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Born in India in 1920, , has a life story marked with various pivotal moments of the 20th century. She witnessed Gandhi's Salt March in her final childhood days in India, arrived in the U.S. in the midst of the Great Depression, began medical school 4 months before the U.S. joined the Second World War, and became a physician at a time when few women were accepted in the profession.
She would later co-found the in La Jolla, California, and the American Board of Integrative Medicine. At 103 years old, Dr. Gladys, as she likes to be called, is still practicing medicine. In 2023, she published , in which she details her approach to a happy life by focusing on finding love and purpose.
In this episode, Dr. Gladys joins Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson, MD, to discuss her remarkable journey in medicine, what holistic medicine means to her, her own experiences with cancer, the healing power of love and human connection, and more.
In this episode, you'll hear about:
- 2:08 Gladys' early years and her path to becoming a physician
- 7:20 The discrimination that Gladys endured as a female physician
- 11:02 What Gladys' medical practice looked like when she began her career
- 12:23 Gladys' definition of holistic medicine and how it became a part of her practice
- 18:22 Gladys' case for why love is essential when providing healing for a patient
- 23:27 How Gladys' own experience as a cancer patient demonstrates her approach to holistic medicine
- 26:12 What Gladys believes has been lost amidst all of the advances that medicine has made
- 30:09 How spirituality has affected Gladys' approach to medicine
- 31:41 Concrete ways that doctors can incorporate holistic sensibilities into their practices
The following is a partial transcript (note errors are possible):
Bair: Dr. Gladys, thank you for joining us and welcome to the show.
McGarey: Thank you.
Bair: To start us off, can you share with us what first drew you to medicine almost a century ago?
McGarey: Well, 100 years ago, actually. I was born in India. My mother went into labor at the Taj Mahal with me, and then we had a wild drive in a Model T Ford to get to the hospital in time. Anyway, my parents were both medical missionaries. They were osteopaths. And they went to India in 1914, right in the middle of World War I. And so I grew up with the whole field of medicine, so much a part of everything that we did that I just knew when I was 2 years old that I was a doctor already.
Johnson: And so walk us through then. What did the formal path for you becoming a physician look like?
McGarey: When I started school, I was so severely dyslexic that I was unable to read, so I had to repeat first grade as the class dummy. For 2 years, I had this deep injury to my psyche, but the third grade teacher saw something in me that other one hadn't, so that I was able to really reclaim something of who and what I was.
And my family was fine because my parents both were really, really good at helping to encourage us to be who we really wanted to be. So when I was 15 I went to go to Muskingum College in Ohio, and then I went to Women's Medical College in Philadelphia. I started there in 1941, in September. World War II started in December, so all through the time of the war we were in medical school and it was the only women's medical school in the country. We started with 50 women and only 25 of us graduated, because the idea was that you're going to be facing tough work when you get out in the field that we're going to make it tough for you here. And it worked that way. But, you know, we started and we got into internships.
My internship was at Deaconess Hospital in Cincinnati. This hospital had no women physicians ever. So when I was on a call, I had no place to sleep. So I got the x-ray table and a pillow and a blanket. And, you know, it really was difficult for a woman to even think about being accepted by people. When we actually started our practice in Ohio, I had people the first few years tell me to get out of their house and go take care of my babies, and I would have to call my husband, who was a physician, and he could take over and get them in the hospital or do whatever they needed to do, exactly what I was going to do, or was doing. So, you know, those were really tough years, but they were amazing years. The things that we got to do and for me at this point, to be able to talk to you and to be able to do this amazing connection, which technology is allowing us to do now, when we had nothing, I mean, really nothing. Oh, we did have a telephone.
Johnson: You sort of alluded to this, but I just want to paint the landscape a little bit more. We had a doctor on a couple of months ago. Dr. Gunther Henry, I think, was probably in her training years, maybe, let's say, 2 or 3 decades ago. And she was telling us that she was in her training sort of just after it had become much more common and accepted for women to be in medicine and for women to be doctors. But all of that is just to say that for you who was in your training many decades ago and as you say at the Women's Medical College, I imagine that at that time, at most of the other, you know, quote unquote, standard medical schools, that there were virtually no women in the medical school classes. Is that true?
McGarey: Well, if there were, there weren't more than 10 with possibly 100 students, male students. No, we were very scarce and had to really fight. If I would introduce myself as Dr. Gladys McGarey, people would laugh and walk away.
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