicine residency in 1970. Remarkably, he would remain on the Mayo clinical staff for the next 27 years.
Dick was fascinated by the intricacies of the gastrointestinal tract and completed a fellowship in gastroenterology from 1972 through 1974. During that time he became very interested in the potential role of nutrition as an adjuvant therapy for gastrointestinal illnesses. It was indeed serendipitous that Dick's interest in nutrition paralleled the rapid changes occurring in clinical nutrition, such as the discovery and availability of total parenteral nutrition. He was further stimulated to acquire training in clinical nutrition through the influence of Hugh Butt, the former chairman of gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic, who strongly encouraged him to couple nutrition with gastroenterology. Dr Butt had a longstanding interest in nutrition and was the first to show that the coagulopathy of cholestatic liver disease was reversible with vitamin K and bile salts. In recognition that there was a need for increased nutritional expertise in the Department of Gastroenterology at Mayo, Dick was made a Mayo Foundation Scholar in Nutrition and encouraged to attend the University of California at Davis, where he received an MS degree in Nutrition in 1975. He returned to join the staff at Mayo as an instructor in Medicine in 1975 and rapidly matriculated through the academic ranks to become a Professor of Medicine in 1987 and subsequently the David Murdock Professor of Nutrition Science at the Mayo Medical School.
Dick yearned to return to the warmer weather of his childhood and recognizing the potential of Mayo's new satellite hospital established in Jacksonville, Florida, and was appointed to the Chair of the Department of Gastroenterology there in 1987....