2005 Inductees and Award Recipients

William Larimer Mellon Jr., MD (Posthumous)

1910 - 1989
Hôpital Albert Schweitzer
Deschapelles, Haiti

William Larimer Mellon Jr., MD William Larimer Mellon, Jr., M.D. was born in Pittsburgh, PA, heir to part of the Mellon family’s banking and oil fortune. After one year at Princeton University, a brief marriage, and some experience working for both the Mellon Bank and Gulf Oil in Pittsburgh, Mellon concluded that his primary interests were not in the traditional family businesses. He left Pittsburgh and bought a ranch near Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona, where he worked as a cowboy, building fences and riding herd.

Upon reading an article in the October 6, 1947 Life Magazine about Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s medical missionary work in Gabon, West Africa, Mellon became inspired to establish a medical mission of his own. He corresponded with Schweitzer from 1947 until Schweitzer’s death in 1965. Soon after, Mellon decided to enroll in medical school at Tulane University with the goal of establishing a medical mission of his own. He and Gwen, who became a medical technician, chose a site for their hospital: a former banana plantation in Haiti’s Artibonite Valley with a 600-square-mile area, 185,000 people, and not a single doctor in practice at the time. Funded with Mellon’s own money, Gwen supervised the construction of the hospital while Mellon completed his studies at Tulane.

Through the community development program, they initiated dozens of sanitation projects. They collared old wells and dug new ones for the clean cooking and bathing water that hadn’t been obtainable in generations. The laborers – always including Dr. Mellon - built latrines as well as rammed-earth houses, dams, and irrigation canals that soon saw rice paddies flourishing for the first time. To double the rice yield, they introduced a new strain of rice into the Artibonite Valley. Dr. Mellon’s discovery of large deposits of clay by the Artibonite River led to the production of bricks. From the late 1950’s to the end of his life, Mellon worked from 7:00 am until late afternoon on his countless community service projects. By late afternoon he would return, stopping in front of the hospital to drop off the sick people who had waited along the way. He always filled his old Land Rover with patients. Then, Dr. Mellon spent the remainder of his day concerned with music, languages and conversation.

In his last years, Dr. Mellon was hospitalized briefly at Hôpital Albert Schweitzer. During his stay, he insisted on the same room, bed, sheets, and food as everyone else: “We don’t have two types of sick people here,” he explained. Just a few weeks before he lost a long battle with cancer and Parkinson’s disease, he had gone with Gwen to buy a cheap coffin of wood and cardboard. Mellon left an inspirational example to people who often spent as much as half a year’s income on their funerals. After his death, the hospital continued under Gwen’s leadership until her death in 2000 when loved ones buried her by her husband’s side near their home in Deschapelles, Haiti.

Inducted into the Medical Mission Hall of Fame Foundation, 2005

Hôpital Albert Schweitzer - Deschapelles, Haiti

The cornerstone of Hôpital Albert Schweitzer was laid on December 11, 1954 for, named for its source of inspiration.The hospital entrance

The hospital opened on June 26, 1956, but Mellon quickly recognized that medicine alone could only make a dent in the underlying Haitian dilemma. To cure people and then return them to the same environment that produced the disease did not much help them in the long run. Accordingly, he "doctored for about three years and then turned his attention to the creation of a vast array of ambitious service projects. Beginning in 1959, the hospital’s community development program and outreach centers began. Additionally, they started an elementary school on the campus and taught reading, writing, basic health, sewing, carpentry, homemaking, and childcare.

Mellon Hospital Dedication Speech

Mellon’s own words may best describe the nature of his humanity. Quoting from the speech he delivered at the hospital’s dedication ceremony:

"First and most important is treatment of the sick from Deschapelles and neighboring areas of the Artibonite Valley. Second comes that of inviting foreign specialists from various branches of medicine to visit Haiti and encouraging Haitian doctors and qualified students to attend demonstrations of operative techniques. … Finally, the hospital staff must seek to foster interest and a sense of responsibility in members of the community, especially among the young, for solving public health problems and spreading information about hygiene and other aspects of disease prevention. Without doctors, nurses, technicians and staff consecrated to the service of humanity, this hospital will fall short of our expectations. A modern building complete with diagnostic and therapeutic equipment is not a hospital although it may represent a useful tool in a beautiful shell. Even when staffed with trained medical personnel, such an institution might be a dismal failure unworthy of the name "hospital." Besides buildings with men and women, hospitals require food and medicine administered with insight and love, all the qualities that make up ethics. To this task my wife and I humbly dedicate ourselves. May the spark of "reverence for life" which came to us from across the Atlantic Ocean continue to burn until it has consumed us with real and deep concern for every living creature that suffers."

Gwendolyn Grant Mellon (Posthumous)

Hôpital Albert Schweitzer
Deschapelles, Haiti

Gwendolyn Grant Mellon Gwen Grant Mellon was the dynamic woman behind William Larimer Mellon, his equal partner in their prosperous Arizona cattle ranch and in their amazingly sudden decision to quit it and devote the rest of their lives and fortune to the people of rural Haiti, co-founding the world-renowned Albert Schweitzer Hospital there.

