John E. Heffner, MD
In Making of a Physician, Dr. Heffner reflects on the experiences, mentors, patients, and lessons that shaped physicians trained during a period of extraordinary responsibility, autonomy, and rapid change in medicine. The story is less about professional accomplishments than about learning the craft of medicine from teachers, colleagues, and patients. Although medicine is often described as both an art and a science, he came to believe it is better understood as a craft—grounded in science but refined through observation, judgment, humility, experience, and service to others.
Today, Dr. Heffner and his wife, Anne, divide their time between Napa and San Diego, California, where they enjoy being close to their sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and extended family. Looking back, he considers his greatest achievements not the offices he held or the papers he published, but the relationships he built as a husband, father, grandfather, physician, teacher, and friend. He remains convinced that medicine is, above all, a craft—one learned from mentors, refined through experience, and ultimately entrusted from one generation of physicians to the next.
John E. Heffner, MD, is a pulmonary and critical care physician, educator, researcher, and writer whose medical career began during the demanding era of residency training in the 1970s. Over more than four decades, he cared for patients, taught generations of medical students and residents, and advanced pulmonary and critical care medicine through research, medical education, quality improvement, and more than 350 scientific publications and books. He served as President of the American Thoracic Society, chaired the Pulmonary Board of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and was recognized by the American College of Chest Physicians as a Giant in Chest Medicine.