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Saturday, February 08, 2003

By Marylynne Pitz, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Dr. Thomas Keyser Oliver Jr., who trained more than 250 pediatricians at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, will be remembered today at a memorial service in Duke University Chapel in Durham, N.C.

Dr. Oliver, 77, died in his sleep on Jan. 6 in his home in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he had lived since 1987.

A third-generation Californian, Dr. Oliver was a neonatologist who focused on caring for premature infants. Through his research and teaching, he increased understanding into the physiology of newborns, specifically how their lungs developed.

Dr. Andrew Urbach, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh and assistant medical director for clinical excellence at Children's, said one reason Dr. Oliver was so successful in improving Children's pediatrics program was that he actively recruited young medical students to take part in it.

"He would go to the floors, find students, ask them to present a patient, and teach them. As a result, he was able to recruit people to pediatrics. People got excited about it because he gave them a chance," Urbach said.

"He really was the highest-ranking pediatric person in the city for quite some time and yet he always had time for medical students."

Dr. Oliver earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley and his medical degree at Harvard University in 1949.

After completing his residency at New York Hospital of Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Oliver was a special fellow at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindess, Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, Sweden. He spent two years there studying the lungs of newborns.

Following his stay in Sweden, Dr. Oliver accepted his first faculty position at Ohio State University, where he managed the iron lung unit for polio patients. There, he developed his lifelong interest in pulmonary medicine.

In the 1960s, he moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he established and headed the department of neonatal biology and served as director of the newborn nurseries and premature center and as associate director of the child development and mental retardation center.

From 1970 to 1978, Dr. Oliver was medical director at Children's Hospital. From 1970 to 1987, he was professor and chair of the department of pediatrics at Children's Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

While in Pittsburgh, Dr. Oliver sat on the boards of directors of the Women's Health Service, Pittsburgh Free Clinic and Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

In 1987, Dr. Oliver moved to Durham to become senior vice president of the American Board of Pediatrics and an adjunct faculty member at Duke and the University of North Carolina medical schools. After his retirement in 1995, he continued to teach until he suffered a head injury that impaired his balance and memory.

Surviving are his wife, Lois; his daughter, Katherine of Palo Alto, Calif.; his son, Thomas of Seattle, Wash.; and three grandchildren.