Frances Cooke Macgregor

MACGREGOR-Frances Cooke. With apologies for the delay to her friends and colleagues, it is with regret that we advise that Frances Cooke Macgregor, an expert on the psychological effects of facial deformities, died on Christmas Eve (2001) at her retirement home in Carmel, California. She was 95 and died of congestive heart failure. She was a renowned social scientist whose research and writing on the social and psychological significance of facial differences was the first acknowledgement of disfigurement as a disability. Her publications document 40 years of research. Mrs. Macgregor was born in Portland, Oregon, but grew up in San Rafael, California and earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1927. She moved to Massachusetts several years later and in 1933 married the late Gordon Macgregor, an anthropologist for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. They later divorced. While they were married, the Macgregors visited Indian reservations around the country. A professional photographer at the time, Mrs. Macgregor took pictures that captured daily life on the reservations. Those photographs, published in 1941 in a book entitled, ``Twentieth Century Indians'', helped prompt Congress to devote more money to Indian reservations. Other pictures Mrs. Macgregor took over the course of a year in the small Massachusetts town of Hingham, were also published in 1941 in a book called, ``This Is America'', with text written by her friend, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In the 1940's, Mrs. Macgregor moved to New York City and did graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University under Dr. Margaret Mead. Mrs. Macgregor obtained her master's degree in sociology at the University of Missouri in 1947. Her work on facial disfigurement began during World War II while photographing patients at the Ellis Fischel Cancer State Hospital in Columbia, Missouri. Shortly after the war, she met plastic surgeon Dr. John Marquis Converse, who helped repair the shattered and burned faces of French and English pilots. His specialty coincided with her interest in social and psychological ramifications of facial disfigurement. Dr. Converse accepted her suggestion to conduct an exploratory study of his patients. At that time, the existing literature on physical disabilities was limited almost entirely to functional impairments: the loss of a leg, blindness, deafness and so on, and the problems of physical rehabilitation. As for those whose faces happen to deviate from the norm, there was and is, a special irony with which they must contend. Their problems have their roots in the inextricable relationship of the face to the person and its role in human relations. Moreover, it is a situation made even worse in a society whose frenetic efforts to look young and beautiful makes looking different a social stigma-a stigma that has the potential for social and psychological death. Her work led to the World Health Organization adding facial disfigurement to its list of disabilities. In 1951 The Society for the Rehabilitation of the Facially Disfigured was established. Now known as The National Foundation for Facial Reconstruction, the Foundation helps fund the work of the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center. Mrs. Macgregor remained in close touch with Dr. Joseph G. McCarthy, who became Director of the Institute following the death of Dr. Converse in 1981. The innovative streak in Macgregor drew the attention of the Russell Sage Foundation where she did a threeyear study at the New York Hospital, Cornell University School of Nursing in order to introduce social science into the education of nurses. She published a textbook, ``Social Science in Nursing; Applications for the Improvement of Patient Care'' (Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1960). She became a full professor teaching at Cornell University Medical and Nursing School from 1954 to 1968 then rejoined the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at NYU Medical Center. In 1991, Macgregor moved from New York City to Carmel, California. She continued her consultancies adding legal clients as well as medical colleagues and patients. Magregor's last research efforts focused on iatrogenic illness. Years before it was frontpage news in the New York Times (Sunday, December 19, 1999), she wanted her philanthropic funds to go to studying medical errors caused by physicians and other health professionals. On the same page as the continuation of The New York Times article of December 19, 1999, ``Breaking Down Medicine's Culture of Silence'', the Institute of Medicine estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical errors. Macgregor had already contributed to studies by the Institute of Medicine and also the Harvard Medical School in her name through the aegis of The Commonwealth Fund. She has left her estate to The Commonwealth Fund who will administer the Frances Cooke Macgregor Awards for further study of iatrogenic illness. At a private ceremony on January 4, 2002, Frances Cooke Macgregor was buried at the family burial plot beside her father, mother, brother and nephew at the Mt. Tamalpais Cemetery in San Rafael, California.