John Stone, 72, doctor with poetic talents

Rides in his dad’s 1980 Toyota Tercel often were set to the soaring, intricate sounds of classical music. And Dr. John Stone III would ask his younger son, Jim, to pay attention: “What instrument is that playing right now?” he would say.

Apart from sharing his love of classical music, Dr. Stone, an acclaimed poet and Emory University cardiologist, was teaching Jim, now 41, about listening.

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Keith Hadley/ 2004 AJC photo

Dr. John Stone and his family wanted to shield his mother, Polly Stone, from bad events that happen in the world.

“Learn to listen to the patient through the ‘thin reed of his crying,’ ” said Dr. Jim Stone, a physician at Emory Johns Creek Hospital, quoting one of his father’s poems. “He tried to hear what was underneath what they were saying, just like any particular instrument would come in underneath the rest of the symphony.

“He was a gifted clinician who wielded a stethoscope with a skill unsurpassed by any of the finest clinicians of his day. But he always knew that in most cases, the diagnosis came from the history — from talking to the patient,” said his older son, John, 45, the director of clinical rheumatology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

An Emory cardiology professor for nearly 40 years and associate dean for admissions at the medical school for the last 19, Dr. John Stone III, 72, of Tucker died in his sleep of cancer Thursday. The body was cremated.

A memorial service will be held on the Emory campus in the next few weeks. Donations can be sent to the John Stone Fund for Emergency Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. Contact Anne Stainback at Emory, 1440 Clifton Road N.E., Suite 440, Atlanta, GA 30322.

He founded and directed Grady’s residency program in emergency medicine, which has since become a department at Emory. He won the school’s best clinical professor award several times and started Emory’s first course combining medicine and the humanities. He claimed awards for medicine and writing, including the American College of Physicians’ mastership designation, the Literature Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and several honorary degrees, an Emory spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

The last of his five books of poetry was titled “Music From Apartment 8,” a reference to his mother’s home in Decatur. Dr. Stone also wrote an essay, that ran in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution four years ago, about shielding his mother from reports of terrorism and war. She was 96 at the time and died last year, just shy of her 99th birthday.

Dr. Stone’s anthology of literature and medicine, “On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays,” co-edited with Richard Reynolds, has been issued to first-year medical students for the past 17 years, according to the Emory spokeswoman.

Mae Nelson Stone, 61, his second wife, called her “best friend” and husband “probably the most sensitive man I’ve ever known.” Dr. Stone’s first wife, Sarah Lucretia Crymes Stone, who went by “Lu,” died in 1991.

“He just seemed to know when someone was hurting, when someone needed help,” Mae Stone said, describing him as an egalitarian who saw humanity in all. “With all the people he met, he just always interacted with them as if it would be someone he would cherish to have as a friend, no matter what.”

Dr. Bill Eley, the executive associate dean of Emory University School of Medicine and a student of Dr. Stone’s, said, “He demonstrated through his life the importance of a physician’s humanity and our patients’ humanity, and they’re both essential.”

“He really saw it as a privilege to go in and be able to listen to people’s stories and be part of their lives. … I think what drove him to write was his ability to express that in the lyric of poetry.”

Dr. Jim Stone felt his father’s writing, like his doctoring, reflected his quest for truth. One of his poems — a favorite of his son’s — compares the art of whittling to life and closes with these lines: “May you find in the waiting wood, rough, unspoken, what is true, or nearly true, or true enough.”

Other survivors include a brother, Marler Stone of Memphis; a sister, Betsy Stone Walkup of Nashville; a daughter-in-law, Martha Stone; and two grandchildren, William Stone and Sarah Stone of Sudbury, Mass.