Glenn A Pope, MD

He graduated from Sacramento High School and Stanford University, and received his MD from Temple University in 1938. After an internship and residency in internal medicine in Alameda County hospitals, he served in the Air Force from November, 1942, to January, 1946.

He returned to Sacramento to practice, and became active in a number of organizations. He was President of the Sierra Sacramento Valley Medical Society in 1963, president of the California Society of Internal Medicine in 1965-66, and a delegate to the California Medical Association from 1956-76. He served on governing boards of the East Sacramento Improvement Association, county and city Health Advisory Boards, Campfire Girls, San Francisco Shriner's Hospital and other organizations.

Dr. Pope died on July 25, and is survived by three children, nine grandchildren and four great grandchildren. The following was delivered at his funeral.

I met Glenn Pope in Internal Medicine Clinic when I first came to UCDMC over 20 years ago. I walked in as a new attending there, full of information about the latest and the best in modern diagnostic-therapeutic interventions. There were papers and multivolumed charts everywhere , cacophony in the hall, residents and support staff scurrying I knew not where.

And in the middle of it, an island of calm, was Glenn. He was a long man in a small chair in the doctor's room, waiting for the next resident to come in to present a patient. I figured, given his suit and his age, that he was a volunteer faculty attending, as indeed he turned out to be.

I didn't know then, but only later, that he was one of the influential community colleagues who had helped to transform the old Sacramento County Hospital into a University Medical Center. I thought we'd probably be a good team: He could provide the grace of practice experience, and I the most recent data (I wonder if all young doctors go through a presumptuous phase, as I did then).

He grinned at me, and we had just begun to talk when a resident came in, looking harried. I stepped over to him: "Got a patient to present?" I asked. The resident, whom I knew from morning report, looked beyond me to Glenn. "I'd like to present him to Dr. Pope. It's kind of a tough one, " he said.

Glenn chortled - one of the few people whom I ever met who really chortled. He uncoiled himself from his chair, grinned again, and went off with the resident who knew far better than I did then - but subsequently discovered - that Glenn Pope had both medical information and true wisdom: He taught not only what a doctor should know, but also what a doctor should be.

At the core, despite the enormous concurrent commitment to all of his civic, administrative, philanthropic and personal obligations, Glenn Pope was a doctor. His was a vocation, not a job, and he reveled in it: his enthusiasm, generosity, honesty, critical thought, and affection were manifest in everything he did. He loved it.

So now, after a life brimming with rich accomplishment, Doctor Glenn Pope is resting. But I think he is still rounding: his influence as a teacher and paradigm was such that hundreds of medical students and residents now in practice have a gesture, a smile, a touch, a way of talking to patients, a pearl of medical lore, a way of thinking, and a devotion to their craft, that is the enduring part of Glenn Pope in them. I know I do, and I am deeply grateful.

- Faith Fitzgerald MD