About Samuel P. Martin, III, MD

The annual Samuel P. Martin, III, MD Memorial Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics honors the legacy of a man whose vision developed a new breed of leaders and thinkers in American medicine—men and women whose training in more than the clinical practice of medicine would equip them with new ways of looking at the world.

Dr. Martin joined the Penn faculty in 1970 after a distinguished academic career at Duke University, where he was a Markle Scholar and later a professor, and at the University of Florida at Gainesville, where he was the School of Medicine’s first chair and subsequently Provost for Health Affairs. At the age of 39, he created Duke’s residency program. He built the University of Florida’s School of Medicine, and while there was the first to create the hospital ward manager and merge the medical chart, putting doctors’ and nurses’ notes on the same page.

Dr. Martin spent more than a quarter of a century at Penn, where he championed innovative programs and careers for students in health, management, and social sciences. He was founding director of both the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program for young physicians and the Dana Scholars Program for medical students. He helped establish the MBA Program in Health Care Management department at the Wharton School and developed the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics into a major health services research entity. In the late 1970s, with his wife Dorothy, he envisioned and helped launch Penn’s first thematic college house: The Ware College House for Health and Society. It was in the close circle of these premier programs at Penn that Martin made perhaps his greatest and most cherished contribution as a mentor for an entire generation of physician leaders in academic medicine and public policy.

It is a little-known fact that most of the world’s first doctors to receive MBAs in the 1970s and 1980s did so at the University of Pennsylvania under Martin’s leadership and vision. Considered one of the last of the post-World War II generation of great leaders in American medicine, Martin physically and spiritually dominated the contemporary health care scene at Penn, as well as throughout the nation and world. In memory of this extraordinary leader and mentor, this lecture is given by a medical scholar or health care leader whose work exemplifies Martin’s influence in the field. Dr. Martin himself believed that American medicine had underachieved in harnessing its vast resources to serve the health care needs of the nation. He devoted his entire career to addressing how his chosen profession might do a better job of it.

Samuel P. Martin, III MD Memorial Lecture: Recent Speakers

2024: Tara Lagu, MD, MPH
Lack of Data Hinders Research on Disparities For People With Disabilities

2023: José Escarce, MD, PhD
Despite Broad Efforts, U.S. Health Equity Gap Continues to Grow

2022: Alicia Fernández, MD
Health Disparities, Race, and Language in the Age of COVID

2021: Utibe R. Essien, MD, MPH
In Pursuit of Equity: Race, Novel Drugs, and Health in the U.S.

2019: Aaron Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH
Prescription Drug Prices: Controversies and Potential Solutions