Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings January 2014, Volume 27, Number 1 | Page 55

I came to Baylor at the urging of a former oncology fellow whom
I trained with, Leon Dragon. To be honest, I did not think that
I would be interested in Baylor and Texas. My wife and I came
as a favor to Leon, and we were in need of a trip and a little
time away from our three children. A trip to Baylor fit the bill.
There were a number of people that impressed me on my trip to
BUMC, but Marvin was especially influential in changing my
interest in Baylor from casual to definite. There were a number
of qualities of Marvin that were immediately evident to me and
appealed to me—honesty, reliability, humor, a true interest in
other people, empathy for and care of his patients, scholarship,
a love of medicine and especially the teaching of medicine. This
early admiration has turned into a deep friendship. Years later, I
realized that many of these qualities came from his admiration
of William Osler. Osler’s life was not a casual interest of Marvin
but a rule to live by. We often kidded him about Osler, but we
all knew that he was dead serious about his admiration for Osler
as a man and as a physician to be emulated.
In my early years with Marvin, I was impressed with how
interested he was in the young members of the cancer center.
He was interested in helping people reach their full potential.
He gave the young as well as the older members their head
and always tried to have everyone develop an interesting and
rewarding career. If he had favorites, they were not obvious.
He wanted to have everyone enjoy their work, and work well
together to provide the best care for their patients, move the
field of medicine ahead, and teach those coming up behind
them in medicine.
Although medicine was in many ways Marvin’s life, it was
not the only thing of his life. He loved the symphony and
he loved collecting microscopes and books. Although one
could argue that his collection of microscopes was just an
extension of medicine, I think it was much more than that.
To me, although Marvin was an excellent oncologist, his
real love was hematology. It was impossible for you to rotate
with him and not understand that many of the mysteries of
medicine could be demystified by microscopy, especially of
the blood smear. I believe this is what led to his exhaustive
collection of historic microscopes. His collection was so large
that it is housed in three separate areas, the Sammons Cancer
Center, the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research, and
his home. Like Osler, Marvin loved books and he avidly
collected them. He was especially interested in old medical
books. It was a great honor to be gifted a book by Marvin
from his collection.
Another very evident quality of Marvin is his humanism.
This applied to his approach to medicine, but also to every
aspect of his life. To Marvin, a patient was first and foremost a person. He believed that the humanistic practice of
medicine was equally as important as the scientific practice
of medicine. He believed that the patient had to be treated
as you would treat a friend, not a subject. He taught many
physicians, faculty included, the value of talking to the patient and examining the patient and the folly of relying on
impersonal labs and images alone. In his career, he cared for

January 2014

many physicians and their families—a true testament to the
trust that medically savvy people placed in him. He was a
doctor’s doctor.
I have not done justice to Marvin with this very brief description of what he means to me. This testimonial is much
too short to do him justice. Suffice it to say that Baylor was
fortunate to have selected Marvin as its first director of the Sammons Cancer Center. He had the true interest of Baylor’s cancer
center at heart and led the cancer center through its formative
years to become an outstanding center. He surrounded himself
with an interesting and talented group of faculty. He personally
furthered the careers of countless staff and faculty. He lovingly
educated numerous medical students, medicine residents, and
oncology fellows. Most importantly he is a genuine and nice
person who is worthy of your trust. I have learned a lot about
medicine and life from Marvin. I am sorry to see him retire. I
am especially sorry not to have him in the office next to me,
where I can just drop in to seek his sage advice. He is more than
a colleague to me. He is a true friend.
ALAN M. MILLER, MD, PHD
In the 1991 Cancer Center Annual Report, Dr. Marvin
Stone wrote:
Three simple words summarize our mission and goals at the
Baylor Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center: help, hope, and
healing. We share these concepts with each of the more than
2000 new patients we serve each year through a combination
of sophisticated equipment and technology and straight-fromthe-heart compassion. This synthesis of “high-tech and hightouch” forms the nucleus upon which the Sammons Cancer
Center was built and continues to grow.

Aside from the patient number, all of these words are applicable and accurate today. The foundation that was established
in 1976 and the years to follow is what our cancer center with
its all of its clinical, research, and education programs is built
on today. Dr. Stone’s career in medicine has seen dramatic
and exciting changes in the way we treat cancers and blood
disorders.
They say if you can’t be born a Texan, get here as soon as possible and you will never leave. Well, it took Dr. Stone a while to
get here, but he travelled through some of the most prestigious
institutions along the way: the Ohio State University for undergraduate; the University of Chicago for medical school; Barnes
Hospital in St. Louis for internship and residency; the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda for a research fellowship, where
he began his work on Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia; and
then finally to Texas.
He first came to Dallas in 1968 to be a senior resident in
medicine at Parkland. It is fun to speculate whether his career
was influenced by the lead article in Blood on January 1 of that
year: “Melphalan therapy for multiple myeloma” by Alexanian
and colleagues. In 1976 he was lured across town to Baylor
to become the first director of the cancer center and chief of
oncology. At that time the ɔ