| The Top 100: Medecine 
Kevin Cahill
For more than forty-five years, Dr. Cahill has been helping to heal the
world, as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force
in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts across the globe.
Dr. Cahill’s range of expertise is so vast, it almost exceeds
credulity. His medical career began in 1961, when he studied tropical
diseases in the slums of Calcutta, alongside Mother Teresa.
He treated refugees in the Sudan, was among the first to predict the
famine in Somalia, and has been caught behind lines of armed conflict
in Beirut and Managua. While serving in the U.S. Navy, he was the director
of Clinical and Tropical Medicine in Egypt. From 1975-81, Dr. Cahill served
concurrently as the Special Assistant to the Governor for Health Affairs,
Chairman of the Health Planning Commission, and Chairman of the Health
Research Council of New York State. From 1981-93 he was a Senior Member
of the New York City Board of Health.
In 2005, Dr. Cahill published To Bear Witness: A Journey of Healing and
Solidarity (Fordham University Press), which brings together a rich selection
of his writings – essays, op-ed pieces, speeches, and other works,
and offers a fascinating window into Dr. Cahill’s life’s work.
Today, Dr. Cahill offers his expertise on humanitarian efforts to a number
of national and international organizations, including the United Nations
and the NYPD – where he is the Chief Medical Advisor for Counterterrorism.
He is also chairman of the Department of International Health at the Royal
College of Surgeons in Ireland, director of the Institute of International
Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University, president of The Center for
International Health and Cooperation, and a clinical professor of tropical
medicine and parasitic diseases at New York University Medical School.
He is also the president of the American Irish Historical Society.
He has received 25 honorary doctorate degrees and has written 29 books
on a range of topics, including tropical disease, humanitarian and foreign
affairs and Irish literature.
Dr. Cahill has five sons and five grandchildren. His son, Chris Cahill,
is the editor of The Recorder, the renowned journal of the American Irish
Historical Society.
Mike Magee
Mike Magee, MD, is the host of Health Politics with Dr. Mike Magee, a
weekly, Internet-based program that explores complex issues of health
care policy and public health for consumers, policy makers, caregivers,
educators and the news media.
In addition, Dr. Magee is a Senior Fellow in the Humanities to the World
Medical Association and director of the Pfizer Medical Humanities Initiative.
He is a David Rockefeller Fellow, Professor of Surgery at Jefferson Medical
College, and a Master Scholar at New York University School of Medicine.
Dr. Magee is noted for his visionary perspective on health care and for
championing patient rights, cross-sector partnerships, principled leadership
and access to scientific discoveries. He is often called upon to speak
worldwide on a wide range of clinical, public health, and public policy
issues that impact the quality of life.
As a passionate advocate for patients and their families, Dr. Magee believes
that the health care system must address a number of major issues –
or its ability to provide quality care for all will be compromised. He
believes that a number of global megatrends – including aging societies,
the increase in home-based caregivers and the rise of the Internet –
are helping shape a new “health populism,” in which consumers
demand more empowerment and involvement in the health care system.
He is a pioneer in the concept of “home-centered health,”
which envisions a transfer of much of the health care process to the home
through virtual, physician-led teams connected to homes via emerging technology.
Dr. Magee’s books include Health Politics: Power, Populism and Health,
The Best Medicine, The Book of Choices, Positive Leadership, All Available
Boats and Positive Doctors in America. He has provided testimony to Congress
and has appeared on the Today Show, Larry King Live and in many other
media forums.
Born on January 20, 1948, Dr. Magee is the son of a house-call making
doctor and one of 12 children. (His brother Dr. Bill Magee, founder of
Operation Smile, is also a Top 100 honoree). He attended medical school
in Syracuse, New York, and did his surgical residency at the University
of North Carolina. He spent 13 years as a country doctor in rural New
England before assuming progressive academic and leadership posts, including
senior vice president of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, our nation's
first hospital.
