August 17, 1913–November 24, 2001

BY JUDAH FOLKMAN

FRANCIS DANIELS MOORE, one of the world’s great surgeon-scientists, died on November 24, 2001, at the age of 88. He was born in Evanston, Illinois, and graduated from the North Shore Country Day School. He graduated from Harvard College with the A.B. degree cum laude in anthropology. He entered Harvard Medical School and received the M.D. degree cum laude. Soon after he had completed his years of surgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and had become its chief resident in surgery in 1942, he began his pioneering work on the metabolic response to surgery. He became a postgraduate National Research Council fellow in isotope physics and its applications (under Joseph C. Aub). This new field would become his life’s work. He would continue to pursue it at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where he arrived in 1948 to become its Surgeon-in-Chief. At the age of 34 he was Harvard Medical School’s Moseley Professor of Surgery, the youngest chairman of surgery in Harvard’s history.

Francis Moore’s studies, carried out between the physiology laboratory and the patient’s bedside, culminated in two classic books: Metabolic Response to Surgery with M. Ball (1949) and Metabolic Care of the Surgical Patient (1959). These masterpieces changed the thinking of surgeons