About Gayle Woodson
Female surgeons were an oddity when Gayle Woodson began her internship at Johns Hopkins. She was born and raised in Texas, but her career as an internationally renowned surgeon educator has taken her around the globe, lecturing on six continents and volunteering for humanitarian outreach in South America, Africa, and the Middle East.
She and her husband, Dr. Tom Robbins, have four grown children and six grandchildren. They divide their time between Florida, Newfoundland, and Tanzania. After Kilimanjaro is her multi award-winning debut novel. Adios Amarillo is an illustrated memoir of a special cat. Her current project is a Leaving La Jolla, a thriller/suspense novel set in a small West Texas town.
Why we go to Tanzania
Since 2004, my husband and I have made one or two visits each year, to teach at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. When friends and acquaintances hear about our work, they usually ask if we are with Doctors Without Borders, or if we are going on medical missions. When we explain that we teach surgery, they say, “How nice,” or “How generous,” but their eyes tell us they are wondering why. The answer, “We were called,” seems inadequate—far too meager an explanation to account for why we repeatedly take a 20+ hour journey to live and work in less than comfortable circumstances.
We teach doctors to teach others, essentially starting a chain reaction that helps more and more people every day. When we first visited Tanzania, there were only five ENT doctors for a population of nearly 50 million people. Three of the five were nearing retirement. A gaping hole loomed in the health system, a need that we knew we could help to fill, by mentoring young doctors. When people think of ENT, they think of tonsils and ear infections, but the scope of Otolaryngology is much broader, including medical and surgical management of sinusitis, ear infections, hearing loss, congenital anomalies, tumors of the head and neck, foreign bodies in the airway. Surgery cannot be learned just from reading or listening to a lecture, any more than one can learn to drive a car without getting behind the wheel. Hands on supervision in the clinic and operating room is essential to becoming a competent surgeon.
We have been so impressed by the bright and hard-working young doctors who have persevered in training. In November 2015, three young men graduated from the ENT training program and became specialists in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck surgery.
