GIBSON, Count Dillon, Jr. Count Dillon Gibson, Jr., died on Tuesday, (July 23, 2002) at Hartford Hospital after suffering a stroke. Born in Covington, GA, on July 10, 1921, to Count Dillon Gibson, Sr. and Julia Thompson Gibson. Count was raised in a pious and highly educated family. Moving to Atlanta in 1933, where his father became Professor of Geology at Georgia Technical Institute, he never forgot his childhood in a small southern town, which instilled in him a lifelong commitment to civil rights and a hatred of racial prejudice. After receiving B.S. and M.D. degrees from Emory University, he served as an intern and resident at the Columbia- Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City between 1944 and 1951. From 1946 to 1947 Count served in the U.S. Army as Chief of Laboratory Service in the 110th Station Hospital in Vienna, Austria. During his stay in Vienna, he further developed his passion for foreign languages, adding Russian to German, Latin and French. He was later to study Spanish, Italian, Dutch and American Sign Language as well. He was proud of the fact that after the war he could follow most of the multi-lingual puns in “Finnegan’s Wake.” Not long before being posted to Vienna, he entered the Roman Catholic Church. His long-standing interest in Russian language and history acquired a deeper significance for him through his encounter with Russian refugees fleeing Soviet territory. Following his return to New York City in 1947, he began attending Saint Michael’s Russian Catholic Church where Father Andrey Rogosh tutored him in the liturgy and theology of the Byzantine Church. Here he met his future wife, Katherine Vislocky, the daughter of Father Alexey Vislocky, pastor of Saint Mary’s Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church in Manhattan, NY. Soon after their marriage in 1950, he transferred to the Byzantine Rite to which he maintained a steadfast devotion. The use of antibiotics to treat infectious diseases was the focus of his early research while on the faculty of the Medical College of Virginia from 1951 to 1957. In 1958, he moved to Tufts University in Boston, MA, to chair the Department of Preventive Medicine. It was there that he linked his conviction in the rights of patients to the consumer Cooperative movement that originated in Rochdale, England a century before. He came to believe that the future of primary health care lay in Neighborhood Health Centers run by the community of health care consumers. He served as the Director of the pioneering Columbia Point Health Center in Boston, MA from 1965 to 1969. He was also instrumental in the development of a number of neighborhood health centers in rural areas like the Mississippi Delta and the San Joaquin valley of California. He was recruited in 1969 by Stanford University where he chaired the Department of Family, Community and Preventive Medicine until his retirement in 1988. Throughout his tenure at Stanford, he made important contributions to the University community as a clinician, educator, and administrator. He was a delegate to the White House Conferences on Health (1965) and on Civil Rights (1966) and served on several other statewide and national healthcare-related committees. His humanistic interest in language, culture and religion combined with his rigorous scientific training into a holistic vision, in which the health of an individual was intimately related to their social and cultural environment. His commitment to consumer’s rights in the provision of health care was allied to his interest in and sensitivity toward all kinds of difference. From 1947 he was inspired by the particularly non-violent social activism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. In the 1960s, he was engaged in the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and took part in the march from Selma to Montgomery, AL in 1965. In California in the 1970’s, he actively supported the cause of the Mexican-American and Filipino-American farm workers who had united under the leadership of Cesar Chavez. Their principles of non-violent resistance to injustice and the use of consumer boycotts to bring about social change were fully in accord with his own vision of the moral obligation of the individual to strive for social justice. When a group of the Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay to protest their disenfranchisement by mainstream America, he was one of the few non-Native Americans they welcomed onto the island. He was also an early advocate of the rights of the mentally and physically disabled. In 1982, his interest in languages led him in a new direction which had its roots during his time in the Army. In 1946 he had an opportunity to observe the Nuremberg trials and witnessed one of the earliest uses of simultaneous translation. As a clinician, he treated patients who belonged to many different language communities, and came to realize that simultaneous interpretation could be adapted to the hospital setting. He was actively engaged in this project at the time of his death. After 30 years in California, Count and Katherine moved to West Hartford in 1999, where they settled at the McCauley retirement community. Here he played an active role as chair of the Health and Wellness committee. He and his wife were also active in the life of Holy Trinity Byzantine Catholic Church in New Britain as parishioners and members of the choir. Count Gibson is survived by his daughter, Gabriella and her three sons, Tom, Max and Sam of Gillingham, England; his son, Thomas and his wife, Ruhi Maker and their two sons, Taimur and Amir of Rochester, NY, his son, Aleksey of Washington, DC, and his son, George and his wife, Zoe Strickler and their daughter, Chloe of Willington. Funeral arrangements are being made by the New Britain Memorial-Sagarino Funeral Home, 444 Farmington Ave., New Britain. Calling hours will be held at the funeral home Friday evening, between 6-8 p.m., with a panakhida service at 7 p.m. The funeral liturgy will be held Saturday, 10 a.m. at Holy Trinity Byzantine Catholic Church, 121 Beaver Street, New Britain, preceded by a parastas service at the funeral home at 9:15 a.m. Donations can be made in memory of Count D. Gibson, Jr. to: Holy Trinity Byzantine Catholic Church. Directions to the funeral home are as follows: 84 east or west to exit 37, take a right off the exit. The funeral home will be one and a half miles on the right hand side.
