San Diego, Calif.
David Evans Williams IV, MD, an enthusiastic lover of life, died in San Diego, Calif., on Sept. 4, 2021, at UCSD Medical Center – Hillcrest following a massive stroke. He was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 14, 1940. His father, David Evans Williams III, was a coal company executive and banker. His mother, Mary Starr Williams (later Mary Starr Justice), known in the family as “Starr Wars,” was a housewife.
Dave was educated at St. Georges School, Stanford University and Colby College. Inspired and mentored by his father-in-law, Dr. Hubert A. Royster Jr (who was also his pediatrician), he matriculated to Thomas Jefferson Medical School, graduating in 1967. After medical residency at the Maine Medical Center, Portland, he joined the Navy and served two years as the medical officer for a destroyer squadron home-ported in San Diego. He went on to complete a two-year fellowship in cardiology at the University of Vermont, and then returned to San Diego for a fellowship in pediatric cardiology.
He joined Scripps Clinic, La Jolla, Calif., in 1975 and remained there for 35 years until retiring in 2010. He believed that an essential aim of medicine was to keep patients well rather than wait to attend to illnesses that could have been prevented by early intervention. With that in mind, he was one of the founders of Scripps’s Executive Health, a program designed to fulfill that goal. Executive Health did not replace the primary care doctor, but instead offered a program that pulled together disparate medical experts for a comprehensive understanding of the patient that included not only a physical exam, but also recommendations regarding nutrition, exercise and stress reduction in an efficient, one-day program.
Dave was a fun-loving, gregarious man who extended an informal medical practice far beyond Scripps. He was a phone call away to friends and family, ready to answer any medical question, happy to consult on any problem, and often to reassure that the problem that worried a friend would be cured “by the tincture of time.” He was a man who could not buy a pound of hamburger or order a meal in a restaurant without engaging whoever waited on him in a conversation, asking about family, checking on health and well-being. While buying fish one day, he asked the man weighing the order how he was feeling. “Fine, Doc,” the man replied. “But I’ve got a kind of sharp pain in my chest.” A quick phone call by Dave, and the man was scheduled for a chest X-ray that revealed a piece of shrapnel he had caught in the Korean War had migrated from the wound site to his heart. After that save, “Doc” Williams was the first person to get a call when the Dungeness crab appeared at the store.
At the conclusion of a commencement address he gave to a graduating class at St. George’s School on pursuing a career in medicine, he said, “In the practice of medicine, there is a joy — a joy which somehow weathers every storm, a joy which will endure all reckonings.” But it was a prediction that faltered: He married Martha (Molly) Royster in 1963 in Blue Hill, their beloved town on the coast to which they returned nearly every year. Molly was the anchor in his life, his shelter and his great love. When she died in 2006, the joy went out of his life, and he waited out the last years impatient to join her.
He was also predeceased by his parents and his sister, Ann Starr Widman. He is survived by his daughter Holly Williams Kennedy and her husband, John; by his son, David A. Williams, and his wife, Cathleen, and their children, Charles, Clare and Tim; by his niece Springer Huseby and her husband, Bob, and their children Brin and Ana; by his nephew Ted Heyd and his wife, Heather, and their son Teegen; by his half-sisters Maida Broudo, her husband, Bob, Marion Bennett, her husband, Bruce, and Christina Brabazon and her husband, John; by his sister-in-law Virginia (Dindy) Royster, her son Andy Wanning and his wife, Brenna Cohen, and her daughter Molly Cooper, her husband, Daniel, and their daughter Dinah.
Donations in Dave’s memory may be made to The Blue Hill Fire Company, P.O. Box 1167, and Peninsula Ambulance Corps, P.O. Box 834, Blue Hill, ME 04614. There will be a memorial gathering in August 2022.