Robert P. Davis

Robert P. Davis, of Providence, R.I.; Feb. 14, 2024, of renal failure brought on by pneumonia. In 1952, while chief resident in internal medicine at Brigham Hospital, he was elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard and conducted pioneering research. He later taught medicine at the University of North Carolina and at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (N.Y.). He took a sabbatical from 1965 to 1966 to be a visiting scientist at the Institute for Biological Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and in 1967, he joined the faculty at Brown as both professor and physician-in-chief of the Miriam Hospital in Providence, a post he held until 1974. During his tenure, he was instrumental in building the Miriam’s profile as a research institution and its connection to the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown. He was a driving force behind the construction of a building dedicated entirely to laboratory research and led the team that performed the first kidney transplant conducted in the state of Rhode Island. He continued to teach at Brown and helped establish a program in biomedical ethics. From 1974 to 1979, he served as director of renal and metabolic diseases at Miriam, during which time he worked to integrate regional and state organ banks and further promote organ transplantation in Rhode Island. He spent the last three decades of his life pursuing interests he had maintained since childhood, which included founding a rare bookstore, Gadshill, devoted to 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature, culture, and science. He later exhibited his collection and lectured on Dickens at the Grolier Club in New York and the Club of Odd Volumes in Boston. For more than 20 years he attended the annual Dickens conference at UC Santa Cruz. He was a World War II U.S. Navy veteran. Survivors include his daughter Elizabeth A. Davis ’90 and son John R. Davis ’79.