Count Gibson: Difference between revisions

Count Dillon Gibson, Jr. (1921 – 2002) was an American physician. He cofounded the first community health center in the United States, beginning a network that grew to serve 28 million low-income patients.

Early life

Gibson was born in Covington, Georgia, on July 10, 1921.^[1] The family moved to Atlanta in 1933 when his father joined the faculty of Georgia Technical Institute as Professor of Geology.^[1] Gibson attended college and medical school at Emory University in Georgia,^[2] earning his MD in 1944.^[3]

From 1947, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement were early influences on Gibson, who admired the non-violent social activism.^[1]

Career

From 1945 to 1947, Gibson was in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.^[3] He was chief of laboratory service in the 110th Station Hospital in Vienna, Austria.^[1]

Gibson completed his residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.^[3] In 1951, he took a position at the Medical College of Virginia, researching infectious disease and in particular the use of antibiotics.^[1] In 1955, as an associate professor, Gibson learned about the ongoing Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments (1932 to 1972).^[4] He became the first person outside the United States Public Health Service (which was conducting the experiment) to raise objections,^[4] writing to one of the investigators questioning the “ethics of the entire program” as it appeared to him (as was in fact the case) that the subjects did not know treatment was being withheld.^[4] Moreover, he said, “It seems to me that the continued observation of an ignorant individual suffering with a chronic disease for which therapeutic measures are available, cannot be justified on the basis of any accepted moral standard.”^[5] But he was warned to stay away from the issue by more senior members of the Medical College of Virginia and did not pursue it further.^[4]

In 1958 he left Virginia to become chair of the Department of Preventative Medicine at Tufts University Medical School.^[6]

In 1964, Gibson was one of the medical professionals on the Medical Committee for Human Rights, traveling to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer to provide medical aid to civil rights workers in the voter registration drive.^[2] Gibson joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s March from Selma to Montgomery.^[2]

In 1965, Gibson cofounded the first community health center in the United States at Columbia Point, Boston.^[2] He served as director of the clinic for four years^[1] and, working with H. Jack Geiger (who had also been on the Medical Committee during Freedom Summer), Gibson went on to found similar clinics in the Mississippi Delta and the San Joaquin Valley, California.^[2] This grew into a national network of clinics serving 28 million low-income people as 2020.^[7] The original Boston clinic was renamed the Gibson-Geiger Health Center in the 1990s.^[2]

In 1965 and 1966, Gibson was a delegate to the White House Conferences on Health and on Civil Rights, respectively.^[1]

From 1969 until he retired in 1988, Gibson was professor and chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine (later called the Department of Health Research and Policy) at Stanford School of Medicine.^[3] In California, he was a supporter of advocate for farmworkers Cesar Chavez as well as Native American activists in the Bay Area.^[6] In 1969 Native college students occupied Alcatraz Island for several months to raise awareness of Indian issues and Gibson went to the island to give the students medical care, one of the only non-Native people they allowed in.^[2] He founded community health centers in the model he had helped establish, including the Native American Health Center in San Francisco and the Charles Drew Medical Center in East Palo Alto.^[3]

Personal life

Gibson was a polyglot, speaking Russian, German, Latin and French, as well as studying Spanish, Italian, Dutch and American Sign Language.^[1] Shortly before being stationed in Vienna, he converted to Roman Catholicism, but his interest in Russian, fueled by his encounters in Austria with Russian refugees, led him to the Byzantine Church,^[1] where he became a devout member.^[6] This also introduced him to Katherine Vislocky, daughter of a Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church in Manhattan, and they married in 1950.^[1] The couple had three children.^[2][6]

After living in California for 30 years, they moved in retirement to West Hartford, Connecticut in 1999.^[1] Vislocky died on February 21, 2002.^[6] Gibson died five months later, on July 23, 2002, in Hartford, Connecticut, after a stroke.^[3] He was 81.^[3]

References