Biography of Dr. Joseph E. Graham, MD

Joseph E. Graham was born in 1917, a home delivery, in East St. Louis, Illinois.
His parents, Joseph E. and Lenora Wall Graham, were first generation U.S. citizens, their parents born in England and Ireland respectively. Joseph was the firstborn, followed by two younger sisters— at 8 years of age he witnessed the home delivery of his youngest sister on the family’s dinning room table. He was asked to help the delivering physician with equipment and never forgot the experience, as he was horrified by the barbaric use of high forceps during delivery.

When Joseph was 9 years old, the family moved to Omaha, Nebraska where his father managed the steel foundry. Young Joe attended parochial school and was admitted to Creighton Preparatory for his four years of High School. While there he lettered in football and boxing, and was a member of the debate club, among other extra-curricular activities. In his teens, he also became an Eagle Boy Scout, learned to fly a biplane, and enjoyed skiing, tennis, and any activity that allowed him to take apart machinery and put it back together.

Joe attended Creighton University and was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity. In 1939, he was admitted to the University of Nebraska Medical School. The following year, his father became severely ill and Joe was forced to leave medical school to work and care for his parents and two sisters. In the summer, he earned money by flying a biplane at county fairs. Later that year, a friend of his father’s offered to help Joe as he knew how very proud Joe’s father was of his ambition to be a physician. This gentleman arranged for Joe to work in the steel foundry at night so he could attend the University of Nebraska Medical School during the day. This was Joe’s routine for the next four years.

During his fourth year of medical school, Joe met Dorotha Christine Parks, an elementary school teacher from Bloomfield, Iowa, on a blind date. They were married July 17, 1944. Dr. Joe served in the United States Navy during his internship, and was a flight surgeon during WWII. They were stationed in Pensacola, Florida where Dorotha taught school and Dr. Joe worked at the hospital.

In 1946, the couple became pregnant with their first baby. Tragically, that baby died at four to five months’ gestation. Later Dorotha revealed that, had that son lived, his name would have been Michael, after Dr. Joe’s paternal grandfather. Dr. Joe was forever touched by his first son’s death, wondering why that baby died, and he embarked on a lifetime search for reasons why a healthy woman would lose a baby. Dorotha and Joe were devastated and unable to conceive another pregnancy for many months.

When the war was over, Dr. Joe’s uncle, Dr. William Crotty, M.D., asked Joe to return to Illinois to help him with his general practice of medicine. The couple had planned to live in Florida where they had made very good friends. But in 1947, they answered Dr. Crotty’s request and Dr. Joe entered practice with his uncle.

Soon after, Joe and Dorotha became pregnant and delivered a daughter in February of 1948. Sadly, Dr. Crotty died suddenly of a heart attack only six weeks after having delivered Joe and Dorotha’s baby girl.

Taking over Dr. Crotty’s medical practice, Joe and Dorotha abandoned their plans of living in Florida, settling instead in East St. Louis, Illinois. During those early years, Dr. Graham did many home deliveries in the poorer sections of the city. Polio was raging at that time, and Dr. Graham became the Medical Director for the Polio Campaign for the March of Dimes in Southern Illinois. Over the next few years, he continued his general practice and the couple had two more children, both sons.

In 1953, their fifth child, another girl, was born. Dr. Graham had been reading and corresponding about a new specialty: Obstetrics and Gynecology. Seeing the new trend in medicine toward specialties, he was originally exploring anesthesia as a care choice and began to work with Dr. Lunde, the pioneer of anesthesia. Working and practicing in anesthesia became a way for Dr. Graham to earn income while he was in his residency.

When Dr. Graham realized that his passion was in Obstetrics and Surgery, he entered the OB/GYN residency at St. Louis University in St Louis, Missouri in the fall of 1953. His residency lasted 3 years. According to policy, he was unable to work outside his residency, and the pay was a mere $45.00 per month. However, Dorotha and Joe were now were expecting their 6th child in January, 1954. So they remodeled their small two bedrooms home in the rural county of Fair View Heights, Illinois. With the help of some patients and the local priest, they turned the attic into bedrooms for four of the children and the basement into a medical office. There he “moonlighted” in the evenings and on weekends, seeing patients while training during the day, plus doing the shift and on-call work that accompanies medical residency.

During those lean years of residency, Dr. Joe supported his family by bartering medical care for fresh farm produce, sides of beef, bird houses, hand crocheted blankets, and even a paved driveway so his children could ride bicycles in the summertime. Dorotha was a substitute teacher at the local parochial school. She was very active in the Women’s Medical Auxiliary of Southern Illinois, and during the polio epidemic she gave radio reports for Today’s Health.

