ROBERT PAUL DAVIS [JULY 3, 1926 - FEBRUARY 14, 2024]
Robert Paul Davis, an eminent nephrologist and Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Brown
University, died at age 97 on February 14, 2024. at The Miriam Hospital in Providence, RI, an
institution he once led as Physician in Chief. The cause of death was renal failure brought on by
pneumonia. He leaves behind his wife of 70 years, Ruby; three children, Ned, John, and
Elizabeth; and two grandchildren, Isaac and Anton Stella.
A resident of Providence since 1967, Bob Davis was born on July 3, 1926, the middle of three
sons to Samuel Davis and Sarah Lemberg, East-European Jewish immigrants who had settled
in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Bob looked back on his early education and experiences in
Boston with great fondness. He was especially grateful for the public high school education he
received at The Boston Latin School, where he studied Latin and Ancient Greek – languages he
still recalled with great fluency late in life along with the Hebrew he had learned as a child. Bob
entered Harvard College in 1942 at the age of 16. His undergraduate years were interrupted by
his service in the US Navy as a gunnery officer on the USS Los Angeles, a heavy cruiser which
plied the Chinese coast from Hong Kong to Qingdao during World War II.
After college, Bob entered Harvard Medical School. In 1952, while Chief Resident in Internal
Medicine at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, he was elected to the Society of Fellows
at Harvard and conducted pioneering research on cell transport in the human kidney in the
chemistry laboratory of George Kistiakowski, a member of the Manhattan Project and a
science advisor to President Eisenhower.
It was also during this time that Bob met and married Ruby Mae Black of Brooklyn, New York
– then a student at Simmons College. Ruby and Bob had their first child, Ned, in 1954 and their
second, John, in 1957, the latter born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Bob was an
Assistant Professor of Medicine at UNC. Bob really enjoyed his professional life at UNC, but
frequent firsthand encounters with the flagrant racism of the still-segregated Jim Crow South
compelled the family to move to New York three years later. Bob served from 1959 to 1967 as
Associate Professor of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. From 1965
to 1966, he took a sabbatical as a visiting scientist at the Institute for Biological Chemistry at
the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Vacations that year were spent touring Western and
Northern Europe in a newly-purchased, chocolate brown Mercedes 220S that eventually
followed the family to Providence.
In 1967, Bob was recruited as Physician-in-Chief of the Miriam Hospital in Providence, a post
he held until 1974. During his tenure, Bob significantly bolstered Miriam’s profile as a research
institution and its connection to the burgeoning Brown Medical School. While at Miriam, he
was the driving force behind the construction of a building dedicated entirely to laboratory
research, and led the team that performed the first kidney transplant conducted in the state of
Rhode Island. Despite his extensive administrative and research responsibilities at Miriam, he
continued to teach medical students and undergraduates at Brown, and established, with
fellow faculty members in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Departments, one of the
country’s first academic programs in Biomedical Ethics. From 1974 to 1979, he served as
Director of Renal and Metabolic Diseases at Miriam, during which time he worked to integrate
regional and state organ banks and further promote organ transplantation in Rhode Island. In
the 1980s, Bob gradually shifted his attention away from academia toward private practice.
Bob spent the last three decades of his life pursuing scholarly and collecting interests he had
maintained since childhood. In the early 1990s, he founded a rare bookstore, Gadshill,
devoted to 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature, culture, and science.
Concurrently, he began amassing a uniquely comprehensive archive of books and ephemera
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related to Charles Dickens’ unfinished last novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” and to the
much-publicized Webster/Parkman murder trial of a Harvard Medical School professor that had
inspired Dickens’ writing of the book. Bob later exhibited his collection and lectured on Dickens
at the Grolier Club in New York and the Club of Odd Volumes in Boston. For over twenty years
and well into his 90s, he attended the annual Dickens conference at The University of California
Santa Cruz.
Bob revelled in the accomplishments of his family. His wife Ruby was a respected interior
designer and antiques dealer. His daughter Elizabeth, born in 1968, became a physician and
now serves as an addiction specialist at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health
Alliance. Ned is an Associate Professor of Chinese History at The University of Hawaii (Manoa),
and John is a concert pianist based in Brooklyn, New York.
Despite his teetotaling tendencies, Bob was a lifelong wine enthusiast. He had served as
unofficial “sommelier” for the weekly dinners held at Harvard’s Society of Fellows back in the
1950s, and he led a champagne-tasting and a poetry reading with his fellow residents at Laurel
Mead in Providence in the weeks before his death.
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