Fonds F 0145 - Elizabeth Gillespie fonds

Elizabeth Halliday Gillespie (1916-2003) was born to John Gillespie and Margaret Arthur in Toronto, Ontario. John Gillespie worked first as a schoolteacher, and later as a surgeon; he married Margaret in 1913 and the couple welcomed daughter Elizabeth three years later. In 1921, the Gillespie family moved to Windsor, Ontario, where John ran a medical practice until his death in 1932.

Perhaps following in her father’s footsteps, Elizabeth Gillespie chose a career in health care, earning her graduate nurse credentials at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children during the Great Depression. In 1965 she earned her MScN from New York’s Columbia University. She nursed in Ontario (including a decade in Windsor), and served for twenty years as a nursing educator with the fledgling World Health Organization (WHO) in its campaign to improve public health. Her overseas postings for the WHO included India, Egypt, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Burma; after leaving the WHO she worked as a public health nurse in Malawi and Kenya, and helped create a Bachelor of Science program in Nursing in Iran. A memorial scholarship in her name was established at the University of Windsor in 2003 by her sister Louise Proctor and good friend Anna Gupta, a former Dean of Nursing, funded by a bequest from Gillespie’s estate.

Sources: University of Windsor, “Supporting Education, A Lasting Legacy,” [weblink defunct] (accessed 22 August 2018) via print-out found in donor file; World Health Organization, “Nursing and Midwifery in the History of the World Health Organization 1948-2017,” https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/nursing-and-midwifery-in-the-history-of-the-world-health-organization-(1948%E2%80%932017) (accessed 5 October 2022); Obituary for Elizabeth Halliday Gillespie, The Windsor Star (19 March 2003), D6.