In 1947, after reading a Life magazine article on Albert Schweitzer's hospital in Gabon, Mellon realized that he wished to become a doctor and practice in the undeveloped world. The two enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans and afterward chose to build their hospital in the rural midsection of Haiti, 90 rugged miles northwest of Port-au-Prince in an Artibonite Valley village called Deschapelles.

A healthy ratio of doctors to population is 1 to 2,000. In the Artibonite -- a 600-square-mile area with 185,000 people -- there was not a single doctor in private practice.

Legal, financial and logistical details had to be worked out, and the legwork was left to Mrs. Mellon. The Haitian government was to grant the rent-free site and 15 residential outbuildings on Standard Fruit's former banana plantation at Deschapelles, plus water rights, tax exemptions for equipment and supplies and a 100-acre farm. But the agreement drafted by the Haitians contained a 25-year limitation. Mellon dispatched his wife to Haiti to change it.

Many wives of that day might have been daunted by the prospect of negotiating with the head of a foreign country, but Mrs. Mellon was not among them. She went to Port-au-Prince to tell President Paul Magloire the 25-year restriction had to go -- and came away with the crucial concessions they needed.

While her husband finished med school, Mrs. Mellon single-handedly supervised construction of l'Hopital Albert Schweitzer, which opened June 26, 1956.

Certain roles as "enforcer" fell to Mrs. Mellon. Then and now, many called it "l'Hopital de Mme. Mellon" (Madame Mellon's hospital) because it was she who sat out front every day, recording the patients' names and collecting the fees.

Mrs. Mellon helped initiate a vast array of HAS Community Development programs on the hospital campus and at the HAS outreach centers, where literacy, health, sewing, carpentry, homemaking and child care were taught. She was intimately involved in the dozens of sanitation and water projects her husband brought to fruition for the Artibonite Valley over the next 30 years.

Education: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts -1934

Publications: "My Road to Deschapelles" autobiography - 1997

Awards: Shortly before he died, William Mellon named his wife as his successor as president of the Mellon Grant Foundation and effective head of l'Hopital Schweitzer.

Excerpts taken from “Gwen Grant Mellon Obituary/Co-founded Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti” By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

http://www.post-gazette.com/obituaries/20001201mellon3.asp

Glenn W. Geelhoed, MD

George Washington University Medical Center
Washington, D.C.

Glenn W. Geelhoed, MD Glenn W. Geelhoed was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the third of four siblings, and the only boy. As an adult, Geelhoed received his BS and AB cum laude degrees from Calvin College. He also received his Medical Degree cum laude degree from the University of Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan Medical School, Geelhoed moved to Boston. Following a Harvard surgical internship and residency at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and also at the Boston Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Geelhoed served as clinical associate and senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. After completion of his chief surgical residency, Geelhoed joined the full-time faculty at George Washington University as an Associate Professor of Surgery in Washington, DC in 1975.He was awarded an appointment as clinical scholar of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Education:

To assist in developing further volunteer surgical services in underserved areas of the developing world, Geelhoed completed the DT Mental Health in the University of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1990

Masters degree in International Affairs from the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University - 1991
Masters in Public Health degree in Epidemiology
Health Promotion/Disease Prevention - 1993
Master of Arts cum laude degree in Anthropology with special interests in Biological and Medical Anthropology - 1994
Master of Philosophy degree in Human Sciences in the interdisciplinary program at George Washington University completing the Executive Leadership Doctoral Program to be granted an Ed.D. in Education

Currently, Dr. Geelhoed still works as a professor at George Washington University Medical Center and is a member of numerous medical, surgical, and international academic societies, including the Society of University Surgeons and The American College of Surgeons, and is a past president of the Washington Academy of Surgeons. He was selected the James IV Traveling Scholar of 1986, and inducted into the Academie de Chirurgie de Paris in 1990. George Magazine named him Humanitarian of the Year in 2000.

Dr. Geelhoed’s major clinical interests are endocrine surgery, surgical physiology, oncology, and transplantation. He has been a frequent Visiting Professor in most of the United States and on all continents, traveling with a strong interest in global health that includes the third world. Geelhoed is a widely published author accredited with several books and over 500 published journal articles and chapters in books. He has a major interest in medical education in academic, professional, and international organizations. Recent publications include Out of Assa: Heart of the Congo and Surgery and Healing in the Developing World.

Geelhoed has completed a year of research and service in southern Africa, supported by an award as Senior Fulbright Scholar for 1996, in developing the African Regional Research Program. He has led medical students, residents, and physicians into clinical experiences in the developing world on over one hundred medical missions in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and South America. Geelhoed has developed both Medical Anthropology and Tropical Medicine programs within the Medical and Master in Public Health schools of George Washington University, and as a George Washington University Professor of International Medical Education, is developing international health and medical education programs.

