John Oates, MD, an internationally known physician at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a founding father of the discipline of Clinical Pharmacology, died Tuesday (July 30) in Nashville after a short illness. He was 87. Dr. Oates, the Thomas F. Frist Sr. Professor of Medicine, founded the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt in 1963 as a joint division of the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology. He chaired the Department of Medicine from 1983 to 1997.