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“Medicine keeps imposing things that make it harder and harder to talk to patients,” Dr. DeSanctis said in January 2014 of his aversion to letting a computer keyboard come between him and those he treated.
He was 83 by then and was the oldest practicing Mass. General physician in anyone’s memory when he retired a few days later. With enormous understatement, he added in that interview with a Boston Globe reporter, “I’ve always been a people person.”
A legendary healer and a teacher who mentored generations of cardiologists, Dr. DeSanctis died July 8 at home in Winchester. He was 93 and his health had been failing.
“First and foremost, in addition to being just an unparalleled physician, he really was the quintessential gentleman, the definition of kindness,” said Dr. Brit Nicholson, who is senior vice president of development at Mass. General and a former chief of medicine.
And while Dr. DeSanctis’s reputation was such that King Hassan II flew halfway around the world for appointments, he placed his compassion for patients above recognition or renown.
“He would say that as a cardiologist, it’s important to listen to the heart,” Nicholson said, “but it’s much more important to listen to the patient.”
In “Reflections on 59 Years of Doctoring,” an essay Dr. DeSanctis published in Methodist DeBakey Cardiovascular Journal after retiring, he wrote that he had “always tried to be not only a caregiver to my patients, but also a friend.”
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Quoting the famed Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Francis Weld Peabody, who died in 1927, Dr. DeSanctis wrote that “‘the secret of the care of the patient is caring for the patient.’ And I really care about my patients.”
As his health was failing at the end of his life and death was no longer distant, his daughters asked how he wanted to be remembered. Dr. DeSanctis told his family he should be thought of as someone who was “called to heal, inspired to teach, and humbled by his love of and for people — especially his family,” his daughter Ellen of Houston said during a phone interview, borrowing words she had prepared to deliver at her father’s funeral Mass.
“He always knew he wanted to be a doctor,” Ellen said during her words of remembrance at the Mass on July 26, “but he pursued the profession in a way that was all-encompassing and filled him with joy.”
His devotion to his work, she added, “was otherworldly. No matter the time of day or night, he never turned away from what he considered his sacred duty to his patients.”
When the time arrived to set aside his practice, Dr. DeSanctis turned even more of his attention to Mass. General’s development office, where for years he had helped raise money and awareness.
The example he had set at the hospital, where he spent his entire career, continued to inspire others when he no longer was making life-saving diagnoses.
Few could match his stamina in busy years, when Dr. DeSanctis’s workdays often stretched from 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
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His habit of showing up past midnight to help guide a patient through an emergency room visit was its own lesson to younger physicians, as was his practice of sometimes wheeling a patient off for tests or X-rays, rather than leaving those tasks to orderlies.
“We all learned from him,” said Dr. Patrick Ellinor, the acting chief of cardiology at MGH who trained under Dr. DeSanctis. “If Roman’s taking a call, then why can’t you take a call?”
Dr. David Brown, president of academic medical centers at Mass General Brigham, said Dr. DeSanctis is “impossible to replace. He taught me so much about being a doctor and a leader. I still hear his voice in my mind.”
Born on Oct. 30, 1930, in Cambridge Springs, Pa., Roman W. DeSanctis was the younger of two siblings whose Italian immigrant parents were Vincent DeSanctis, a tailor, and Marguerite Marini DeSanctis. Marguerite ran the business after the family moved to Arizona so Vincent could recover from tuberculosis.
Dr. DeSanctis credited his parents with giving him “the greatest gift he ever received – the opportunity to grow up in the greatest country on earth,” Ellen said in her words of remembrance. “He viewed this as a profound act of love.”
Only 16 when he began attending the University of Arizona, Dr. DeSanctis graduated with a bachelor’s degree and went to Harvard Medical School, knowing that would include enduring cold weather.
He graduated in 1955, the year he married Ruth Ann Foley, a registered nurse from Arlington.
Taking time away from his MGH residency, Dr. DeSanctis served in the Navy as an assistant to the attending physician to Congress. Then he returned to finish his training and a cardiology fellowship at MGH, and was mentored by the legendary cardiologist Dr. Paul Dudley White.
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As a professor at Harvard Medical School, Dr. DeSanctis received many teaching awards. He and Ruth traveled extensively because of his medical duties and conferences, filling a map of the world with stickpins highlighting where they had visited.
“He was devoted to her, she was devoted to him,” Ellen said in an interview.
Ruth, who died in 2018, hosted frequent gatherings of physicians and cardiology fellows when they were home. “Both my parents loved people,” Ellen said. “They were very, very generous in that way.”
Generous as well with doctors he mentored, Dr. DeSanctis treated the newest residents as full-fledged colleagues, asking their opinions if he was summoned to MGH for an emergency at 2 a.m.
“He had a way of making the least competent medical student or resident feel competent and valued,” Brown said.
“What a gem,” Ellinor said of Dr. DeSanctis. “We really just feel so fortunate to have learned from him.”
In addition to Ellen, Dr. DeSanctis leaves three other daughters, Lydia of Winchester, Andrea of Scottsdale, Ariz., and Marcia of Bethlehem, Conn.; and four grandchildren.
“Roman had this saying that he always would be in the boat with the patient, and he certainly was,” Nicholson said. “He had a reverence for his profession. He referred to medicine as a calling, not a job.”
Dr. DeSanctis didn’t view himself as only “called to cure,” Ellen said in her words of remembrance at the late-July funeral Mass.
“He was called to heal, and that meant treating the heart as more than a vital organ,” she said, adding that her father treated hearts “as the source of our dreams, fears, hopes, and feelings.”
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Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
