Dr. Robert Babineau

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FITCHBURG -- Friends and colleagues remember Fitchburg's Dr. Robert Babineau Sr. as a pioneer in family medicine, as well as the creator and visionary of the Fitchburg residency program for medical students.

"He was a great guy," said Dr. Daniel Lasser, chairman of the family medicine and community health for UMass Medical School in Worcester. "If you were a patient, you would feel like he gave you all time in world, but he had a reputation for going home on time. People felt like they got their full visit with him, but somehow he stuck to a schedule. I wish I knew how he did it."

Babineau, 91, died Thursday. Helen, his wife of 66 years, had died five days earlier. The couple had lived in Fitchburg, but moved to Brewster on Cape Cod two decades ago.

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Raised in Fitchburg, Babineau took advantage of a program in the 1940s in which the Army paid for him to attend Boston University Medical School in exchange for four years of service as a military doctor. He spent a portion of those four years in Korea, where he established an orphanage in Seoul and left with the rank of major.

He was an intern at Maine General Hospital, where he met his wife, who was the head maternity nurse at the time. They later moved to Fitchburg, and he opened his own practice in 1952 as a general practitioner.

"He was a doctor back when doctors made house calls," said Dave Svens, a former patient and now the executive director of Fitchburg Access Television.

Around 1957, when Svens was 9, he was running along a sand embankment, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in his own bed. He could hear Dr. Babineau say, "He's coming to."

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Robert Babineau, pioneer in family medicine mourned in Fitchburg and beyond