Students’ Enduring Admiration of Temple
Alumnus teacher a favorite for nearly 25 years
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| J. Donald Temple, B.S. ’74, M.D. ’78, has received many awards for outstanding teaching since joining the faculty in 1985. |
Miller School associate professor of medicine J. Donald Temple,
B.S. ’74, M.D. ’78, never set out to become a perennial student favorite. Things just kind of evolved that way.
“I have no idea why that is,” says Temple, an understated man who’s director of the William J. Harrington Medical Training Programs for Latin America and the Caribbean and who teaches hematology/oncology. “I just sort of inherited some teaching responsibilities when I first joined the faculty in 1985. And I found out I was good at it.”
“Superb” is more apropos. Temple, who’s also co-director of the Office of Professional Development and Career Guidance, has a dynastic lock on the awards that Miller School students give their favorite instructors. In 2008 the Miami native won the George Paff Award for Best Teacher, Sophomore Class. Ditto 2007—and 15 previous years.
Among harder-to-impress seniors, Temple scooped up the George Paff Award in 2002, the sixth time they conferred the honor upon him. Name
a Miller School teaching honor, and Temple’s undoubtedly earned it at some point. Not bad for someone who admits with a rueful grin that had it
not been for medicine, he probably would have been an auto mechanic.
“Students admire him because he is a teacher extraordinaire,” posits Bernard J. Fogel, M.D. ’61, dean emeritus, who led the school from 1981 to 1995. “I’ve admired him since the day he walked
in the medical school.”
When pressed to explain his popularity with students, Temple credits simplicity and discernment.
He strives “to get as much important information over to them as possible and to help them weed out stuff that’s esoteric,” Temple explains. “My philosophy is that in medical education, it’s a lifelong process. So you don’t have to learn everything all at once.”
A graduate of Miami’s Palmetto Senior High School whose parents
were a housewife and a produce broker, Temple completed his residency
in internal medicine and fellowships
in general medicine, hematology,
and oncology at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Private practice was Temple’s goal until a medical hero intervened.
Harrington Training Programs founder William J. Harrington Sr., M.D., “saw me in the cafeteria at UMHC one morning, and he sat down next to me and said, ‘How would you like to work for us?’” Temple recalls. “I thought about it for about ten seconds and said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
“He impressed me as being the most patient-oriented physician I’d ever seen,” Temple says of Harrington. Temple emulated that when treating hematology/oncology patients, something he no longer does.
“The problem is, for the past 20-plus years I’ve been struggling with Parkinson’s disease,” Temple says. “It was just a minor nuisance for quite
a few years, but it got to where my mobility wasn’t where it needed to be
to take care of patients properly.
“I think it bothers other people more than it bothers me,” Temple
says of his disease, which causes tremors in his hands and arms. “But one of
the advantages of having trained in oncology is that those patients are
in a much worse situation than I am. Whatever nuisance condition I have doesn’t come close to approximating what they’re dealing with.”
Bottom line—you can look for Temple to be wowing Miller School students for years to come.
“I enjoy coming to work and doing this,” says Temple, a married father of three daughters. “There’s nothing else I’d rather do.”
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