Wealthy Houston plaintiff’s lawyer John O’Quinn (earlier posts here and here) recently proposed to donate $25 million to St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital — the largest gift in the hospital’s 50 year history — in return for renaming the hospital’s highly-recognizable medical tower the “O’Quinn Medical Tower at St. Luke’s.”
Well, the Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, who does a fine job of staying on top of Medical Center stories, reports in this article that the St. Luke’s board’s decision to accept the donation from Mr. O’Quinn is not going over well with a number of St. Luke’s doctors:

The plan to rename the edifice after John O’Quinn in recognition of a $25 million donation by his foundation has infuriated many St. Luke’s doctors, who last week began circulating a petition against it and Monday night convened an emergency meeting of the medical executive committee.

“Perhaps you are unaware of the intensity of feelings held by many physicians about Mr. John O’Quinn,” says the petition, which is addressed to the Rev. Don Wimberly, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas and chairman of the St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System board of directors. “The primary source of his financial success has been representing plaintiffs in medical liability and products liability cases, many of them groundless.”

Dr. Priscilla Ray, a psychiatrist who wrote the petition, said that even though doctors were let out of the breast-implant litigation, it was onerous because they had to hire lawyers, prepare for trial and be deposed.
“The bottom line is, Mr. O’Quinn has contributed toward the litigious environment in which doctors work, toward the changed relationship between doctors and patients,” said Ray. “Now, doctors have to fight not to see each patient as potential plaintiff, and patients might have impaired confidence in their doctor.”

“It offends us to have money we earned ? and which he took by suing us ? going to name after him a medical building in which we work each day,” says the petition. “The naming of buildings at the law school or perhaps at a medical liability carrier seems much more appropriate.”

Well, the University of Houston is way ahead of the docs on that idea, as the law school has already named its library after Mr. O’Quinn. But now that idea on the medical liability carrier building . . .
Despite the current hub-bub, my sense is that this will die down soon and the board’s decision to accept the donation will not be changed. Raising funds is too important in the dog-eat-dog worlds of academic medicine and health care finance to let little things such as principle stand in the way of a big donation.