Count Gibson
Count Gibson | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Emory University |
| Occupation | Physician |
| Employer | Stanford University |
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]
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] He took a position at the Medical College of Virginia, researching infectious disease.[4] In 1955, as an associate professor, Gibson learned about the ongoing Tuskegee experiment.[5] He became the first person outside the United States Public Health Service (which was conducting the experiment) to raise objections,[5] 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.[5] 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.”[6] 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.[5]
In 1958 he left to become chair of the Department of Preventative Medicine at Tufts University Medical School.[4]
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] Working with H. Jack Geiger (who had also been on the Medical Committee during Freedom Summer), he 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]
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]
Personal life
Gibson was a polyglot, speaking Russian, German, Latin and French, as well as studying Spanish, Italian, Dutch and American Sign Language.[1] His interest in Russian, fueled by his time in Vienna, led him to the Byzantine Church,[1] where he became a devout member.[4] 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][4] She died on February 21, 2002.[4] Gibson died five months later, on July 23, 2002, in Hartford, Connecticut, after a stroke.[3] He was 81.[3]
References
- ^ a b c d e f "GIBSON, COUNT DILLON, JR". Hartford Courant. July 25, 2002. Retrieved 2021-02-14.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ a b c d e f g O'Connor, Anahad (2002-08-09). "Count D. Gibson, 81, Leader In Bringing Medicine to Poor". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2016-07-31. Retrieved 2021-01-31.
- ^ a b c d e f "Count Gibson, pioneer in community health-care movement, passes away at age 81". Stanford Report. August 21, 2002. Archived from the original on 11 September 2020. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
- ^ a b c d e Kim, Ryan (2002-08-01). "Count D. Gibson Jr. -- physician and activist". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2021-01-31.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ a b c d Reverby, Susan M. (2009-11-01). Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. Univ of North Carolina Press. pp. 70–76. ISBN 978-0-8078-9867-3.
- ^ Paul, Charlotte; Brookes, Barbara (October 2015). "The Rationalization of Unethical Research: Revisionist Accounts of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the New Zealand "Unfortunate Experiment"". American Journal of Public Health. 105 (10): e12–e19. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2015.302720. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 4568718. PMID 26270295. Archived from the original on 2020-12-14. Retrieved 2021-02-14.
- ^ Grady, Denise (December 28, 2020). "H. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on December 29, 2020. Retrieved December 29, 2020.