Count Gibson, pioneer in community health-care movement, passes away at age 81

Emeritus professor Count D. Gibson Jr., MD, a pioneer in the community health-care movement, died July 23 in Hartford, Conn., following a stroke. He was 81.

From 1969 until his retirement in 1988 Gibson served at the Stanford School of Medicine as professor and chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine (predecessor of the Department of Health Research and Policy).

A devoted physician and civil rights advocate, he provided leadership for innumerable community health-care centers in the South, the Northeast and throughout the United States. In California he helped the town of Livingston organize its own health center. He also helped establish the Native American Health Center in San Francisco and the Charles Drew Health Center in East Palo Alto.

Gibson, born in Covington, Ga., in 1921, received his medical degree in 1944 from Emory University in Atlanta and completed his residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1945 to 1947. Prior to joining Stanford, he held faculty posts at the Medical College of Virginia and Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

He and his wife Katherine, who died in March, retired to Connecticut in 1999. Gibson is survived by a daughter, three sons and six grandchildren.