- Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer
Elizabeth Jones Gidney
Avia Ustanny, Gleaner Writer
THE VOICE of Elizabeth Jones Gidney trembles with suppressed tears as she recalls the experience she had as an eight-year-old 'mother' to children her brothers and sisters. Fierce pride, not self-pity, is the emotion that she is feeling, we soon find out.
Currently based at the Faith Hope and Love Medical Centre on Derrymore Road in Kingston (filling in for Dr. Dorothea Dayley who is on vacation in the United Kingdom), the doctor who specialises in alternative health has dedicated her life, generally, to the healing of mankind, but also specifically to the well-being of one family the Jones clan of whom she is the eldest daughter. As long as she lives, she says, not one of them will beg bread.
Gidney was born in the small Southern town of Hayneville, Alabama, United States. The fourth of 13 children and first daughter, she was very soon thrust into the role of caregiver and mother with the early illness of her mother, Lucinda Jones. Two of her siblings died in infancy, but the rest survived and were in need of her help.
With tears, Elizabeth remembers giving the baby her own lip to suck, with the childlike perception that since she had no breasts, her lips might be just as soothing to the crying child. The next morning, her lips were sore, but if it would quiet the hungry child, she would do it again.
Later, she took on after-school jobs from which she would use money to buy her sisters and brothers things that would make their lives more bearable. She told Outlook, "My father always said how much of a help I was to him. But, really, I was interested in making my brothers and sisters lead happier lives."
Elizabeth's' mother was an invalid, confined to a mental institution where she eventually died at the age of 46.
With all the claims on her time and attention, still the young girl managed to do very well in school. On graduating from high school, she visited her mother in the mental institution, dressed in her graduation gown. She would do the same on the day she got married, at age 19, surprising the ailing woman, dressed in her gown.
Early marriage was quite usual then, Gidney told Outlook.
Time would prove that nothing would sway Elizabeth from a personal commitment to her siblings. "We grow up steeped in poverty. But, sometimes when you think you do not have what you need, all you need is a commitment, a commitment that says its either death or doing it," she told Outlook.
The next 14 years were filled with a business career; from office clerk to office manager.
"During this time I was blessed with two daughters, Michelle and Lisa," she recalls.
The plan was to become a doctor herself so that she could help people like her mother, health-wise, and financially assist her brothers and sisters into bettering their positions in life. Medicine was her focus. Later she realised it was a spiritual calling.
In her words, "There remained a void that in retrospect I realised was spiritual." A career in holistic medicine would be an expression of a new-found spirituality at a later age.
While working as an office administrator, Elizabeth entered the State University part-time. Eight years later she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree, and in September 1972 she commenced medical school, graduating four years later.
Internships were done in psychiatry and internal medicine. Completion of her training in internal medicine was April 1980. A final year of preparation as a post-graduate included a focus on internal organ systems at Howard University Hospital in Washington D.C.
Regular hospitals, she was to discover, were not where her career would be played out. Upon her return to Buffalo in October 1981, she contracted employment in Emergency Medicine. Later, however, she started a private medical practice in Holistic Self-heightened Healthcare.
Concept
Gidney says, "It proved a concept whose time had not yet arrived in that area." But, she persevered, and in the summer of 1991, she moved to Detroit, Michigan, to avail herself of an "open, more universal milieu", into which, she now says "I am tapping with the core of my being."
Gidney is presently engaged in holistic healing. "I am personally witnessing the unfolding of miracles almost daily," she says. Other interests have lead her to design and present lectures and seminars in corporate management training, industrial relations and stress management.
Gidney's plan, now, is to do her part in educating the black race, so that they can come out from under the mantle of dis-empowerment which has been their lot until this present time.
She has worked with the Department of Corrections (prisons) in the United States, serving as a clinician, and then as director. She has also made many television, radio and personal appearances with the intent to heighten awareness of health and lifestyle interaction. Gidney has also developed a video/cassette series entitled, "Help Yourself To Good Health".
Elisabeth Gidney is also an author. She says, "My spiritual and emotional growth gave birth to much reflecting and led to my writing." Her two manuscripts are 'Poor Little Poor Girl' or 'The Will To Triumph', an autobiography; and 'Behind The Walls', which explore and share many "incredible experiences as a black woman professional working in the penal institutions of America."
Younger
Today, at age sixty-five, the doctor appears to be a decade younger than she actually is. Her commitment to a holistic lifestyle may be the cause of this. But, more certainly, her commitment to the well-being of her family has also been the fire at the embers of her soul.
She told Outlook, "I have five years left in the personal plan for the Jones family." So far, several of her 11 siblings have emerged as professionals in the medical and legal field.
"My objective is that the whole progeny of Stephan and Lucinda Jones will prosper," she says with passion and adding, "It is not just about my family. It is also about humanity. Know thyself. That is what I am after."
Perhaps, if only by her example of familial love, her part of the human race might acquire more self-knowledge, self-love and then begin to claim each other and prosper.
