Elsie Giorgi

Giorgi was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Italian immigrant parents; she was the youngest of ten siblings.[2] After attending Hunter College on a scholarship, she worked for a trucking company for twelve years before she could afford the tuition fees to attend the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.[1] She graduated from Columbia in 1949.[3]

Giorgi began her career at Bellevue Hospital where she spent ten years rising from an intern to chief of clinics,[1] while also running a private practice in Manhattan and working at a clinic in East Harlem.[2] She relocated to Los Angeles in 1961 for a psychiatry residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, running the center's clinic and setting up a home-care program. In 1967, she established Watts Health Center, a free clinic funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity, in the low-income neighborhood of Watts after she was "appalled" by the health of local children whom she had volunteered to examine as part of the Head Start program.[1] She also ran a private practice in Beverly Hills which served a wealthy clientele including numerous celebrities. She was a medical adviser on the 1991 film The Doctor and the television series Diagnosis: Murder.[2]

Giorgi never married; she once told a reporter, "I am Italian, so that means Italian men who want a docile wife and lots of babies. Do you see any trace of a docile person in my eyes?"[2] She died in Los Angeles in 1998 from a heart attack.[2]