Herbert Leighton wanted one thing for his sons when they grew up—to become medical doctors.

He would have been a physician himself, but Mr. Leighton had too many ailments and became a funeral director in the rural town of Oakland, Md.

But it was through his gentle urging that his sons became doctors. “He encouraged us,” says Richard F. Leighton, ’55, a cardiologist. “He was always very supportive.” Dr. Leighton’s older brother, Herbert, became a family practitioner after graduating from Maryland in 1953.

In May, Richard received the 2005 Honor Award & Gold Key. The award recognizes graduates for outstanding contributions to medicine and distinguished service to mankind. “Many of my former professors were recipients of the award. The association awards just one of these a year; so this is quite an honor,” Dr. Leighton says.

At 74 years of age, Dr. Leighton shows few signs of slowing down. He is professor of medicine at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia, and a faculty physician at Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah.
Two afternoons a week at Memorial he teaches third-year medical students how to read electrocardiograms and selects patients for them to observe. He also chairs two institutional review committees at the hospital, and twice a year puts on conferences for the students and residents dealing with current medical topics.

More recently, he began serving as a research consultant with another physician in Savannah on a monthly Internet-based journal club for InterventUSA. It offers programs nationwide to help people prevent heart attacks and stroke. “It has been a very effective program,” says Dr. Leighton. “A lot of companies are providing incentives for people to enroll in the program.”

Dr. Leighton makes certain that the “mentors” or health professionals who work with Intervent’s enrollees are current on the latest literature and information on heart attack and stroke. He regularly e-mails articles to the mentors. “Heart disease is still the number one killer of people in this country,” says Dr. Leighton, who received a stent nine years ago. “Tremendous progress has been made in both the diagnostic and therapeutic areas. As a result, people are living longer, and the quality of life is better.”

Dr. Leighton experiments with food, trying to make it flavorful yet healthy. Twenty years ago he took a sabbatical in Paris and went to cooking school. About once a month he gets together with a group of men who have started a gourmet club in Savannah where he lives with wife Frances. He has several signature dishes and enjoys whipping up fish and veal dinners.

“In my cooking I have to maintain my image as a cardiologist,” he says. “I have tried to get some of the flavors of the traditional French cooking, but I keep modifying them to ensure they’re more low fat. I try to dilute foods with substitutes, but not to the point where that same delicious taste is lost.”

cardiology has been his passion for more than 50 years. It wasn’t a book or a favorite physician that got him interested, but his father. The elder Leighton suffered from coronary disease and had a series of heart attacks while Richard was in medical school. “I got interested in what was happening to him,” he says.

After graduating from medical school in 1955, Dr. Leighton joined the U.S. Navy and became a flight surgeon. One course he liked was electrocardiography. “I thought that was fascinating,” he says. “I just thought I wanted to know more about heart disease.”
“Early on, patients with heart disease were treated with benign neglect,” Dr. Leighton says. “They were kept in a dark room and just rested. Patients were not monitored. It was completely different from all of the attention they now receive.”

Dr. Leighton got out of the Navy in 1958, and did his residency at Ohio State University Hospitals, but he had six months to kill before leaving for Columbus, Ohio. So, he joined his brother’s large practice in Western Maryland. He did everything from delivering babies to making house calls. “It was interesting, but after six months I was glad to move on,” he says.

Dr. Leighton rose through the ranks at Ohio State, becoming director of the coronary care unit at Ohio State University Hospitals in 1968. In 1974, he was named professor of medicine and the first chief of cardiology at the Medical College of Ohio (MCO) in Toledo.

When he started at MCO, there was one full-time and one part-time cardiologist. He is credited with building the coronary care unit and the cardiac catheterization lab. He also got MCO started on echocardiograms and nuclear imaging of the heart. When he left the position 16 years later, the college had 10 full-time cardiologists. “It was an opportunity to really build a cardiology unit from the ground floor,” Dr. Leighton says. “We got all of those things started.”

Two years before stepping down as chief of cardiology, Dr. Leighton was named vice chairman of the department of medicine. In 1990, he became vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college, a position he held through 1996. In 1997, he left the Medical College of Ohio for Savannah.

His father never saw Dr. Leighton’s career take off because he died from cancer in 1967, while his son was still at Ohio State. “It was tough at the end when he developed cancer,” Dr. Leighton says. But there is no doubt that his father would have been proud.