Clifton K. Meador graduated from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1955, sharing the Founders’ Medal for top scholastic honors with a classmate. He spent his internship and first year of residency in medicine under Dr. Robert F. Loeb at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. After two years in the U.S. Army medical corps, he returned to Vanderbilt to complete his residency in medicine under Dr. David Rogers and to complete an N.I.H. fellowship in endocrinology under Dr. Grant Liddle. He returned to his native state and practiced medicine in Selma, Alabama, with the physician who in 1931 delivered him into life.

Dr. Tinsley Harrison, then outgoing chairman of medicine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, recruited him to the faculty. Dr. Meador directed the N.I.H. Clinical Research Center at the university for six years, advanced to professor of medicine and served as dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham from 1968 to 1973.

In 1973 Dr. Meador returned to Vanderbilt to join the full-time faculty as professor of medicine and to establish the Vanderbilt teaching service in medicine at Saint Thomas Hospital. Dr. Meador also served as chief medical officer of the hospital until 1998, when he became the executive director of the newly formed Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance. He now is professor of medicine at both medical schools and continues to direct the programs of the alliance.

Dr. Meador has published extensively in the medical literature; he is perhaps best known for “The Art and Science of Nondisease” and “The Last Well Person,” both published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and “A Lament for Invalids,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The articles are satiric treatments of the excesses of medical practice. He is the author of six books, including the best-selling medical book, A Little Book of Doctors’ Rules.