J. Edwin Wood III, 85, Pennsylvania Hospital department chairman

J. Edwin Wood III, 85, chairman of the department of medicine at Pennsylvania Hospital from 1969 to 1990, died of cancer Sunday, Aug. 15, at Beaumont, a retirement community in Bryn Mawr.

Dr. Wood also served on the medical faculties at Boston University, the Medical College of Georgia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia.

And Dr. Wood had an adventurous streak.

Not only did he run five marathons, said his wife, Ann, but he ran the last when he was 63.

He also once lived at an outpost of the Indian army in the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir for a month in 1967.

His wife said he had gone there to research high-altitude pulmonary edema with S.B. Roy, the physician to Indira Gandhi when she was prime minister of India. The research resulted in two papers, one in the journal Nature in 1968 and one in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1970.

Born in Charlottesville, Va., Dr. Wood graduated in 1942 from Lane High School there.

After a year at Davidson College in North Carolina, he enlisted in the Navy, which sent him to premedical classes at Duke University and then to the School of Medicine at Virginia, where his cardiologist father was a professor.

After leaving the Navy, he earned his degree at Harvard Medical School in 1949.

He was a research fellow at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in 1950-51, but to fulfill his obligation to the military, Dr. Wood was a flight surgeon at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, in 1951-53.

His wife said he had considered his greatest achievement to be his work at Randolph, where he researched aircraft oxygen systems and high-altitude survival.

From 1958 to 1964, he was director of the Georgia Heart Association Laboratories for Cardiovascular Research at the Medical College of Georgia.

Besides the 44 papers that he published in several journals over his career, Little, Brown published his 213-page book, The Veins, in 1965.

From 1964 to 1968, he was the Virginia Heart Association Research Professor of Cardiovascular Research at the University of Virginia and, in the next academic year, associate dean there.

From 1969 to 1990, he was professor of medicine at Penn and, from 1980 to 1982, president of the professional staff at Pennsylvania Hospital.

Dr. Wood was a member of the board of directors of the American Heart Association in 1968-69, chairman of its Pennsylvania Hypertension Committee in 1975-80, and president of its Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter in 1983-84.

He was president in 1985 of the American Clinical and Climatological Association.

He established the J. Edwin Wood Clinic at Seventh and Spruce Streets, which, his wife said, provides quality health care to adults without regard to their ability to pay.

Until his 1996 retirement, Dr. Wood worked for Correctional Healthcare Solutions in Chalfont, Bucks County.

Besides his wife of 62 years, Dr. Wood is survived by sons Edwin and James, daughters Emily Starkey and Ann Gregg, 11 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

The funeral will be at 11 a.m. Friday, Aug. 20, at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, 625 Montgomery Ave. A graveside service is planned for 11 a.m. Monday, Aug. 23, at Riverview Cemetery, Charlottesville.