Diagnosed with a fatal cardiac condition in his 20s, Wright Caughman had to decide how to make use of his remaining years. He was in medical school, and he thought often about death. When a later diagnosis contradicted the first, he was grateful.
“That (first) diagnosis gave him perspective at a very young age,” said Alison Caughman, Wright’s wife. “It affected how he treated people the rest of his life.”
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1948, Stewart Wright Caughman died Aug. 22 in his Atlanta home from thyroid cancer. His colleagues and friends at Emory University, where he spent 30 years working as a physician, faculty member and administrator, were shocked, believing his cancer could be managed. He didn’t tell them it was a rare, aggressive form, Alison Caughman said, because he didn’t want them to feel uncomfortable around him.
Wright was the fifth of six children born to James Bankston Caughman and Elizabeth Jennings Caughman and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Davidson College, and an English major. He taught English at Dreher High School, his alma mater, where he met Alison Youngs, a math teacher. They were friends for two years before they started dating. Six weeks later, they were engaged, and six weeks after that, they were married.
“Wright always said that teaching high school was the hardest job he ever had,” says Alison Caughman. “It was very labor intensive, and the pace was horrible. He felt he had to do something else.”
In his mid-20s, he enrolled at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, believing, said his longtime friend and colleague Gary Teal, “that he thought he could do more good in the world as a doctor.”
After Wright finished MUSC in 1979, the Caughmans headed to Harvard University, where he became the chief resident in dermatology. After Harvard, he spent seven years in the dermatology branch of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., studying the molecular process of skin cell production.
Tom Lawley, who had worked with Wright at NIH, had become the dean of the dermatology department at Emory Medical School. He invited him to join the faculty, and in 1990, Wright accepted.
“We were ready to leave D.C.,” said Alison Caughman. “There’s so much turnover with the city there, it’s hard to plant roots. We felt like it wouldn’t be the same in Atlanta.”
The family settled into Atlanta and Wright’s career at Emory evolved. Caughman served Emory as department chair of dermatology, executive vice president for health affairs, CEO of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center and chair of the Emory Healthcare Board of Directors, among other roles. No matter what his duties were, he kept up a clinical practice. “He was a great dermatologist, he was my dermatologist,” said Teal. “If he saw the smallest of problems, he would worry about it.”
As CEO, Caughman often accompanied Cameron Taylor, vice president of Emory’s Office of Government and Community Affairs, to Capitol Hill to talk about research. Once, as they were leaving a meeting, a staff member couldn’t believe Caughman was Emory’s CEO “because he was just so humble and nice,” Taylor said. “That’s why I loved bringing him to any group where he could educate folks about a research university — the most competent academic center in Georgia. His investment at Emory to bring more federal research dollars into Georgia is a big accomplishment.”
Kind, generous, positive and funny, never gossiping about or lambasting people, Caughman was beloved across the Emory campus. Jon Lewin served as Emory’s executive vice president for health affairs before returning to a faculty position. He said he has no memory of Wright “as being anything other than kind and respectful in all of his interactions. As a teacher of medical students and residents, he imparted that patient-centered focus to all of his trainees.”
When his office was in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Caughman would distribute healthy snacks every month, and he once held a holiday party, handing out fleece blankets to everyone in the often-freezing building. Both Teal and Lawley relied on Caughman’s excellent writing and editing skills when they were submitting grants.
“He never raised his voice, but he had a whistle that could silence a room,” said Teal, who often played golf with Wright at Ansley Golf Club. “I don’t know how he did it.”
Colleagues said that Caughman would skip a conference if it interfered with an annual family trip to the South Carolina coast, a tradition Caughman’s mother started. Aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, spouses and in-laws, cousins and their children in the extended Caughman family would gather on Pauley’s Island and, later, at Litchfield Beach. Fifty to 70 people would attend, Alison Caughman said.
In addition to his wife, Wright Caughman is survived by his sisters Madeline Ritchie and Carlisle Harvard and his brother Marvin; his children Sirah, Stewart and Christopher; and six grandchildren. A memorial service is scheduled for Sept. 7 at 11 a.m. at Covenant Presbyterian Church, 2461 Peachtree Road. Donations can be made to the Emory University Department of Dermatology, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra or the Children’s Brain Tumor Project.
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