AAFP Past President George "Ned" Burket Jr., M.D., died March 28 at age 95. Burket had been a member of the Academy since 1949.
Burket received his medical degree from the University of Kansas, Kansas City, and completed a surgical residency at Santa Barbara General Hospital in California. He also received a fellowship from Harvard University to complete postgraduate training in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Burket, who practiced family medicine in his small hometown of Kingman, Kan., for 32 years, was president of the Academy from 1967 to 1968. During his tenure on the Board of Directors during the mid- to late 1960s and as president, he helped to initiate and then oversee the organization's transition from the American Academy of General Practice to the American Academy of Family Physicians, a process that was completed in 1971.
According to AAFP Board Chair Rick Kellerman, M.D., of Wichita, Kan., Burket was keenly interested in furthering the education of physicians who chose to go into family practice.
Under Burket's leadership, the Academy looked into the issue of board certification and found that physicians could not be certified in general practice because general practice was never meant to be a specialty. Thus, the Academy undertook a name change and began working with medical schools to add family medicine departments.
"He was a small-town doctor who became known as 'the education president' of the AAFP," said Kellerman, adding that Burket was modest, unassuming and intelligent, but, at the same time, the kind of person who got things done. Kellerman reported that when he got involved in the leadership of the Academy, Burket's advice to him was, "Sometimes you have to get in there and just have to carve through people -- knock some heads."
After completing his term as Academy president, Burket went on to serve as a founding member and president of the (then) American Board of Family Practice and as chair of the (then) Residency Review Committee for Family Practice. His efforts on behalf of medical education and his patients led to his election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
Later in his career, Burket joined the faculty at the University of Kansas School of Medicine as an associate professor of family medicine. He also received the John G. Walsh Founders Award from the AAFP.
