Thursday, April 18, 1968
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
23
Dr. Gibbins tells of 35 years as India medic
By Kathy Hall Kansan Staff Reporter
"I'm not a feminist or a women's rightist by any means," Dr. Ivanoel Gibbins, part-time doctor at Watkins Hospital and graduate student in anthropology, said recently. "But I don't believe the only way a woman can be fulfilled is by giving birth."
Dr. Gibbins, who recently returned from 35 years as a medical missionary in Ambala, India, likes to talk best over tea. As she poured tea from a small silver pot, she remembered the times she had entertained in India. She found it hard to adjust to doing the serving herself.
"I will never be able to accept dirt and filth, although there was plenty in India. I will never be able to accept begging and will generally refuse to give money to a beggar. But I think about the circumstances that cause the dirt and the beggar to exist, and I try to do something about them," she said.
It was while studying English and biology at Park College, Parkville, Mo., when she read about the utter lack of health and medical provisions in India. At the time Moslem women could not be treated by male doctors.
She decided she must go and help them.
In India, she headed a run down inadequate hospital staffed by one doctor, and one other American nurse, she said.
When she left India last June, the Philadelphia hospital, supported by the women's foreign
missionary society of the Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Pa., had been expanded to include a training facility for mid-wives, nurses, and an orphanage.
The 61-year-old physician is happy about returning to this country.
She is happy about the changing attitudes in America "especially in its hypocritical stand on the equality of man." At the same time, she is shocked that her country could have riots, that moral standards could have changed so radically, and that prohibition had been repealed. Dr Gibbins left for India in 1932.
She does not consider herself "a fanatic on birth control," but she does not think there is enough food to support the people we have.
"But I worked just as hard bringing babies into the world as I did in rebuffing them, as it were," she said.
Dr. Gibbins reluctantly admits her life has been exciting—helping hundreds of thousands of refugees after the partition of India in 1947, meeting Nehru, and sitting on the floor barefoot, with Mohandis Gandhi.
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She has seen joy in her lifetime—when she saw a former student become a respected army nurse after the doctor herself had despaired teaching her anatomy, when a new hospital was built even though there was not enough money, and when a well was dug, where buckets of water had been carried before.
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