Gwen Grant Mellon

Gwendolyn Grant was born on July 22, 1911, in Englewood, New Jersey, to William Wright Grant, a construction engineer, and Katherine Hall, a former New York debutante.[1][2] She grew up in Geneva, New York. She was a graduate of the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and in 1934 received her bachelor's degree in sociology from Smith College.[2][3]

With her first husband, John de Groot Rawson, she had four children, one of whom died.[2] In 1942, she moved with her three young children to Arizona in order to establish residency to obtain a divorce.[2][3] She worked as a riding instructor on a dude ranch.[2] There she met neighboring cattle rancher William Larimer Mellon Jr., an heir to the Mellon fortune, whom she married in 1946. Inspired by a 1947 article about the work of Albert Schweitzer, who had set aside an illustrious career to found a hospital in West Africa,[2] he told her, "I think I'll become a doctor and practice in the underdeveloped world", to which she replied, "You're right, we don't want to sit around looking at the damn cows all our lives".[3][4]

The couple enrolled at Tulane University, where he earned his medical degree in 1953 and she studied tropical medicine and hospital administration. The couple chose to build a hospital in an impoverished location in Deschapelles, Haiti, where 185,000 people were serviced by two government health clinics.[4] Building costs were covered by a foundation that she and her husband established from their private fortune. The 75-bed Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti cost $2 million and opened in 1956.[5][6]

Gwen Grant Mellon spoke Haitian Creole, worked as a nurse, admitted patients, and kept patient records.[3] She taught sanitation, oversaw digging of water wells, and set up literacy classes.[7] After her husband's death in 1989, she became the hospital's operating head and continued to work there until her death.[3] By 2000, the hospital was servicing 400 outpatients per day and 2,500 patients per year.[4]

Per her request and in keeping with the tradition of burying the poor in Haiti, she was buried in a cardboard box.[4][7] Both she and Mellon are buried on the grounds of the hospital they founded.[8]

On September 27, 1958, she received the first Elizabeth Blackwell Award at the 50th anniversary convocation of William Smith College.[9] In 2000, she received the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism.[6]

• My Road to Deschapelles. Hôpital Albert Schweitzer. 1997. ISBN 9780826410559.
• Letters From St. Marc. 1995. ASIN B007OVTHD4.

• Paris, Barry (2000). Song of Haiti: The lives of Dr. Larimer and Gwen Mellon at Albert Schweitzer Hospital of Deschapelles. Public Affairs. ISBN 9781891620133.