HBCU grad tapped to be next surgeon General

Special to the NNPA
from the Louisiana Weekly

NEW ORLEANS (NNPA)— President Barack Obama turned to the Deep South for the next surgeon general, a rural Alabama family physician who made headlines with fierce determination to rebuild her nonprofit medical clinic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Obama has announced the nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin, a Xavier University and Tulane alumna.

“Through floods and fire and severe want, Regina Benjamin has refused to give up. Her patients have refused to give up,” Obama said in a White House Rose Garden ceremony.

“For all the tremendous obstacles that she has overcome, Regina Benjamin also represents what’s best about health care in America, doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients,” he added.

The surgeon general is the people’s health advocate, a bully pulpit position that can be tremendously effective with a forceful personality.

Benjamin has that reputation.

A decade ago, the New York Times called her “angel in a white coat,” a country doctor who made house calls along the impoverished Gulf Coast, paid whatever her patients could scrounge.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1979 from Xavier University of Louisiana, Benjamin attended Morehouse School of Medicine from 1980 to 1982, and received a doctor of medicine degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1984. She completed her residency in family practice at the Medical Center of Central Georgia in 1987. Seven years later, she earned a master’s in business administration from Tulane University.

Of her decision to become a doctor, Benjamin writes, “I believe it was divine intervention—it was in medical school when I realized there was nothing else I’d rather do with my life than to be a doctor. I had never seen a black doctor before I went to college, so I did not have an idea that I wanted to be one.

“I never thought that I couldn’t, but I never really thought about it at all. In college we had a very strong pre-med program and I joined a pre-med club and from there did well on interviews, and the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test), and I got accepted to medical school.”

While her educational accomplishments could have paved the way to a charmed life, Dr. Benjamin has opted instead for a life of selflessness and public service. She has placed a premium on improving the quality of life of those who are ailing instead of trying to earn a lot of money, she said.

“My priority has always been the needs of my patients,” Benjamin, who called the nomination “a physician’s dream,” told CNN. “I decided to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay.”

President Obama commended Dr. Benjamin for opening the Alabama clinic, “even though she could have left the state to make more money as a specialist or a doctor in a wealthier community.”

Dr. James Holland, CEO of Mostellar Medical Center in nearby Irvington, where Benjamin spent about three years in the early 1980s as a National Health Service Corps scholar, told The Huffington Post that Benjamin has always been “very ambitious from a political standpoint.”

Holland said he was surprised to learn that Benjamin had enrolled at Tulane in pursuit of an MBA near the end of her time at Mostellar. That decision suggested she had lofty plans, he said.

“It is unusual and it’s also an indicator when you see a physician working on an MBA, especially from a good school like that, you’re expecting that they have desires to advance in the political field,” he said.

Asked by the National Institutes of Health who her mentor was, Dr. Benjamin said, “My grandmother who died when I was age nine. She was very strong willed and very compassionate. Long before I was born, she helped start a Catholic church for blacks in our community. Mass was said in her living room until she got someone to donate property and got the bishop to declare it a mission and the church was built using an old Army barracks. Also, my grandmother lived on U.S. Highway 98 and during the Depression she would leave sandwiches and lemonade outside for the hobos (blacks and whites) who passed by. They always knew that they could stop there and get something cool to drink and something to eat. Those values she passed on to my mother and ultimately to my brother and to me.

“Several years ago, after my mother died of lung cancer, I realized that she was truly my mentor. She kept my grandmother’s values alive in us. She was very intelligent, very bright, witty and extremely social and outgoing, very much a team and consensus builder, and was very opinionated. Many of those traits I inherited from my mother. And just like most of us we don’t realize many of these things until after our parents are gone,” said Benjamin.

Xavier University President Dr. Norman Francis said. “It’s a good day, it’s a great day… I think the president made a great choice. Regina is a very special person.”

Francis, the shepherd of the nation’s only black Catholic university for 40 years, can boast of building the institution that sends more blacks to college than any other institution in the U.S. The proud president said he’s been telling proud Xavier alumni, faculty and supporters that “this is for all those mothers and fathers who worked their fingers to the bone to make opportunities for their sons and daughters.”

Dr. Francis said, “She is the model for what the payoff really is.” He added that Benjamin is scheduled to join the Xavier University board this fall.

From those early days Dr. Benjamin has emerged as a national leader in the call to improve health disparities, pushed by the need in her own fishing community of Bayou La Batre, Ala., and its diverse patient mix—where immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos make up a growing part of the population.

Her nonprofit clinic was rebuilt by volunteers after being destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, only to burn down months later. Benjamin later told of her patients’ desperation that she rebuild again, recalling one woman who handed her an envelope with a $7 donation to help.

“If she can find $7, I can figure out the rest,” Benjamin said last fall as she received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” money she dedicated to finishing that job.

Alice Gallops, an Alabama resident who started utilizing the clinic after moving to the area last year, told The Huffington Post that she was stunned to turn on her television Monday and learn that Dr. Benjamin was Obama’s pick for surgeon general.

“I think it’s wonderful. After Katrina destroyed so many people’s homes and their lives, this lady went around helping people at their homes and making house calls,” she said. “She does so many great things from her heart.”

Dr. Benjamin praised President Obama “for putting healthcare reform at the top of your domestic agenda,” and said she hopes, if confirmed by the Senate, “to be America’s doctor, America’s family physician.”

She added, “As we work toward a solution to this health care crisis, I promise to communicate directly to the American people, to help guide them through whatever changes come with healthcare reform. I want to make sure that no one, no one, falls through the cracks.”

Benjamin said that her own family is a glowing example of why healthcare reform is critical to the future of American families. “My father died with diabetes and hypertension. My older brother and only sibling died at age 44 of HIVrelated illness,” she said.

“My mother died of lung cancer because as a young girl she wanted to smoke, just like her twin brother could,” she added. “While I cannot change my family’s past, I can be a voice in the movement to improve our nation’s healthcare and our nation’s health for the future.”

Benjamin became the first black woman and the youngest doctor elected to the American Medical Association’s board. She also received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights in 1998, and Pope Benedict XVI awarded her the distinguished service medal Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.

American Medical Association President Dr. James Rohack, who has known Benjamin for more than two decades, told The Huffington Post that Benjamin recognizes “if you don’t have health insurance, you live sicker and you die younger.

He said, “She can bring the realworld perspective as surgeon general of the things as a nation we need to do to keep ourselves healthy.”

This is part of the July 29, 2009 online edition of Frost Illustrated.

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