As Thanksgiving approached this year, Dr. John S. “Jay” Garvin decided that he wanted to spend it with friends and family. Despite being aware of his impending death, stepson Robert S. Faurot, Jr. said, he dressed up and took part in the holiday celebration.
He prepared carefully, sister Eleanor Garvin Skinner said, checking out of the nursing home he had been in and returning to his Winnetka home.
“He told me he was going to get a taxi and go get a manicure and get his hair cut. And he had a private trainer come in to strengthen his legs enough that he didn’t need a wheelchair,” said Skinner, a retired colonel in the U. S. Air Force.
Garvin, who was the first head of the department of neurology at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and was known to peers as the “neurologist’s neurologist,” died from heart complications days later, on Nov. 28, at his home. He was 95.
Garvin brought the gentle determination that marked his Thanksgiving decision to his interactions with colleagues, said Jeffrey Loeb, current head of the UIC School of Medicine’s neurology department.
“There are people who embolden you to do great things by taking charge,” Loeb said. “He was one of those. He wasn’t trying to tell me how we should be moving forward, but if you were going in the right direction, he was there as your cheerleader.”
Loeb said of Garvin’s reputation, “If you’re an expert in something, who do you go to for help? Well, if you’re a neurologist, you go to the neurologist’s neurologist, and that was Dr. Garvin.”
James Stone, a former student of Garvin’s and now chief of neurosurgery at Manhattan Veteran’s Administration Hospital and professor of neurosurgery at New York University Medical Center, called Garvin “one of the most gifted neurological clinicians in America and among the first academic university-based neurologists in Chicago.”
Garvin was born Feb. 23, 1921, in Windsor, Ill., a small town about 200 miles south of Chicago, where his father owned a hardware store, Skinner said.
“From the time I can remember, he was always playing doctor, trying to make things and people well. The rest of us were going to be firemen, we were going to be movie stars, but he never was. He never changed his mind, and it turned out well,” she said. “He was compassionate. I liked that.”
According to Faurot, Garvin earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Illinois and graduated in 1945. Following a residency at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1946 to 1948, specializing in neuropsychiatry, Faurot said.
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He spent a year in England as a Fulbright Fellow at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, in London, before returning to Chicago and holding a number of neurology teaching and clinic positions at the University of Illinois, Faurot said.
Faurot said Garvin also served as a senior attending and consulting neurologist at several Chicago area hospitals, including Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Hospital, St. Francis Hospital, Mercy Hospital, and the Veterans Administration West Side Hospital.
He headed the UIC College of Medicine’s school of neurology when it was created in 1971, a position he held for 18 years, according to Faurot. Loeb said he handled well the challenges of spinning the new school out from the College of Medicine’s department of neurosurgery.
“He not only spun out a separate stand-alone department, he kept good relations with the original department,” Loeb said.
Under his direction, the neurology department developed programs with an emphasis on treating epilepsy, neuromuscular diseases, strokes and children’s neurological diseases, Faurot said.
He said that in 1996, Garvin’s sisters, Skinner and Mary Ann Coleman, endowed the John S. Garvin Professorship of Neurology, currently held by Loeb.
Garvin was a member of the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Neurology, the American Epilepsy Society, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the Illinois State Medical Society and numerous other professional and academic organizations, including the Chicago Literary Society, Faurot said.
Faurot said that his stepfather turned in his later years to an appreciation of the kind of farming that had surrounded his hometown when he was growing up. He purchased farmland in Wisconsin and was a member of the Chicago Farmer’s Club, Faurot said.
“He talked about farming and rotating crops, and he viewed life that way,” Faurot said. “There was a time for planting, a time for growing, a time for harvesting and a time where the ground lies fallow before growing again. It’s how he viewed his own life.”
“He had a great life,” Skinner said.
In addition to Faurot, of Wilmette, and Skinner, of Florida, Garvin is survived by his second wife, Suzanne Spencer Faurot, to who he was married for 38 years; daughters Mary Garvin of Tallahassee and Elizabeth Garvin, of New York, N.Y.; son Bruce Garvin of Los Angeles; stepson Sandy Faurot of Wilmette and stepdaughter Suzanne Faurot Barton of Media, Pa.; and seven grandchildren. He was previously married to Elizabeth Harding Stone.
Services for Garvin are scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Dec. 28 at Kenilworth Union Church, 211 Kenilworth Ave. in Kenilworth. Donations in his memory can be made to Kenilworth Union Church and the University of Illinois College of Medicine department of neurology.
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