Caring For Patients and Physicians
Hugh Taylor ’69 named President of the Massachusetts Medical Society
BY KRISTIN DUISBERG
It was in a biology class taught by Nobel Prize-winning scientist George Wald that Hugh Taylor ’69, then a freshman at Harvard, decided he wanted to go into medicine, and during his first year at Harvard Medical School that he settled on practicing primary care. “Part of that was the idea of working in the community as opposed to in a hospital or specialty center,” Taylor explains. “I decided it was more my style of work, drawing on the concepts of social medicine and population health. That really felt to me like the way I could best contribute to the community.”
Four and a half decades into his medical career, Taylor, who has practiced as a family physician on Boston’s North Shore since 1982, has found yet another way to contribute to the community: In May, he was named president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. The 243-year-old organization represents the state’s 25,000 physicians and medical students and owns the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the United States.
While Taylor still sees patients one or two days a week, as head of the state’s largest physician-led organization, the balance of his work has shifted toward advocating for both physicians and their patients — different groups with very similar concerns. “The biggest issues for patients right now are tied to the question of access to care,” he says. “Patients are having trouble finding doctors — there just aren’t enough of us around. And on the doctor side, we are trying to address the phenomenon of burnout, which includes any number of factors that make physicians decide they want to give up medicine and go do something else.”
While there are no easy answers, and there are limits to what Taylor can achieve over the course of his yearlong appointment, he sees health care policy as a powerful platform for change, whether that means working on legislation to address how primary care is paid for in the state; taking on insurance company practices that create administrative burdens for doctors and prevent patients from getting timely care; or pushing back on employers who are overly prescriptive regarding how many patients doctors see in a day, how long they spend with each patient, what diagnoses they can make and what treatments they can prescribe. “Those are some of the factors that make it just less fun to practice,” he says. “So one of our goals is always to try to put the joy back into medical practice.’
Taylor’s own joy in medicine comes in part from continuing to care for some of the same patients that he saw when he established his Hamilton, Massachusetts, practice four decades ago, as well as from the sheer variety of the work. “In primary care family medicine,” he says, “we take care of the problems that affect people most — common infections, minor surgery … we’re trained in dermatology and psychiatry, and we really do take care of all ages.” The patients he cares for range in age from newborn to centenarian.
There’s a parallel in Taylor’s enjoyment of the diversity of his work to what he recalls most fondly about his time at SPS. Raised in Connecticut, it was a family expectation that he’d attend boarding school (his grandfather Hugh MacColl, after whom he was named, was a member of the Form of 1903); St. Paul’s, he says, gave him the opportunity to try out activities including crew and theater that he wouldn’t have elsewhere. Roles that included serving as captain of the cross country team and president of the Library Association and the mathematics club were the first tastes of leadership experience that he drew on as a young physician establishing his own practice and still taps into today.
Next year, Taylor will become the immediate past president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, a position that will keep him involved in physician and patient advocacy, but in a somewhat less public-facing fashion. After that, he says, he might get around to retiring. “A number of my colleagues have told me that retirement’s pretty good,” he says. “So I may actually try it out.”