John Aubrey Feagin

West Point, 1955

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by John J Crawford on December 14, 2021:

It's difficult to fully express how grateful I am for everything that John Feagin means to me now and did for me in his lifetime. After I graduated from USMA and medical school, I wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon, but I had not yet heard of Dr. Feagin. I was trying (and failing) to convince the Army that I should be given a deferral in order to train at one of the "top" Orthopaedic residencies in the country when a friend arranged for me to interview at Duke. One of my interviews that day was with Dr. Feagin. Strangely, the interview occurred while he was walking from his office to the racquetball court to play at lunch and we chatted as we speedwalked across the Duke campus. It is one of the most remarkable and memorable experiences of my life because it seemed chaotic, frenzied, unplanned, and the conversation had little to do with my motivations--only what I wanted to achieve and who held the decision-making power to make it happen. It seemed that he knew every orthopaedic surgeon in the country, and every doctor in the Army. He let me know that he would put the power of the Long Gray Line to work for me, and sure enough all of the doubters and naysayers in my life suddenly evaporated as the path was paved for me to train at Duke. Dr. Feagin had innumerable superlative qualities, but the one that sticks with me the most is that he was the original master of networking, long before the internet and LinkedIn existed. He knew and liked everyone, and everyone knew and liked, and trusted, him. During my residency, Dr. Feagin continued to look after me and provide valuable advice whenever requested. He even asked me to scrub in and assist him when he was performing shoulder surgery on the most famous living General in the Army (USMA Class of 1956) and he was remarkably calm and gentle when I unforgivably gave that General morphine post-operatively despite a known allergy, causing him to hiccup every 30 seconds for 3 days (the General's wife was not so forgiving). In fact, Dr. Feagin was instrumental in getting that same General to assist me and write a letter of recommendation years later when I needed another favor to get an assignment that I coveted. I am quite sure that my life and career would have been far less dictated by my desires if it were not for the efforts of Dr. Feagin to provide the wind in my sails that carried me in the direction I was trying to steer. As celebrated and accomplished as he was as a surgeon, intellectual, friend, and explorer, he was also a loyal member of the Long Gray Line who went out of his way to write the letter, make the call, or whisper in the ear of the people who controlled the destinies of younger grads. He serves as a powerful reminder that the power of an institution rests in its culture and people, not its brick and mortar.

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