Robert B. McLafferty, M.D.’90, M.B.A., is a Larner alumnus, Professor of Surgery at Oregon Health & Science University, School of Medicine in the Division of Vascular Surgery in Portland, Oregon. He is also the Medical Director of the Wound and Hyperbaric Center.
In the following blog post, he highlights his journey from being a vascular surgeon and academic leader to rediscovering his passion for music and songwriting later in life, encouraging everyone to pursue passions beyond their career.
“Find another passion in your life that tickles the similar and dissimilar parts of your medical brain and never let it go.”
If I could have been monitored by a happiness or a “laugh” meter throughout my entire life, it would have registered at its very highest during my four years as student in the Larner College of Medicine in the great college town of Burlington, Vermont. Graduating in 1990, those four years were among the most formative in every facet of my life. I finally felt like I was with my peeps and my journey in medicine was finally beginning. From the apples that Dean William Luginbuhl would bring in to the student lounge daily in the fall with a short history attached… to the musings of our dry-humored Dean of Students, Dean David Tormey… to the banter between Dallas Bouschey and Bruce Fonda on the Given Building fourth-floor anatomy lab as the sun set over Lake Champlain, it was all truly great fun. And, it was also a lot of work—good work.
Life Priorities: Medicine Before Music
Up to entering medical school, I had been a self-taught avid guitar player throughout my high school and college years. Growing up in a small mill town in Maine, there wasn’t too much else to do and it was there where my love for songwriting began. By the time I graduated from Boston College in 1986, I had written nearly fifty songs—most of which were, well… not very good. Early on, as medical school progressed, my guitar and songwriting notebook began to gather more and more dust to the point that I rarely, if ever, picked them up. Sadly, this continued throughout my residency in General Surgery, Vascular Surgery and ultimately throughout the first 20 years of my academic practice as a faculty member at two consecutive medical school healthcare systems. During that time, my clinical work, teaching, research and raising a family all took a front seat—as they should have.
And now that I have begun to slide down the other side of life’s bell curve at the young age of 62… changes come, kids grow up, and new priorities emerge—especially as one begins to reflect on the path to the future during the limited number of years left on this precious planet. I remember rummaging through the closet about seven years ago for something and came across that shoe box with all my old songs. To say the least, it was a very emotional moment as I read through them. I dug out my old guitar and in 2017, wrote a song—the first since 1986 and again, it was not so good. But, something very powerful happened with that song in parallel with many special people in my life encouraging me to start playing again—and I did… daily.
Pursuing a Passion for Prose
As more songs were penned in the Americana sub-genres, interesting things began to happen to my musical life. I crossed paths and befriended a group of insanely talented young musicians and finally got enough guts to ask them if they would listen to my songs. They did and with that, we headed into the studio to make my first album “Crossing Lines” in 2019, of which four of the nine songs came from my high school/college years. Yikes! Despite finding our way through the process, the experience was absolutely invigorating. I gulped that Kool-Aid and the sugar high expanded my musical network. I wrote more songs. I got a producer. We all went back into the recording studio and came out with record #2 entitled “C’mon And Gimme Some More” in 2022. I really felt, with a serious dose of bias, that we were hitting our stride and the songs and the musicians were just hitting it out of the park. I began taking guitar lessons. After a year passed, we went back into the studio again with 15 studio musicians to create my third album “The Reasons Why”—released in early 2025. I enrolled in the Berklee School of Music and currently am working on my master’s degree in songwriting. This educational experience has helped me find out what I actually want to be when “I grow up.” I am not much of a performer, nor a singer, having not played or sang on any of my albums. My goal… to be a professional songwriter, and with this centering, I am gaining more traction in understanding my journey on this songwriting/publishing side of music.
This entire musical experience has reinvigorated my love for academic medicine and surgery—for the way I often view my days now is whether there is a song lurking around every corner. Playing guitar, writing songs, going back to music school, leading and bringing together a diverse group of musicians (that have nothing to do with medicine), has provided me with a release valve for the stressful business of medicine. This duality of roles, surgeon and songwriting, are actually not so dissimilar. As I deduce what might be the best treatment for a complex vascular patient who needs a revascularization of their ischemic leg, so too do I use all my songwriting skills and music theory muscle, with its many techniques, to craft a well-written song. To do, as they say in the world of songwriting, create prosody.
I still believe medicine is a great career to pursue—and so do my children, with my son following in my footsteps, now matriculating in a vascular surgery residency, and my daughter practicing as a dentist. My advice to them, my example to them, and to ALL of you reading… find another passion in your life that tickles the similar and dissimilar parts of your medical brain and never let it go. Go beyond the “hobby” stage and truly enjoy every part of its journey so that like medicine, your brain has become wired for it. You will, with every new day, be a better doctor for it.
Listen to Dr. McLafferty’s songs on all streaming platforms and YouTube, or follow him on Instagram.