On his father’s side, Dr. Magee traces his ancestry to Derry. He
is a direct descendant of Daniel Magee, who left in 1763 and settled in
Lancaster, PA. Subsequent family members served in the Revolutionary War,
the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I and World War II. -TMC
 Bill &
Kathy Magee
In 23 years, Operation Smile’s volunteers have provided free reconstructive
surgery to more than 90,000 children and young adults in 25 developing
countries and the United States, bringing them new hope and new lives.
Operation Smile was founded by Dr. William “Bill” Magee, a
plastic surgeon, and his wife, Kathy, a nurse and clinical social worker.
In 1982, the Magees traveled to the Philippines with a group of medical
volunteers to repair children’s cleft lips and cleft palates. They
discovered hundreds of children ravaged by deformities, and although they
helped many children, the volunteers were forced to turn away most of
those who sought help. The Magees saw the need and Operation Smile was
born.
Operation Smile now has a worldwide network of some 12,000 volunteers
spanning 75 cities and nine countries and is headquartered in Norfolk,
Virginia.
“Looking at a child with an ugly cleft lip and knowing that a 45-minute
operation will change this life from one of rejection and shame to one
of acceptance and joy deepens our commitment to work harder to raise public
awareness, to recruit more volunteers, to develop more financial supports,
to train more surgeons in developing countries, and to heal more children,”
said Dr. Magee.
Irish actress Roma Downey, best known for her Touched by an Angel television
series, is a board member of Operation Smile and acts as a spokesperson
for the organization. She recently traveled to Vietnam with Operation
Smile and saw some of the “miraculous changes” that the Magees
and their committed team have brought about. “I’m continually
moved by how this amazing work changes children’s lives,”
said Downey.
Dr. Magee, son of a doctor, brother of two doctors, and the second of
twelve children, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. His maternal grandmother,
a Murphy from Valencia Island off the coast of Kerry, settled in Pennsylvania
in the 1800s and married another native Irishman named Sugrue.
Working as a team, Bill and Kathy Magee, who have five children, have
made it possible for thousands of children to smile again.
For more information on Operation Smile check out www.operationsmile.org
or call (757) 321-7645. -PH
Joseph McCarthy
Dr. Joseph G. McCarthy, director of the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic
Surgery at New York University Hospital, like Dr. Magee of Operation Smile,
also believes that there is nothing more rewarding than making a child
smile. He was one of the original members of the Board of Directors at
the Smile Train, an organization which provides corrective surgery to
thousands of children around the world.
Dr. McCarthy, now Chairman Emeritus of The Smile Train Medical Advisory
Board, knew from an early age what he wanted to do in life. He once told
The New York Times how one day out walking with his grandmother they saw
a young boy whose face was badly deformed. On asking his grandmother why
the boy’s face was so, she told him it was God’s will. McCarthy
has spent his life giving God a helping hand and making many people’s
lives all the better for it.
Born in New England, he received his undergraduate education at Harvard
and then gained his medical degree from Columbia University in 1964. After
stints in the U.S. Public Health Service and the Columbia Presbyterian
Medical Center, he joined the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery
at the New York University Medical Center. He became the director of the
Institute in 1981, a post he continues to hold today.
He also contributed greatly to research into craniofacial anomalies and
served on the editorial boards of both the Journal of Craniofacial Biology
and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. He has written extensively on
facial surgery and the correction of craniofacial deformity, serving as
editor of an eight-volume text, Plastic Surgery, published in 1990. Dr.
McCarthy has been a recipient of the Joseph Garrison Parker Award of Columbia
University, the first prize of the Educational Foundation Scholarship
and in 2003 was given the Pioneer Surgeon Award by the University of Zurich.
Dr. McCarthy’s family came to America in the early 1820s and he
traces his roots on his father’s side to Mallow, County Cork and
on his mother’s side (the Fitzgeralds) to County Leitrim. Though
his aunt married a doctor (also a McCarthy), Joseph is the first bona
fide doctor in the family.
Unlike the schmaltzy image that some plastic surgeons have today, McCarthy’s
work has always shown how truly beneficial reconstructive plastic surgery
can be for both society and science. As he recently told Irish America,
“I look at plastic surgery as a problem solving surgery.
