In the generation since, millions have given up smoking, though 400,000 still die from the habit every year. But colleagues said Dr. Davis stayed in the Sisyphean fight against smoking and other health hazards in a nation of fast foods, caloric binges, lazy ways and the anodynes of liquor and cocaine.
With speeches and lectures, with articles in peer journals and on Web sites, with surveys and health bulletins, with legal depositions and testimony before Congressional committees and state and federal agencies, Dr. Davis was a tenacious campaigner for healthy lifestyles, promoting fitness, exercise, better diets and an awareness of the corrosive effects of tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs.
Dr. Davis, a specialist in preventive medicine, served as the 162nd president of the medical association from June 2007 to June 2008, after decades as a public health official. He was the director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the C.D.C. from 1987 to 1991, the chief medical officer of the Michigan Department of Public Health from 1991 to 1995, and since then the director of health promotion and disease prevention for the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit.
He also delivered the medical association’s historic recent apology to black physicians for more than a century of exclusion from membership. While the A.M.A., founded in 1847, had no formal policy barring black doctors, it required members until the 1960s to belong to state or local medical societies, many of which barred blacks.
“This is the moment we can stand as one,” Dr. Davis told the National Medical Association, America’s largest black doctors’ organization, in July. Besides apologizing for its history of racial discrimination, the A.M.A. pledged to raise its minority ranks. At the time, the association said, only 2 percent of its members and fewer than 3 percent of the nation’s medical students and doctors were black.
Ronald Mark Davis was born in Chicago on June 18, 1956, to George and Alice Komessar Davis. He received a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of Michigan in 1978, and at the University of Chicago he earned a master’s in public policy in 1981 and his medical degree in 1983.
After an internship in Chicago, he trained in epidemiology and became a resident in preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In 1984, he became the first resident ever named to the A.M.A.’s board, serving until 1987. He was elected to the board again in 2001 and was re-elected in 2005.
Dr. Davis wrote many articles for medical journals and was a founding editor of Tobacco Control, published by the British Medical Association.
He taught at Johns Hopkins, Wayne State, Morehouse, Michigan State and the Universities of Illinois and Michigan. He directed many studies and testified in tobacco cases and before government agencies on many topics, including obesity, which is fast overtaking smoking as a cause of death.
