CLIFTON K. MEADOR has been practicing and teaching medicine for over sixty years. His revision of A Little Book of Doctors’ Rules, his fifteenth book, complements his published writings and his well-known satiric articles noting the clinical excesses of modern American medicine, including “The Art and Science of Nondisease,”published in the New England Journal of Medicine (1965), “The Last Well Person” also in the New England Journal of Medicine (1994), “A Lament for Invalids” in the Journal of the American Medical Association (1992) and “Clinical Man: Homo Clinicus,” published in Pharos (2011).

 

Fascinated by patients with symptoms of hidden origin and by patients who carried diagnoses of nonexistent diseases, he recorded his experiences in his books; Symptoms of Unknown Origin (2005), Puzzling Symptoms (2008), and Fascinomas –fascinating medical mysteries (2013).

 

His book True Medical Detective Stories (2012) was dedicated to Berton Roueche, Writer for the New Yorker and creator of the genre of medical detective stories.

 

A graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1955, Dr. Meador trained at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York and at Vanderbilt Medical School where he completed a NIH fellowship in Endocrinology. After practicing medicine, he joined the faculty of medicine at UAB, where he was Professor of Medicine and then Dean of the University of Alabama School of Medicine at UAB from 1968 to 1973. He returned to Vanderbilt and Saint Thomas Hospital, serving as chief of medicine and chief medical officer of Saint Thomas Hospital (then a major teaching hospital for Vanderbilt) from 1973 to 1998. He then served as the first Executive Director of the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance from 1999 to 2012. He is Professor of Medicine Emeritus at both Vanderbilt School of Medicine and Meharry Medical College.

 

Dr. Meador lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His wife Ann Cowden, is a well-known portrait artist.  He is the father of seven children, seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.