When we help people, we improve certain functions in their bodies to
make them look and feel better, and when people feel better they function
better in society.” - DOK
Mary Jo O’Sullivan
Dr. Mary Jo O’Sullivan is a trailblazer in women’s health,
and as such she has impacted the lives of thousands of women across the
U.S., Afghanistan, the West Indies, and even Dublin.
The oldest of six children, born to Irish immigrant parents, O’Sullivan
grew up in Brooklyn. Graduating from medical school in 1968, when it was
unusual for women to enter the profession, and almost unheard of for the
daughter of working-class parents, took dedication and discipline. And
a hefty dose of good parenting.
On the phone from Miami on her way back to Afghanistan where she is
three weeks into a three-month stint teaching at the Rabia Balki Women’s
Hospital in Kabul, O’Sullivan talked about her parents’ belief
in education, and in particular her mother, who nurtured her daughter’s
dream of becoming a doctor.
“I was in fifth grade and one of the boys told Sister he was going
to be a doctor just like his father, and I thought if you can do this,
I can do it. I went home to my mother and said ‘I’m going
to be a doctor.’ She said, ‘I don’t know where you get
your notions from my child, but off with you.’
“Whenever I dithered and decided I wanted to do something else,
she would just quietly say, ‘I wonder what ever happened to that
idea of wanting to be a doctor?’”
When it came time to go to college it was understood that if O’Sullivan
wanted to go to a Catholic college she had to pay for it herself. It was
also understood that if she made the grade and got into medical school
her parents would pay.
“So I went to St. John’s [University] and paid my way working
for a U.S. navigation company that had just started an IBM division sorting
out money orders – I had mostly high school students working for
me,” she remembers.
How did O’Sullivan’s parents afford to send her to medical
school? “I don’t know,” she answers. “My father
worked for the city – with the Transportation Authority. He had
an accident and had his leg amputated. The only thing he got by way of
compensation was a guarantee of a job for life. He was the only carpenter
for the City of New York.
“My mother was a house servant with the same family for 40 years.
She took care of children, and then the parents, finally she was the person
who was always there. And she did outside catering jobs with other women
in the neighborhood.”
O’Sullivan knew early on that she wanted to specialize in women’s
health. “I went to an all-women medical school in Philadelphia,
and during my junior year my first clinical rotation was obstetrics and
gynecology (Ob-Gyn) and I was hooked. So after an internship at St. Vincent’s
in Manhattan, I returned to Women’s Medical College for my Ob-Gyn
residency. We were taught by 21 women and five men.
The women had a very different way of dealing with and relating to patients,
impressing on us that we were responsible for their [the patients’]
total care. During training our patients had many complications of pregnancy
such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease to name a few. When
I went to New York Medical College and worked at Flower Fifth Ave., and
Metropolitan hospitals, I found that the women with complicated pregnancies
would keep coming back for both gynecologic and medical care. So my interest
now expanded to complicated pregnancies and women’s health.”
O’Sullivan went on to work with Project HOPE, serving as a senior
lecturer in Ob-Gyn at the University of the West Indies, and rotating
at government health hospitals in Jamaica.
“The idea was to try and keep doctors in the West Indies, and train
them there, rather than having them go abroad and lose them to Canada
and other places,” she said.
In 1977, O’Sullivan joined the Maternal Fetal Medicine Division
at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital Depart-ment of Obstetrics
and Gynecology.
Health care for women with the onset of the AIDS epidemic became even
more complicated. “Nobody knew how to prevent HIV infection spreading
from the mother to the baby,” said O’Sullivan, who saw her
first HIV- infected pregnant woman in 1983. She was part of the initial
U.S. study on HIV transmission from mother to infant, which started between
1989 and 1990 and was completed and published in 1993. “It was the
first study ever done that proved you could prevent the mother from passing
on the virus to the child by using antiviral drugs. It was an amazing
breakthrough,” she recalls.