In 1954 the American College of OB/GYN was formed and Dr. Graham became a charter member. His love of obstetrics grew by leaps and bounds during the ensuing years. When he took additional surgical residency training, he was at the forefront of the new transverse incision “bikini cut” for Caesarian Section.

In 1958 the Graham’s 7th child was born and the family moved to a larger house in Belleville, Illinois. Dr. Graham’s OB/GYN practice grew quickly. Dorotha helped in the office and the couple became solid members of the community. Dr. Joe and a few of his colleagues helped to develop and build the capacity of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Belleville.

During the 1960’s, much was happening in Obstetrics as work on the new oral contraceptive, “the Pill” began. Dr. Joe, along with other OB’s, went to the Guttmacher Institute in Boston to learn from Dr. Guttmacher about the use and administration of ”the Pill,” not only for pregnancy prevention, but also for use in cases of infertility and for the prevention and treatment of endometriosis, about which very little was known. Dr. Graham used the Pill very successfully for endometriosis and presented his findings at a conference in London in 1973. Following that conference presentation, he was invited to join the Fellowship of American College of Surgeons— FACS, which he proudly carried behind his name.

The 1960’s also saw more investigations into the causes of infant and maternal mortality during childbirth. During the 1950’s, the maternal mortality was disturbingly high, and Dr. Graham was part of the movement to reduce maternal deaths during labor and delivery. By the 1970’s, the incidence of maternal deaths decreased significantly in the U.S. By the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, corresponding attention was being given to the high rate of fetal death before birth. Dr. Graham, possibly due to the death of his first child, was very involved in careful monitoring of the fetus and mother during pregnancy. He set his protocol of management of obstetric patients to frequent visits, guidelines for nutrition, prenatal testing— such as was available then— as well as the use of the fetoscope and accurate McDonald measurements of fetal growth. Ultrasound was not yet available— only pelvimatry through x-ray if the physician was concerned.

If a pregnant mother experienced a fetal death, Dr. Joe was very attentive and compassionate. On one occasion, he asked his eldest daughter, a high school “candy striper” at the time, to hold a patient’s hand while he was preparing to deliver a stillborn fullterm baby. This was at a time when physicians typically did not attend such deliveries.

Over the course of Dr. Graham’s life, he is credited with delivering over 19,000 babies.
Dr. Graham was on the teaching faculty of St. Louis University School of Medicine, the teaching faculty of Southern Illinois School of Medicine at Edwardsville, a member of the Illinois State Medical Society, American College of OB/GYN Surgeons, Obstetric Director of St. Elizabeth Hospital in Belleville, Illinois, and he continued in private practice until his death in 1993.

As a retired Naval officer after his internship, Dr. Joe also served as an obstetrical consultant to Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois. He continued this work through the Korean War, and, during the Vietnam War, he was an “identifier.” This latter duty was most distressing to him, as he was called upon to witness the dead bodies of young men he had delivered and cared for as infants.

Dr. Graham is also credited with bringing the first hospice organization to Southern Illinois. This organization, as irony would have it, then cared for him at home during his last two months until his death from lung cancer.

He was a direct service physician, always kind, friendly, and very caring to each individual patient. Even though he became a specialist in Obstetrics, he continued to be concerned about the patient’s entire family and how they handled his patient’s care.
During the years of “home office care,” Dr. Graham and his wife were often the “holding facility” for babies about to be adopted. His records became sacred and were safe years later when people would try to seek their birth histories. During his 15 years of general practice, Dr. Graham was known to treat many patients for free, including the clergy, and the poor. One of his unfinished goals was to establish a free prenatal clinic in East St. Louis, Illinois.

Dr. Graham’s last obstetric delivery was in 1986, but he continued his practice, calling it “Well Women Care.” He worked with couples with infertility and was known for his work on the use of hormones to treat peri-menopause and menopause. He was one of the first to use the new Ciba/Gigy invention, the Estraderm Patch, launched in the late1980’s, and received recognition for his tracking study. His other area of study until his death was the specialty of Uro/Gynecology.

Dr. Graham enjoyed all types of music especially jazz, classical, and musical theater. His favorite jazz musician was Louis Armstrong; favorite musical was Man of La Mancha and Camelot. He read Aesop’s fables to his children and insisted on a family dinner every evening even if he was late from a delivery or office hours.

His favorite poem was Rudyard Kipling’s “IF”. He lived his life by this poem and he taught everyone around him how to die by following those directives. His eldest daughter was with him when he died at home in 1993. He was 75 years old. His beloved wife preceded him in death by 9 months at age 74. The couple would have been married 49 years and Dr. Graham had practiced medicine for that same amount of time.