John Sergent, MD, who first came to Vanderbilt as an undergraduate student in 1959 and has left an indelible imprint on the University and Medical Center as a student, resident, faculty physician and leader every decade since, is retiring on April 30.
“Dr. Sergent’s long-standing dedication to the institution and its mission has shaped the education and careers of countless medical students and residents,” said Jane Freedman, MD, chair of the Department of Medicine, physician-in-chief of Vanderbilt University Hospital and the Gladys Parkinson Stahlman Professor of Cardiovascular Research.
She added: “He has been an influential and devoted faculty member, and his career at Vanderbilt has been marked by education, academic excellence and a commitment to social progress.”
As a student, fighting for integration
Sergent is a native of West Virginia. His mother was a teacher; his father was a bookkeeper for a small coal mine; and he was greatly influenced by the family physician who cared for his childhood ailments, including a case of pneumonia associated with measles. He gravitated toward being a doctor because, as he once said, “Nothing else seemed to offer the excitement and satisfaction of dealing with the sick.”
He received a Founders’ Scholarship to attend Vanderbilt. Along with future Tennessee governor and U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander and future bestselling writer Roy Blount Jr., he was a vocal advocate for the elimination of racial segregation on Vanderbilt’s campus. The Vanderbilt Board of Trust voted to integrate the university in 1962.
Sergent earned his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt in 1963 and his medical degree in 1966. At the beginning of medical school he was leaning toward a career in surgery, but when he rotated on internal medicine and came in contact with Vanderbilt professors David Rogers, Tom Brittingham, Roger Des Prez, Bill Salmon and Grant Liddle, among others, his future as an internist was, as he put it, sealed.
“The Department of Medicine stressed bedside teaching, and being at the bedside with physicians of that caliber was an intoxicating experience,” he said.
The ladder of years
There is a pattern that developed in Sergent’s professional life around this time. He would leave Vanderbilt for a while, come back, leave for a while, and make his way back — until he finally stuck for good.
Upon graduating from medical school in 1966, he was an intern and assistant resident at Johns Hopkins and, following that, was a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
His plan at the time was to follow David Rogers, MD, in an infectious diseases career, but the lab he was assigned to turned out to have changed from a traditional infectious diseases lab to one focused on immunology.
“I enjoyed the immunology so much that I completely changed my career plan and became a rheumatologist instead,” he said.
Sergent returned to VUMC as an assistant resident in Medicine in 1970 and was chief resident in Medicine in 1971-72.
He was a fellow and then assistant professor of Medicine at Cornell before returning to VUMC in 1975 and served as chief of the Division of Rheumatology until leaving in 1979 for private practice (although maintaining a clinical faculty appointment).
In 1988 John Oates, MD, chair of Medicine, asked him to rejoin the full-time faculty as chief of Medicine at Nashville’s Saint Thomas Hospital, which was an educational affiliate of Vanderbilt at the time. He had always enjoyed teaching but loved his new role of supervising the approximately 25 residents and students assigned to Saint Thomas at any one time.
Then, in 1995, “Pretty much out of nowhere, Roscoe (Ike) Robinson, MD, vice chancellor for Health Affairs, asked me to be Vanderbilt’s first Chief Medical Officer and try to organize our faculty into a cohesive group medical practice.”
Creating “the dominant medical group in this region”
The Vanderbilt Medical Group, as that group practice was named, was formed during a turbulent time in health care, when managed care organizations were altering the landscape. Bringing all VUMC clinicians together into a single entity, which could negotiate as a group with insurance companies, was vital to the organization’s survival.
“I personally believe that we have some great strengths at Vanderbilt, and one of our strengths is that if we band together as a single medical group, we could be and should be the dominant medical group in this entire region,” he said at the time, and thanks to his endless hard work and the work of his successors at VMG, that vision of an integrated, united medical group has come to pass.
Sergent became one of the best-known physicians in Nashville when, in 1992, he was engaged by The Tennessean to contribute an op-ed column, “Healing Words.” He and obstetrician Frank Boehm, MD, wound up alternating this weekly column for 18 years, and both men published books that were compilations of the columns.
His skill as a clinician who is beloved by patients and who relates to patients at a human level was evident in his columns.
“I love to write about the human side of medicine,” he said. “It’s good if we can present what we do in a human light since so often medicine is reduced to a bunch of statistics.”
The year he began writing the column was also the year he began serving as national president of the American College of Rheumatology, the capstone of many roles he had with that organization over his years of practice. He also served leadership roles in the American Board of Internal Medicine and the International League of Associations for Rheumatology. He was also editor or co-editor of several rheumatology textbooks and other publications.
“John Sergent has had a major impact on VUMC in so many capacities over the past 6-7 decades,” said C. Wright Pinson, MBA, MD, Deputy CEO and Chief Health System Officer. ” I experienced him first as a true clinical ‘giant’ and teacher in the 1970s. He stood out and was highly respected at that time. I worked with John in the 1990s when he organized the Vanderbilt Medical Group which has had a major business impact on this institution. The practice standards he promulgated have had long lasting favorable benefits for our patients. He has continued to have a huge impact in teaching and training for the past 20 years. My hat is off to John for such a spectacular run.”
In 2003, Sergent stepped down as Chief Medical Officer of the VMG and senior associate dean for Clinical Affairs to become vice chair for education and program director for the residency training program in the Department of Medicine, allowing him to focus on teaching, which had always been one of his passions.
Over the years he has received several student and resident teaching awards and one of the faculty teaching awards is named for him.
“It’s hard to describe the pleasure of watching a class of green interns come in so full of anxiety and doubt, and then see them mature into competent, sophisticated doctors,” he said.
The road ahead
There’s an important part of Sergent’s Vanderbilt experience that hasn’t been mentioned yet, and it’s the most important part.
Vanderbilt was also where he met his wife, Carole. They married in 1963, and as he pursued his career in medicine, she ran a successful event management business and made use of her education in fine arts to become a volunteer leader at the Nashville Symphony, Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, and other community organizations.
More recently, she has worked with refugee families from Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Their life has been a partnership, and in retirement, that partnership will continue.
The Sergents are looking forward to a monthlong trip to France and England and to spending more time with their two daughters and sons-in-law, Ellen and Jon Rickert and Katie and Dave Cour, as well as their four grandchildren, Kathryn and Emmaline Rickert and Henry and Romy Cour. They range in age from 20 to 25, and John and Carole are very proud of the young adults they have become.
His legacy at Vanderbilt will continue far into the future. Sergent said that he would never have been able to attend Vanderbilt without scholarships, and he is especially pleased that he is permanently endowing a need-based scholarship to Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
