Dr. Mark D. Price, of Wellesley, an orthopedic surgeon, the former head team physician for the New England Patriots and a U.S. Navy veteran decorated for his bravery in Afghanistan, died Friday, August 16, 2024 after a long battle with leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer. He was 52.
Over the course of his career, Mark led player care for the Patriots during two Super Bowl championship seasons and was part of the medical team serving the 2018 world champion Red Sox. Despite Mark’s success, and his brilliance as a surgeon, he never took himself too seriously. He was generous and self-deprecating. He cared for every patient the same, no matter who they were. He prized his wife, Stephanie, and their children, Henry, Julia, and Sarah more than anything in his life, and he considered his military service as a surgeon in Afghanistan his greatest professional achievement.
“Whatever I accomplish professionally,” he said once, “will never be more meaningful than that.”
During his time in Afghanistan, Mark led a nine-person team of doctors and medical professionals; performed surgeries on U.S. soldiers and local residents; and won a Bronze Star for his courage in late 2012 when the convoy he was traveling in was attacked and Mark chose to help the wounded under enemy fire. But when he spoke about his time in Afghanistan, Mark never made it about him. He chose instead to talk about the bravery that others exhibited or the grace that an Afghan father once showed him.
The father’s son had been born with a birth defect. Mark performed surgery to help correct the problem and Mark was touched by how grateful the father was afterwards.
“My son’s too young to understand,” the father told Mark, “but I will make sure he knows what the Americans did for him.”
Mark Price was raised in Palm City, Fla., in a family that loved to laugh, and he was exceptional from the start. He wanted to excel at everything, whether it was foosball or his knowledge of 1980s pop culture. But it wasn’t until sophomore year of high school that Mark made his brilliance known. He joined the debate team at Martin County High School, and after just a few months of practice, he defeated 30 other debaters to win first place at the district championships. “He was competing against fourth-year debaters,” his coach marveled afterwards, amazed at what Mark had done.
Thanks to a generous scholarship and a pile of student loans, Mark studied biomedical engineering at Northwestern University and graduated in 1994, with hopes of going to medical school. Initially, anyway, it didn’t go as he planned. In his first attempt, he got rejected everywhere he applied. “I went oh-for,” Mark said in a speech at Northwestern in 2019. “And I swear I’m not making this next part up. I got rejected from a medical school that I didn’t even apply to.”
Instead of getting down on himself, he got to work. He took a job at a start-up company that built MRI machines. He got into a Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study medical physics. He produced a paper on quantum computing that the American Physical Society called “one of the five most significant discoveries in 1998.” And as he was completing his Ph.D., he was accepted at Harvard Medical School. Mark was finally going to realize his dream of being a doctor.
More importantly, he had become a husband, and he was about to become a father. Mark met his wife Stephanie in the nick of time: just one week before they graduated from Northwestern. After four years on the same campus, among the same friends, they almost didn’t connect, until a chance meeting during senior week changed everything for both of them. Mark knew it right away. They married in 1996, enjoying 28 years together, and had three children whom Mark adored. He shared a love of Star Wars with his son Henry, an outrageous sense of humor with his daughter Julia, and an appreciation of bad reality television with his daughter Sarah.
No matter where he went, or what he did, Mark always treasured his family most. And patients who were lucky enough to cross paths with Mark—at Harvard Medical School or later when he was a surgeon at UMass Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital—felt the same sort of love. Mark quickly proved that medical schools had been wrong to overlook him. He became a shoulder specialist who was sought out by people across the country. He gave all of his patients the same attention. He believed everyone—regardless of who they were—had a right to live a good life, pain free. And if you went to Mark Price, if he was your doctor, he probably made you laugh along the way. His favorite joke was telling patients, just before surgery, that everything was going to be fine because he had just googled how to perform the procedure.
Mark’s knowledge, skill, personality, and bedside manner soon got the attention of both the Red Sox and the Patriots. He joined the Sox medical team in 2009 and the Patriots medical team in 2015, and then interviewed to be the lead physician for the Patriots one year later.
In that interview, according to a story that Mark liked to tell, then coach Bill Belichick asked Mark how he would handle it if Belichick called him angry and yelling about an injured player’s game status.
“Respectfully,” Mark recalled telling Belichick, “you being angry with me wouldn’t make the top five worst things that have happened to me.”
He got the job and cared for the team during an epic run of historic success—three Super Bowls in a row between 2017-2019. Mark was there on the field during the amazing comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI, and he was there again two years later when the Patriots defeated the Los Angeles Rams to win Super Bowl LIII.
In the celebrations after both of these Super Bowls, Mark appeared in lots of photos, smiling with the team. But his favorite photo—the one he liked to show people—was a picture he took with his wife and kids on the field in Foxborough the night of his very first game with the Patriots.
It was just an ordinary photo, at an ordinary game. What Mark liked about it was that the photo seemed to capture him in full. He was caring for others. He was doing his job, and he was with the people he loved the most: his family.
In addition to his wife and his children, Mark is survived by his parents Charles Price, of Sweetwater, Tenn., and Michael and Geri Garvey, of Surprise, Ariz.; his siblings David Price, of Fairfield, Calif., Lisa Drew, of Golden, Colo., Stephen Garvey, of Salinas, Calif., and Scott Garvey, of Poulsbo, Wash; his in-laws Juliette and Stallworth Larson, of Ocean Ridge, Fla.; his sister-in-law Victoria Maggard of Larchmont, N.Y., and her husband Jeffrey; 12 nieces and nephews; and legions of friends, patients, and colleagues.
He was preceded in death by his mother DeAnn Price and his sister Anne Marie Price Jahner.
A funeral service will be held Saturday, Sept. 14, at 11 a.m., at Wellesley Hills Congregational Church, 207 Washington St., Wellesley, Mass.
Memorial donations may be made in Mark’s name to the Northwestern University Mark D. Price Scholarship Fund (www.northwestern.edu/giving) or the Massachusetts General Cancer Center (giving.massgeneral.org/where-to-give/cancer-center).