Dr. Francis P. Chinard, physician, researcher, humanist, and a longtime seasonal resident of West Tisbury, died Jan. 5 at Hackensack UMC Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J. He was 96.
Francis Pierre Chinard was born on June 30, 1918, in Berkeley, Calif., to Gilbert and Emma Blanchard Chinard, both scholars and French professors. Dr. Chinard attended Johns Hopkins University from 1924 to 1936 and received his A.B. degree from University of California Berkeley in 1937 and then his medical degree from Hopkins in 1941. An intern and resident at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, his residency was interrupted by his entry into active military service in 1942. Francis joined the 8th Air Force Medical Corps, attained the rank of major, and served as an aviation physiologist and later as director of physiology. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his high altitude research to improve the safety and performance of oxygen masks for pilots and his research into hypothermia and decompression.
It was while in the Air Force that he met his wife-to-be, Josephine L. Wise from Folkstone, England, who was serving with the British Air Ministry, inspecting aviation gun sites at British factories. He and Josephine, who in time would become an artist and poet, celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary on Dec. 18.
It was also in the 8th Air Force that Francis met Dr. Milton Mazer. The friendship was immediate, and the night he met wife-to-be, he went back to the barracks where he and Milton were assigned and told him “Milton, I think this is the one.” Francis and Milton and their families became close, lifelong friends and Music street neighbors in West Tisbury.
In 1959, Francis and Josephine (Jo) were looking for a place to spend the month of August with their family. Jo had heard that the Vineyard looked like the England she had grown up in — sheep grazing, rolling hills, thriving fishing villages by the sea. They discovered that old friends Dr. Milton and Virginia Mazer had just decided to move to the Vineyard full time.
Their first few Island summers, the Chinards rented from Phyllis Alley and then Nancy Whiting, before deciding to have a house of their own built off Music street on a lot that they bought from Nancy. At that time, the property, on a hill on today’s Tiasquam Road, had sweeping views of Look’s Pond, old Grange Hall and the school that is now the town hall. They asked the late Otis Burt, whose own house was on the road, to build their house for them, and, later, another neighbor, Alan Miller, who built the Black Dog, to add to it. For the next 55 years, the Chinards happily spent each August in West Tisbury.
Those were quieter times on the Vineyard. There were daily treks for picnics at Lambert’s Cove, Menemsha or Lucy Vincent Beach, no beach stickers needed. And there was a “moveable feast” that occurred almost daily, where all generations gathered for dinner and drinks at the Mazers, or at the home of Stanley and Polly Murphy, Tom and Helen Maley, Russell and Marianne Hoxsie, Ivan and Virginia Rosenthal, Mark and Irene Ravitch. Bob and Maggie Schwartz, Dianthe and Robert Eisendrath and Nancy Whiting or the Chinards. There were also more serious gatherings for political, social or environmental causes.
Nature-lover that he was, Francis delighted, too, in helping his children pick blueberries for pancakes from the woods around the family house. An expert mushroom hunter, he taught his youngsters and his Vineyard friends what a safe-to-eat chicken of the woods mushroom looked like. And when any were found, he happily sautéed them the French way, in butter, and served them with crunchy French bread from Humphrey’s Bakery that was then in North Tisbury. Francis built a telescope to see the stars and, on clear nights, would point out the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn to his children, Suzanne and Jeanne and Marc. On starry nights, with still no light pollution in the Vineyard sky, West Tisbury neighbors would come to look as well.
Racing on Menemsha Pond with Milton Mazer in Milton’s sloop, the Lark, was another Vineyard passion for Francis. And there were treasured quiet times, when Francis Chinard, an inveterate reader, would take a French novel or a Greek classic or a volume of history from the pile of books that was always on his bedside table, and happily delve into one of them. Music often emanated from the Chinard house, too. As a young man, Francis had seriously studied the piano. Sometimes it was a Rachmaninoff record that was playing, or it might be Thelonious Monk or Tom Lehrer.
Professionally, between 1946 and 1968, Dr. Chinard held academic and hospital appointments at the Rockefeller University, where he was named a Markel Scholar in 1949, as well as at the schools of medicine at Johns Hopkins, McGill and NYU.
He served on the New Jersey Medical School faculty from 1968, when he was recruited as Chair of Medicine, until his retirement in 1997, at which time he was named Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Research Medicine and Physiology for the school.
As well as teaching medicine, his research was supported by generous grants for his clinical studies in renal and pulmonary physiology, cellular transport mechanisms, free radicals and more. He authored over 130 publications and served on several editorial boards. Among the numerous awards and recognition of his work, he received the Eugene Landis Award of the Microcirculatory Society in 1978 and the Osler Humanitarian Award in 1991. He was a member of the Century Club of New York.
Francis Chinard was nearly as renowned among family, friends and colleagues for his devotion to books and reading as he was for his medical expertise. In 2006, on his 88th birthday, the George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry dedicated the Francis P. Chinard Humanities Collection to him, at his direction made up of works of history, literature and philosophy.
Dr. Chinard’s strongly held belief was that “medicine functions best as an interaction between a physician and a patient and less completely as an interaction between physicians and diseases. This singularity serves to distinguish medicine from other sciences — the human element cannot be ignored. For that reason, medicine has deep roots in its history and in the cultures and civilizations, which have fostered its development. Medicine does not exist in a void. Without its historical and social roots, medicine would be lost as a human endeavor.”
But through all of his distinguished service, the Vineyard was always there.
“The Vineyard,” his daughters Jeanne recalled, “was our father’s sanctuary, his journey back to the wonders of the natural world, his reconnection with his closest friends. I think he will always be on the Island, sitting on the beach at Menemsha, surrounded by friends and family, with a cap and a pipe and, of course, reading a good book.”
He is survived by his wife Josephine, of Montclair; and his children, Suzanne and Jeanne of New York, and Marc of Portland, Ore.; his daughter in law Philippa Kaplan of Portland; and his grandchildren, Kyla Kaplan-Chinard of Portland, and Jac F. Mullen of New York.
Contributions in his memory may be made to Doctors Without Borders or Martha’s Vineyard Community Services.
