Gordon Stifler Seagrave

Background

Gordon Stifler was born on March 18, 1897 in Rangoon, Burma, the son of Albert Ernest Seagrave, a Baptist missionary, and of Alice Haswell Vinton.

Education

When Gordon Stifler Seagrave was twelve, his mother took him and three older sisters to Granville, Ohio, to complete their education. He graduated from the Doane Academy in Granville in 1914 and from Denison University, with a Bachelor of arts. in biology, in 1917. He then entered the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. He received the Doctor of Medicine in 1921.

During the year he attended the New York Postgraduate Medical School at Columbia University for surgical training. In 1936-1937 the Seagraves took further surgical training at the University of Vienna.

Career

Seagrave served in the Hopkins medical reserve unit during World War I. In 1920 he was appointed a missionary by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. After receiving the Doctor of Medicine, Seagrave was an intern at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore.

In August 1922 the Seagraves sailed from New York City for Rangoon. They arrived at their missionary station headquarters on October 10 and were assigned to the Namkham Hospital in the northeast frontier area of Burma, three miles from China. Seagrave requested this difficult assignment because a family friend, Dr. Robert Harper, was about to retire from Namkham.

The Seagraves found the Namkham Hospital in a shambles. They rebuilt it with indigenous materials and slowly gained the people's confidence. The major health problems of the frontier states were malaria, goiter, dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea. He wrote a two-volume nursing textbook in Burmese and thereby gained government accreditation for the nursing school in his hospital. In 1928-1929 the Seagraves were in the United States on leave. During the year he visited the Mayo Clinic, and raised funds for supplies.

His first book describing his service in Burma, Waste-Basket Surgery, was published in 1930. The sequel, Tales of a Waste-Basket Surgeon (1938), described his second tour. When they arrived back in Rangoon in October 1937, they found that Burma had been separated from India by the British and granted limited self-government. But the Japanese invasion of China soon changed Seagrave's work at his isolated border hospital.

Beginning in November 1938, Seagrave set up and worked part-time in a Chinese hospital at Loiwing, treating American and Chinese workers at an airplane factory. By October 1940, Japanese bombers regularly passed over Namkham. Seagrave's family was evacuated back to the United States, and during the next two years the conflict engulfed him. He worked with the British Liaison Mission to provide medical relief. Soon he ran a 400-bed hospital at Prome in southeast Burma and was responsible for 300 other beds in jungle hospitals along the Burma Road and the Burma-China border.

Following the arrival of General Joseph Stilwell, Seagrave requested a transfer to the U. S. Army Medical Corps. The Seagrave medical unit of twelve nurses, a dentist, and another physician ran the only hospital for the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's Fifth and Sixth armies. They chose to remain with Stilwell and his band of 114 persons when they retreated across Burma to India.

In 1943 he became famous with publication of Burma Surgeon, in several versions for separate domestic and military use in the United States. In 1944-1945 the Allies retook Burma, as Seagrave described in Burma Surgeon Returns (1946). After six months' leave in the United States, Seagrave returned to military duty in Burma as chief medical officer of the Shan states for the British Military Administration. He could barely tolerate military or civilian administrative life, but this temporary position permitted him to return to the Namkham area.

In March 1946 civilian government was restored. Seagrave created an umbrella agency, the American Medical Center for Burma Frontier Areas (later the American Medical Center for Burma). From October 1946 to March 1947 and again from November 1947 to April 1948, he made fund-raising lecture tours in the United States. But Seagrave's location in the stronghold of the rebellious Karen and Kachin minorities inexorably entangled him in civil war.

On August 15, 1950, he was arrested, charged with treason for supporting the Karen rebels, and taken to Rangoon for trial. He remained in jail or under house arrest for fifteen months and was convicted and sentenced to six years of "rigorous imprisonment. " During a series of appeals, some witnesses admitted perjury. Seagrave refused to have the charges dismissed on a technicality, and ultimately the High Court of Burma released him on November 14, 1951.

In December 1952 his medical buildings reopened. Seagrave's situation had caused diplomatic and political concern because he was a United States citizen. In 1955 he published My Hospital in the Hills, in which he revealed broadened perspectives on missions, religion, and nationalism. From 1959 to 1964 the National Committee of the American Medical Center for Burma (AMCFB) supported his work. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote Seagrave a letter of commendation. Seagrave died at Namkham hospital.

Achievements

• Gordon Stifler Seagrave practiced medicine and surgery on the China border of Burma for nearly 20 years, created the American Medical Center for Burma Frontier Areas. Throughout his years in Burma the schooling of nurses was one of his most important programs. His famous six published works: "Waste Basket Surgery", "Tales of a Waste Basket Surgeon", "Burma Surgeon", "Adventure in Burma told in pictures", "Burma Surgeon Returns", "My Hospital in the Hills". Seagrave received the Kaiser-i-Hind Medal for service to India in 1935, received the Purple Heart and promotion to lieutenant colonel in August 1942.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Burma surgeon

    (Vintage hardcover)

  • Burma surgeon returns

    (Vintage hardcover)

  • Tales of a Waste-Basket Surgeon

    (Date not stated)

  • My Hospital in the Hills

Views

Seagrave considered medicine to be a profession of immediate relevance that allowed him to transcend the American tendency to dwell on the theory of missions, rather than on practical actions within needy societies.

Quotations: "All I wanted was plenty of jungle, and thousands of sick people to treat, preferably with surgery. "

"There is one joy in this world that can be equaled by no other pleasure with which I am acquainted. That is the satisfaction of having too much work to do, and then going ahead and getting it done anyway. "

He envisioned "not a Baptist hospital alone, but a Christian hospital; a hospital that would appeal to Americans whether church members or not; a hospital above denomination, where Buddhists and animists could come and receive loving care when sick and learn that peace comes only to men of good will. "

Personality

Seagrave had heard of the bespectacled, stocky surgeon of endless energy and commissioned him to promotion. He learned Shan and Burmese and relearned Karen.

Connections

While working at a camp in Lake Geneva, Wiscosin, during the summers of 1918 and 1919, Seagrave met Marion Grace Morse. They were married on September 11, 1920. The Seagraves had five children.

Father:

Albert Ernest Seagrave

Mother:

Alice Haswell Vinton

Spouse:

Marion Grace Morse

child:

Sterling V. Seagrave

child:

Weston M. Seagrave

child:

Leslie Mae Seagrave

child:

John H. Seagrave

coworker:

Liaison Mission

family friend:

Dr. Robert Harper

References

• Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945
• the devil in god's old man: biography of gordon seagrave