For 22 years, O’Sullivan was Director of Obstetrics and the Maternal
Fetal Medicine Fellowship Program at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami
and the director of the Maternal Fetal Medicine Fellowship program. She
was an examiner of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the
certification body of obstetrics and gynecology in the U.S., for 20 years
and a director for six. And she was also secretary of the American College
of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the late 1980s for three years.
In April 2004 O’Sullivan received the Lois Pope International Research
Award for her investigation and achievements in the prevention of vertical
HIV transmission from mother to infant. In 2005, she was conferred the
title of Professor Emeritus of the University of Miami.
But is she thinking of retiring? Hardly.
Presently O’Sullivan is in Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan
Ministry of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
She is working with the International Medical Corps, training female Afghan
obstetricians, gynecologists, nurses, midwives, and hospital staff.
Despite the danger, O’Sullivan finds the experience rewarding. “Kabul
is an interesting place; poverty like you can’t believe. It’s
a land that’s devastated of practically all vegetation, and you
see the effects of the war, with buildings all or partially destroyed.”
But, she hastens to add, “It’s in a gorgeous setting, and
the people are just so nice that though everyone is worried about security,
you have to remind yourself about the danger. The people I deal with around
the hospital are just fabulous.”
And have things improved for women?
“It’s happening. Three deputy ministers of public health are
women. You see a return of educated women to the workforce, a lot of women
involved in politics, and, of course, all the doctors involved in Ob-Gyn
are female since women patients are not allowed to see a male doctor at
all.”
One of the problems, after years of Taliban rule, is that many doctors
have no proof of certification. “Eventually, we need to set up a
system to ascertain the qualifications of the residents and midwives,”
said O’Sullivan, whose stay in Afghanistan means that she will probably
miss her trip to Ireland with Dr. Noel McCarthy, who heads the International
New England Ob-Gyn Society.
“Every year for over ten years we have had a meeting in Ireland,
which, quite coincidentally, usually takes place around the time of some
big rugby match,” said O’Sullivan, who delivered the Guinness
lecture on Maternal Fetal Medicine three years ago at the Coombe Hospital
in Dublin.
But though she won’t make this particular trip, the chances are
good that O’Sullivan will visit Ireland later in the year, perhaps
with her sister Anne, a critical care nurse. The family maintains their
mother’s house in Gweedore, Co. Donegal, and visit often. -PH
 Elizabeth
Mullane
Inspired by watching her grandmother care for the sick, Sister Elizabeth
Mullane of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Brentwood, New York, dedicated
herself to nursing at a young age.
She has since used that dedication to successfully create Positive Caring
Services, the nation’s largest provider of services to HIV-infected
children, their parents and guardians. Sister Mullane first encountered
patients living with HIV and AIDS during her time with the Nursing Sisters
Home Visiting Service, where she made home visits to shut-ins and provided
support and guidance to their families.
She was later faced with the growing numbers of women and children afflicted
with the disease when she worked and lived at Providence House, a shelter
established by the Sisters of Saint Joseph, which serves homeless and
abused women and children. Sister Mullane remembers that it was at the
shelter that she realized there was a need for services for children living
with AIDS. At the same time Saint Vincent’s Services, a Catholic
social service organization in Brooklyn, NY, was looking for somebody
to research and implement a pediatric AIDS program. Enter Sister Mullane.
Hired in 1988, Sister Mullane immediately went to work addressing the
many issues faced by children with HIV and AIDS. She established a network
of foster parents, who were trained to meet the emotional as well as medical
needs of children with the disease.
The “Family-In-Transition” program works with dying parents
to provide for children. Sister Mullane also runs pediatrics, infectious
disease, and neurology clinics in conjunction with St. Vincent’s
Hospital. Through her tireless work, Sister Mullane has made an impact
in the lives of thousands. Positive Caring Services has expanded their
mission to care for children with special needs, and to provide foster
care for any child in need. Sister Mullane says, “It is a great
privilege to do this work. The joy that comes to the kids and parents
through the process is unbelievable.”
Sister Mullane traces her Irish roots to Manorhaven, County Leitrim on
her mother’s side, and Dunmore, County Cork on her father’s.
She makes frequent trips to Ireland, where she visits her extended family.
- CM
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