Alfred Gellhorn; oncologist and younger brother of war correspondent Marth Gellhorn
Hyfler/Rosner
Cynthia Kee
The Guardian,
Tuesday April 22 2008
The commitment of my friend, the distinguished American
oncologist Alfred Gellhorn, who has died aged 94, to the
development and delivery of public health changed official
US policy for good.
The youngest brother of the novelist and war correspondent
Martha Gellhorn, he became dean of the University of
Pennsylvania's school of medicine in 1968, where he infused
medical education with a sense of social mission, bringing
in women and minorities. In 1973, he went to the City
College, New York, in the heart of Harlem. There he
co-founded the Sophie Davis school of biomedical education,
which offered high school pupils six years of medical
training provided their first two years after graduation
were spent in under-served areas.
Gellhorn realised, however, that inner-city medical schools
would be drawing on a poorly educated population. To get to
the starting line, education was needed earlier, and so the
"bridge to medicine", a kind of tutoring system, was born.
That led to the "gateway to higher education". The two
programmes were merged in 2000 as the Gateway Institute for
pre-college education, which led to 96% of students going on
to college and Gellhorn - in his 80s and 90s - going to
teach biology in high school. His colleagues and students
loved and trusted him; besides, he made them laugh.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, Gellhorn was the youngest of
four children of an atheist family. His mother Edna, a woman
of great beauty and vivacity, worked tirelessly in the cause
of women; his father, George, a gynaecologist, took him as a
schoolboy on his rounds with him. After medical school in St
Louis, he went to Columbia University, New York, where, over
25 years, he held professorships in medicine, physiology and
pharmacology. Then came the move to Pennsylvania.
In 1958, Gellhorn and his wife Olga bought Folly Farm, a
deserted plot in New York's Catskill mountains: she reared
sheep and he made hay in commercial quantities. They had
five daughters, one of whom tragically died, aged 18. Olga,
too, predeceased her husband. Before her death in 1998, he
often visited his sister Martha in London.
Gellhorn was a man of stature, and very funny with it. His
iron principles of justice, probity and economy - not to
mention his sense of duty - never left him. The day he died,
after months of painful illness, his daughters found him
fully and formally dressed on his bed. It was Monday. He had
meetings lined up.
His ashes will be buried at Folly overlooking the land he
loved and beneath a gravestone carved by himself and his
eldest daughter