George Hyde, Class of 1949

Many would have settled for being Chief of Medical Staff at the Children’s Hospital of San Francisco and Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, with a thriving private practice and string of medical publications. Instead you decided with your wife, June, a pediatrician, to apply your training and experience overseas. After examining several locations, you settled on Africa. And, wanting to be maximally helpful, you devoted yourselves to training local physicians who could then train others. After two years in Kenya you became senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Zimbabwe, where you established that country’s first pediatric surgical unit. Working seven-day weeks, you not only operated on children drawn from three-quarters of the country’s population, you also developed practices and procedures to fit the limited resources available and trained two local surgeons. In time, you continued this work as a volunteer. The immediate result was a dramatic drop in the hospital’s child mortality rate. The long-term effect was that with trained physicians set to run a well functioning unit and with operative procedures and post-operative care in place, you had established a wonderful, self-replicating chain of care that will benefit children in Zimbabwe well off into the future. In this story of service abroad , it is stirring, though perhaps not surprising, to see that the spirit f the Haystack Movement remains strong in one of Williams’s oldest and most distinguished families.