Robert Munger O'Neal

Robert Munger O'Neal, 85, died May 27, 2008 at his home in Stone County. He was born in Wiggins, one of three sons and two daughters of Dr. Charles Ernest and Myra Mae Munger O'Neal. Robert O'Neal graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1943. He attended the University of Tennessee College of Medicine under the Army Specialized Training Program and received his M.D. in 1945.

Dr. O'Neal interned at Gorgas Hospital in the Canal Zone; he returned to Memphis to the Baptist Hospital in 1947 and that year married Mildred Estelle Morris, a Tennessean. He was a tuberculosis patient at Mississippi State Sanatorium in Magee, and after recovering, remained as a resident in chest disease until 1952. He completed his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1954.

Robert O'Neal was an instructor in Pathology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis from 1954-1956, was the pathologist for Greenwood Hospital in Mississippi for two years, and then resumed his academic career at Washington University, as Assistant and later Associate Professor of Pathology. During the years in St. Louis he participated in early research on cholesterol and specialized in atherosclerosis. In 1961 he became Chairman of the Department of Pathology at Baylor Medical School in Houston. Dr. O'Neal was an author or co-author of over 100 research papers, contributed to several medical publications as an editor, and served on the National Institutes of Health, the National Heart Institute and the National Board of Medical Examiners. From 1969-1973, he was Director of the Bender Hygienic Laboratory, the nation's first independent medical laboratory, in Albany, New York, where he was also Professor of Pathology at Albany Medical College. Later in his career, he was Head of Pathology at the University of Oklahoma Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry and Chairman of Pathology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1988. Among other professional memberships, he was an Emeritus Fellow of the College of American Pathologists.

He is survived by his wife and three of his four children, Julia Ann, Margaret Alice, and John Munger O'Neal. A son, Clarence Ernest, predeceased him. Dr. O'Neal had four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.