Out of Africa
Margaret Grigsby has made her mark on two continents
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| Margaret Grigsby at Reunion in October 2004 |
In the late 1960s, in the midst of her medical career, Margaret Grigsby (M.D.
1948) could sometimes be found cooking over an open fire in northern Nigeria,
after a busy day spent overseeing the vaccination of the local people. In fact,
throughout the course of Grigsby’s two years in Africa, she oversaw the
smallpox inoculation of literally millions of individuals.
Today, Grigsby is a professor emerita of internal medicine at Howard University
in Washington, D.C., where, for many years, she was chief of the Infectious
Diseases Section in Howard’s College of Medicine. She recalls her years
in Africa, working for the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease
Control in the Smallpox Eradication Program:
“After our arrival in Nigeria, getting settled and meeting our Nigerian
counterparts, we began planning our campaign. Less than a week later, we received
a telegram about an outbreak of smallpox in Ekiti. We gathered our team and
headed there. I found myself standing in the middle of about 125 cases of smallpox,
hoping and praying that my own vaccination was good.
“Most of the victims were children. The small infectious diseases clinic
was filled, and most of the children were outside on straw mats under palm-leaf
and straw shelters. We started vaccinating right away and stopped the outbreak.”
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| Grigsby and colleagues at vaccination program headquarters in western Nigeria |
Grigsby’s work in Africa was as much diplomatic as it was medical, conflicting
as it did with cultural mores that demanded sacrifices to a smallpox god and
involved a variety of smallpox “cults.” She says, “One goes
about vaccinating that many people by organizing and coordinating the local
health departments, the local influential people like obas (kings), ministers,
and imams, as well as women’s groups. All of this involves the training
and supervision of teams to do the field work.”
Even as war broke out in eastern Nigeria, Grigsby soldiered on. When she arrived
at the university in Ibadan where she was to stay, a guard stopped her taxi,
ordered her out of the car, threw her suitcase on the ground and demanded that
she open it. Grigsby recalls, “He acted like he was going to hit me until
I told him, ‘I am an American with the U.S. Embassy and you are going
to be in a lot of trouble.’ He backed off. I ran a Texas bluff on him
and it worked … ”
Grigsby was born in Prairie View, Texas. An interest in medicine was evident
early. “I didn’t always know I wanted to be a doctor, but I often
pretended I was performing surgery — on inanimate objects, of course —
while my little sister would sit and watch.”
She was studying science at Prairie View College — one of the oldest
African-American colleges in the country — when World War II began. As
most male students were called for service, the college’s popular jazz
bands were disbanded — until a host of female musicians, including Grigsby,
stepped in to play. Thus was born the Prairie View Coeds, an all-woman band
that toured the country, including Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater. It was
an experience that left its mark on the young trombone player.
“Traveling throughout the deep south as a musician made me more aware
of the problems of poor Black Americans in that area, in that era.”
Grigsby was accepted to five of the six medical schools she applied to, and
chose Michigan, where a great-uncle, Frank McKinney, had graduated in the early
1900s. “The professors that stand out in my mind are Carl Weller, Frederick
Coller, Cyrus Sturgis, Ruth Wanstrom and Malcolm Soule. I recall one day in
the bacteriology lab, I was talking to someone and everyone became silent. I
looked around and there stood Dr. Soule, Dr. Furstenburg and Sir Alexander Fleming
by my table, looking at me and obviously amused. I nearly passed out!”
Reading Paul De Kruif’s classic, Microbe Hunters, sparked a fascination
with infectious disease. Following internship and residency at the Homer G.
Phillips Hospital in St. Louis and the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington,
D.C., Grigsby was granted a Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship in infectious
diseases at Harvard Medical School. Another fellowship followed at the University
of Puerto Rico School of Tropical Medicine. In 1963, Grigsby won the coveted
Murgatroyed Prize for her work at the University of London.
A diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners and the American Board
of Internal Medicine, Grigsby was, so far as she knows, the first African-American
woman to become a fellow in the American College of Physicians. Her work in
Africa earned her a 1972 Presidential Citation and, in 1987, the Surgeon General’s
Certificate of Appreciation. She has published numerous articles and lectured
internationally. And, since 1952, she has been on the faculty of Howard University.
She retired in 1993.
Throughout this very busy, incalculably productive life, Grigsby has maintained
a host of other interests including fishing on Martha’s Vineyard, and
breeding and showing prize Staffordshire terriers. Her dog Rocky accompanied
her on her travels throughout Africa, and another of her dogs won a blue ribbon
at the Westminster Dog Show in New York City.
Today, Grigsby doesn’t travel as much as she used to, but she made it
back to Ann Arbor for Reunion in October. “Being a Michigan doctor is
very meaningful and a source of pride to me. I recall in conference one day,
when I analyzed and diagnosed a case, one of my impressed colleagues said, ‘That’s
Michigan!’”
—WH
Also:
Class Notes
Out of Africa
Reunion 2004
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