Ira A. Ferguson Sr. 23M never shied away from doing the hard stuff. He helped his parents run a farm and dry goods store in his native Alabama. He drove an ambulance during World War I and preserved cadavers to help pay for medical school before transferring to Emory. The first of three generations to attend Emory, Ferguson established a private practice and became a professor and chief of surgery at Grady Hospital. In the process, he tended the wounded during both world wars in Europe and championed the education of African American physicians in the segregated South.
As a tribute to his late father, retired Emory surgeon Ira Ferguson Jr. 52M provided a $250,000 gift to create the annual Ira A. Ferguson Lecture. In the first talk this year, Charles Ferguson, 76M—Ira Jr.’s son and a former Emory surgeon who now teaches at Harvard—traced his grandfather’s role in what he calls “the other Tuskegee experiment,” an event overshadowed by the infamous syphilis study of black sharecroppers from 1933 to 1972.
To supplement his income after World War II, Ira Sr. consulted for the Veterans Administration (VA), inspecting hospitals throughout the Southeast and conducting disaster-training courses for national defense. During visits to the Tuskegee VA Hospital, Ferguson befriended Asa Yancey, an African American physician from Atlanta and the hospital’s new chief of surgery. Yancey was eager to establish a surgical residency program but lacked the required teaching resources. Ira Sr. stepped up and organized a team from Emory to teach at Tuskegee once a week. Thus, Ferguson helped establish Alabama’s first surgical residency program for African American physicians in 1948.
Ten years later, Ferguson convinced Yancey to return to Atlanta as director of the Hughes Spalding Pavilion, which served black patients at Grady. Yancey subsequently became medical director at Grady and professor and associate dean of the medical school at Emory.
“Why did a young man from a small town in Alabama spend such time and effort in helping develop surgical training programs for African Americans?” asked Charles during the Ferguson lecture. “He had to overcome obstacles himself and was compelled to make things easier for others. Few 46-year-old surgeons with a successful practice would volunteer for overseas military duty, much less accompany a beach invasion force at age 49 [during World War II], with two teenage boys to support. Perhaps through such self sacrifice, one learns to truly serve others.”
September 2008
