Dr. EDGAR FITZGERALD GORDON was a physician, parliamentarian, civil-rights activist and labour leader in Bermuda, and is regarded as the “father of trade unionism” there. Dr. Gordon was born to Olympia Jardin and Frederick Charles Gordon in Port of Spain where he received his early education at Queen’s Royal College (QRC), graduating as one of the school’s most brilliant scholars.
In 1912 he went to Scotland to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Qualifying as a doctor at the age of 23 in 1918, Gordon was for some time a medical practitioner in the small Scottish town of Kingussie. In 1921 he returned to the Caribbean with his wife Clara and young family. He briefly worked in Trinidad, then went on to become chief medical supervisor in Dominica.
In 1924, Gordon went to Bermuda, where he would set up a busy medical practice on Heathcote Hill in Somerset. Gordon began to take up the cause of black nurses and the discrimination they faced in employment in Bermuda, writing a series of letters dating from 1929 to the editor of The Royal Gazette criticizing the refusal of the Bermuda Welfare Society to hire Blacks as district nurses. After decades of lobbying, the first black district nurse to be hired was in 1963.
Held by Malcolm Brock
MALCOLM V. BROCK, M.D., is the E.F. Gordon Professor of Thoracic Surgery. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins general surgical residency program and the Johns Hopkins fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery, is a specialist in thoracic oncology, and is a Professor of Surgery and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In additional to clinical thoracic oncology, his clinical interests include surgery for palmar, axillary, and pedal hyperhidrosis.
Dr. Brock is a surgeon who conducts cancer research at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, specializing in applying innovative basic science research to patient care. His main research interests are in developing novel molecular biomarkers for solid tumors that can help clinicians diagnose cancer earlier and treat it more effectively. He has studied using DNA-based methods to predict which patients will develop recurrent lung cancer, even after successful surgery, and to predict patients with esophageal cancer who will be sensitive to certain chemotherapy. Dr. Brock has published over 70 original research papers, book chapters, and review articles, and has presented often at national and international conferences. He has been the recipient of research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research Excellence, the American College of Surgery Oncology Group, and the Society of Surgical Oncology.
