Gretchen Berggren, M.D., who, with her late husband, made profound contributions to global health, will inaugurate a new lecture series established in their honor in the College of Public Health at noon on Wednesday.
The Drs. Warren L. and Gretchen G. Berggren Lectureship Series, the first endowed lectureship for the college, was established through a gift from Carol Swarts, M.D., class of 1959, a longtime friend of the couple. Warren Berggren died on Jan. 30 at the age of 85.
“I am humbled by the idea, and my husband would have been too, of this lectureship. I see this as an opportunity to honor my husband. We spent our lives working for an equitable distribution of preventive health care in poor communities around the world,” Dr. Berggren said.
For more than 50 years, the Berggrens worked together as medical missionaries, educators and researchers to improve the health of children across the Third World. In Deschapelles, Haiti, where they have spent much of their career, the hospital’s community health building was known as “Kay Berggren,” Creole for “the Berggrens’ house.”
The couple met at UNMC, where Warren graduated in 1955 and Gretchen in 1958, the only woman in her class. He is from Aurora, Neb. She is from Chadron, Neb. Over the years, they have traveled to Bangladesh, Tunisia, and more than 20 countries in Africa and Haiti, where Gretchen focused on maternal and child health and family planning, and Warren focused on tropical disease and general public health. Together, they pioneered new approaches to community-based health care.
Gretchen’s roommate, Carol, another med student, also became interested in medical missionary work and joined them for a time in post-independent Congo. She practiced radiation oncology for many years in northern Kentucky. At the age of 81, she continues to work in Alaska filling in for other physicians as needed.
In addition to their global health work, the Berggrens have held academic appointments at Harvard School of Public Health, where they also obtained advanced degrees. They also have worked for UNICEF; Save the Children, where Warren was the director of primary health care from 1984 to 1993; and World Relief, where Warren served as its Child Survival Health Director and Gretchen worked as a maternal and child health specialist.
Even after Warren’s death, Gretchen continues her work through teaching at the Center for Global Health at the University of Colorado School of Public Health in Aurora, where she has been an adjunct faculty member since 2003.
“Our work has demonstrated that death and disability rates can be documented and lowered when you work with people in the community to identify and combat the most common causes of death and disability,” Dr. Berggren said.
I may be the last of the "old days" faculty members still living who remembers Gretchen as a student. She was a natural leader and could always be counted on when needed for any campus event. Congratulations and thank you for all your good works.
Dr. L. A. Cappiello
I THOUGHT I was a seasoned alumna having graduated from the UNMC COM in 1990, but as I spent time with Gretchen Berggren and Carol Swarts in Omaha during the 2015 Alumnae Reunion Weekend, I now know I am infantile by comparison with respect to the impact individual physicians can have in medicine and on global health. I thank these incredible doctors for inspiring many generations of medical teams and for their unfailing respect for the work of the healers working with them.
Dr. Renee A. Davis, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, The University of Cincinnati Medical Center