VCU news

By Erin Lucero
Office of Development, School of Medicine

For Robert J. Feezor, M.D., serving as the H.M. Lee Lecturer is not only a professional honor.

“It’s the highest personal privilege,” he said.

To explain, Feezor points to three pivotal years: 1999, when he earned his medical degree from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, where H.M. Lee, M.D., taught; 1973, when he was born in West Hospital; and 1964, when his father, Bill Feezor, became the 40th kidney transplant patient of Lee and David Hume, M.D., the pioneering surgeons for whom the Hume-Lee Transplant Center is named.

When Feezor was invited to serve as the H. M. Lee Lecturer, it was a special moment. “I’m not an overly emotional person, but when I heard from [vascular surgery chair] Mark Levy,” he pauses for the right word, “it means a lot.”

“I was so impressed that this very famous surgeon would make the time for a young medical student,” Feezor said. “It was the first time I’d seen you could be very accomplished and also humanistic. What I saw in Dr. Lee and other faculty members solidified my decision to go into academic medicine.”

Feezor’s father became one of Lee and Hume’s longest-living kidney recipients, and his life would be entwined with MCV in big ways and small. From 1967–1976, he worked at MCV as a hospital administrator, a stint that sadly included being the administrator on duty when word arrived that the private plane Hume was flying had crashed in California. “It was the hardest day of my life,” Bill Feezor told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Robert Feezor is now an assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Vascular Surgery and Endovascular Therapy at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville. He also serves as program director for the fellowship program in vascular surgery. He’s passionate about teaching students and residents. He’s good at it, too — in 2005, he was awarded the national Resident Award for Exemplary Teaching by the American College of Surgeons.

Those teaching skills were on display at the Lee Lecture on March 26 when Feezor chose as his topic the current management of type B aortic dissections. The clinical issue spurred a lively discussion at the end of his presentation. 

Following his death in 2013, Hyung Mo “H.M.” Lee’s family, friends and colleagues made gifts in his memory to create the memorial lecture that bears his name. The focus of the annual lecture alternates between the Divisions of Transplant Surgery and Vascular Surgery. 

The elder Feezor passed away in 2006, and last month marked nine years since his death — which came 42 years after his lifesaving transplant.

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