While on the faculty at the University of Michigan Medical Center in 1985, obstetrician John LaFerla decided to broaden his perspective by seeking a public health degree. LaFerla was attracted to public health’s tradition of studying the well-being of populations, rather than focusing on curing one person.

After earning his degree in health management and policy in 1987, he returned to teaching and delivering babies—and, he admits, never really drew on his public health knowledge. Still, when he was revising his will a few years ago, it occurred to him that “some money should go to places I think are important.” One of those places will be the School of Public Health.

LaFerla’s bequest is an indication of his regard for the school and the overall importance of public health’s approach to wellness, which echoes his own interests in non-traditional approaches to medicine. In the 1970s, he took a year off from his obstetrics residency to study psychosomatic medicine.

“Physicians tend to think they’re so important for someone’s health care, when in the scheme of things they’re relatively unimportant,” says LaFerla. “When I look at the well-being of people on the globe, there are all these different inputs into wellness—like housing and pure water, nutrition, public sewers, unpolluted environment, not having bombs go off. Public health shares that outlook.”

LaFerla taught and practiced obstetrics in academia for 17 years, including his time at UM and a subsequent position at Wayne State University in Detroit. He spent another ten years working for an HMO. He now lives Chestertown, Maryland, where he’s in private practice—“the smallest of the small,” he says–seeing patients in the smallest OB unit in the state’s smallest county.

Last year, LaFerla and his partner delivered 280 babies in that unit. And well over 5,000 people alive today were ushered into the world either under LaFerla’s direct watch or that of professionals whom he taught. His gift to the School of Public Health will cap a lifetime of contributions that can be described as anything but small.