Paul E. Farmer, MD, PhD

Partners in Health
Boston, Massachusetts

Paul E. Farmer, MD, PhD Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to treating some of the world’s poorest populations, in the process helping to raise the standard of health care in underdeveloped areas of the world.

A founding director of Partners In Health, an international charity organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty, Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor areas.

Paul Farmer has worked in infectious-disease control in the Americas for over two decades and is a world-renowned authority on tuberculosis treatment and control. His work draws primarily on active clinical practice (Dr. Farmer is an attending physician in infectious diseases and Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and medical director of a hospital, the Clinique Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti) and focuses on diseases that disproportionately afflict the poor. Along with his colleagues at the Brigham and in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis) in resource-poor settings.

Paul Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti when still a student, in 1983, working with villages in Haiti’s Central Plateau; the following year he began medical school at Harvard, and two years later helped found Zanmi Lasante (Creole for Partners In Health), serving as its medical director from 1991 to the present. Boston-based Partners In Health was founded in 1987. Zanmi Lasante-- which has grown from a one-building clinic in the village of Cange to a multiservice health complex that includes a primary school, an infirmary, a surgery wing, a pharmacy, a blood bank, a training program for health outreach workers, a 104-bed hospital, a women’s clinic, and a pediatric care facility-- has pioneered the treatment of both multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV in Haiti. This role was key in helping Haiti qualify in 2002 among the first group of countries awarded money from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; Haiti was actually the first country in the world to receive these funds and begin employing them to fight disease. A ringing endorsement of Partners In Health’s community-based approach to health care, the award has allowed Zanmi Lasante to expand its treatment facilities into neighboring communities, where it is the only health-care provider for hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers in the Central Plateau –- and a model for poor communities world wide. In Cange alone, the small medical staff often sees over 340,000 patients each year.

With colleagues in Haiti and Peru, Dr. Farmer has helped lead the international response to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), later found to be endemic in the former Soviet Union, by establishing pilot MDR-TB treatment programs and organizing effective delivery systems for medications. Working closely with the Open Society Institute, he has participated in evaluations of TB treatment programs in Russia, Peru, Azerbaijan, Latvia, and Kazakhstan, with a special interest in TB among prison populations. Dr. Farmer was instrumental in establishing the World Health Organization’s Working Group on MDR-TB and has been a member of the DOTS-Plus Working Group for the Global Tuberculosis Programme of the World Health Organization; Chief Advisor of Tuberculosis Programs of the Open Society Institute; Chief Medical Consultant for the Tuberculosis Treatment Project in the Prisons of Tomsk (Siberia); and a member of the Scientific Committee of the WHO Working Group on DOTS-Plus for MDR-TB. He has served on the Scientific Review board of ten of the last international conferences on AIDS, and has been a leading voice on behalf of HIV/AIDS and MDR-TB patients across the world.

Education:

Bachelor degree, Duke University - 1982
M.D., Harvard University - 1990
Ph.D in Anthropology, Harvard University - 1990

Publications:

Dr. Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights, and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcomes of readily treatable diseases. His work in Haiti has taught him that poverty, inequality, and political turmoil lead inevitably to poor health outcomes among the vulnerable, and this belief fuels his scholarly, clinical, advocacy, and charitable activities.

Author or co-author of over 100 scholarly publications, his research and writing stem in large part from work in Haiti and Peru, and from clinical and teaching activities.

Pathologies of Power (University of California Press, 2003)
Infections and Inequalities (University of California Press, 1998)
The Uses of Haiti (Common Courage Press, 1994)
AIDS and Accusation (University of California Press, 1992)
Women, Poverty, and AIDS, co-editor Common Courage Press, 1996)
The Global Impact of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (Harvard Medical School and Open Society Institute, 1999)

Currently Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Farmer has both taught in and served as course director for social-medicine courses in the Department. He also trains medical students, residents, and fellows at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he is currently Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities. He has been a visiting professor at institutions throughout the U.S. as well as in France, Canada, Peru, the Netherlands, Russia, and Central Asia.

Awards:

Among the numerous awards Dr. Farmer has received in the last decade are:

The Duke University Humanitarian Award
The Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association
The American Medical Association’s International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius award”

Perhaps no award so typifies Paul Farmer’s life and accomplishments, however, as the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, which he received in 2003. “To say that Dr. Paul Farmer is a life saver does not begin to describe the impact of his work,” said Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Heinz Family Foundation. “Dr. Farmer and his extraordinary organization have been a force in making the world confront the health care needs of those who historically have never had access to proper care. Because of his dedication and compassion, critical health care services are now being administered around the globe to people who previously would have been left untreated.”

In his acceptance of the Heinz Award, Paul Farmer reminded us all that “as members of the world community, we must recognize that we can and should summon our collective resources to save the countless lives that were previously alleged to be beyond our help.” He believes we can do no less than this.

Dr. Farmer is the subject of Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2003) by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder.

Global Medical Missions Hall of Fame