Ivylyn Girardeau

Ivylyn Lee Girardeau was from Thomaston, Georgia, the daughter of John Bohun Girardeau and Emma Trice Girardeau.[1]

Ivylyn Girardeau attended Agnes Scott College, graduating in 1922,[2] and earned her medical degree in 1931, at Tulane University.[3][4]

Girardeau traveled to India with sponsorship from the Woman's Union Missionary Society (WUMS). She learned to speak Hindi and Urdu. From 1933 to 1945[4] she ran a fifty-bed facility, the Mary Ackerman Hoyt Memorial Hospital in Jhansi, mainly providing obstetric care.[5][6]

In the United States, Girardeau served her internship at the Women and Children's Hospital in Boston.[5] When she was in the United States on extended furloughs in the 1940s and 1950s, she toured and gave lectures about her work at churches and for civic clubs.[7][8][9] "It is the most fascinating country in the world — and potentially one of the most powerful or dangerous," she told Atlanta Constitution readers in 1945.[10] At age 72, she went to Pakistan and India again, as a medical relief worker.[3] She was a pediatrician in Thomaston, and on the original staff of the Upson Regional Medical Hospital.[3]

Ivylyn Girardeau died in 1987, aged 86 years. Her gravesite is in Upson County.[3]

Girardeau House, a Christian orphanage and school in Uganda, is named for Ivylyn Girardeau.[11] There are two folders of papers related to Ivylyn Girardeau's work in the Records of the Woman's Union Missionary Society, at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois.[12]

• Ivylyn Girardeau at Find a Grave