SOUTH PARIS – Dr. Francis Xavier Fellers was released from the cruel grip of Alzheimer’s disease on Dec. 27, and died peacefully at the Maine Veteran’s Home in South Paris.

Born in Seattle, Wash., on Feb. 6, 1922, the eldest of eight children of Carl and Josephine Fellers, he lived a full life after the family moved to Amherst, Mass., when he was an infant.

Francis Fellers was a scholar, scientist, teacher, healer and lifelong learner. A graduate of Amherst High School and Amherst College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, he was drafted in World War II in 1943 as a private first class. The Army sent him to Cornell Medical College, and he became a physician in 1946. He received his undergraduate degree after he graduated from medical school, he always said.

He served in the U.S. Army/Air Force until the mid-1950s where he attained the rank of major.

It was time to move on, he said, from military duties that took him on tours in Japan, Tripoli, Paris, Johnston Islands and Hawaii.

Following a pediatric residency program at the New England Medical Center’s Boston Floating Hospital, he was appointed as a staff physician at Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where he specialized in kidney diseases in children. There he published approximately 100 articles based on his research with colleagues that led to cures for childhood metabolic diseases, such as Vitamin D resistant rickets and nephrosis.

While at Children’s Hospital, he was appointed as an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, where he trained physicians from around the world whose goal was to take knowledge home to help their country’s people. He ran a renal metabolic unit at Children’s Hospital until 1973, when he retired to Maine.

An avid hiker, skier, fly fisherman, and lover of nature, birds, and flowers, he had a thirst for knowledge about the world around him. He boasted that he had been around the world three times, but once nested in New Gloucester, he found peace there raising his family.

He decided in the early 1970s that geriatric medicine was similar to pediatric medicine and became the medical director at Montello Manor and later at Russell Park. He was a staff member at Central Maine Medical Center, where he was a member of the Utilization Review Committee, and St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston. He participated in training residents in geriatric medicine for the Family Practice Residency Program at Central Maine Medical Center. He retired from medical practice in 1995.

He was a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, and was a board certified pediatric nephrologist. He was a charter member of the Antique Telephone Collectors Association.

An Eagle Scout at age 15, he was then the youngest Eagle Scout in Massachusetts.

With his wife Eleanor, they raised two children, Jonathan and Jennifer Fellers, and two stepchildren, Susan and Stephen Barr, at their home in New Gloucester.

He leaves his wife Eleanor of 35 years; his children, Dr. Jonathan Carl Fellers of Fresno, Calif., Jennifer Fellers Farley and her husband, Kevin, of Dedham, Mass., Susan Barr Paclat and her husband, Charles, and their children, Sara and Caroline of Medford, Mass., and Stephen Barr and his wife, Andrea Suter, and their son, Isaac, of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

He was a brother to Martha Averill of Amherst, Mass., David Fellers of Annandale, Va., Paul Fellers of Winterhaven, Fla., and Stephen Fellers of Amherst, Mass.

He was predeceased by two sisters, Ann Fellers Goodyear and Mary Fellers Lopezp; and a brother, John Fellers.

He also leaves 29 nieces and nephews.