Shirley MacIver; her dedication to medicine was lifelong; at 85

A sense of where she fit in the history of medicine informed Dr. Shirley R. MacIver's approach to being a physician, from the days she tagged along as a girl for her mother's nursing duties to her service on a state board in retirement.

"She was smitten by being a link in a chain that went way back and making sure that it wasn't broken," her son Matthew of Hingham said of Dr. MacIver's time on the Massachusetts Medical Society's judicial committee, which she led for several years.

Dr. MacIver, who spent the last decade of her medical practice at Cape Cod Hospital and designed the medical herb garden at the Massachusetts Medical Society headquarters in Waltham, died at her house in North Chatham May 3 of complications from Alzheimer's disease. She was 85.

Growing up down the street from Hanson Tuberculosis Hospital, which opened a couple of years before she was born, Shirley Boulanger developed an early interest in tending to the ill and in her heritage. She was an only child whose father's French-speaking family was from Quebec and before that from the province of Brittany in France.

"Her mother was a public health nurse, and Shirley as a little girl would make rounds with her," said her husband, Dr. John MacIver.

Never physically imposing -- she barely topped 5 feet -- she nonetheless was a presence in the community, participating in theatrical presentations and developing song-and-dance routines.

Her husband said she was voted best dancer in her class at Jackson College, which is now part of Tufts University, and then received a master's degree in histology, or tissue structure, from the University of Maryland.

"She was multitalented and had a great pair of hands," her husband said. "When you're working in histology, you're working with muscle tissue."

After doing research at Harvard University, she went to medical school at the University of Vermont and graduated in 1948. She was a medical resident in Washington, D.C., when she met John MacIver, an intern at another hospital.

"We had our first date on New Year's Eve of 1950," he said. The two noticed that each spoke with a Massachusetts accent. "All I can say is that one thing led to the other, and we became very close. I had great admiration for her abilities and her energy. I didn't have much energy in those days. She had energy to spare."

They married the following August. With two careers in medicine, the couple lived in Louisville, New Haven, New York City, and Pittsburgh over the next two decades. In New York, she worked with Dr. Andre Cournand, who a few years later was awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine.

Dr. MacIver took time away from her medical pursuits during much of the 1960s to raise her two sons and later helped to establish the pulmonary critical care service at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh.

"She had lots of energy," her husband said. "She was never troubled by procrastination or putting things off. With as much energy as she had, when she had an assignment that would take six hours, she was really glued to the chair."

In 1972, the MacIvers moved to a house her father had built in North Chatham, where she became associated with Cape Cod Hospital and, on occasion, was able to peacefully set aside her boundless energy.

"She loved hanging with her girlfriends down on the beach, a place where she could lie down and fall asleep," her son said.

Dr. MacIver could take charge in meetings, he said, but "she had a personality that was very complex."

"She was very old New England in her upbringing, so there was a big emphasis on common courtesy," he said. "And she had a tremendous warmth and charisma."

She survived a bout with breast cancer in the early 1970s and retired in 1981. Always proud of her heritage, she "immediately set off on a two-month walking tour of Brittany, France, to go back to her roots," he said. "She would get up each morning and walk 10 miles, wherever the wind took her."

Dr. MacIver volunteered at what is now Heritage Museum and Gardens in Sandwich, initially as a docent and later on the organization's board, and merged her profession's past and present when she designed Hortus Medicus, the medicinal herb garden at the Massachusetts Medical Society, where a plaque at the entrance bears her name.

"Aside from her identity as a wife and mother, her major identity was as a physician," her husband said. "Despite her laboratory abilities, as a physician her joy was as a treater of people. She loved people without reservation.

In addition to her husband and son, Dr. MacIver leaves another son, J. Robertson of Voorhees, N.J.; two granddaughters and two grandsons.

A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. today in the First Congregational Church of Chatham.