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article by Beth Jolack

a new look for a Roanoke

landmark

Gill Memorial

Building

Gill Memorial Hospital was founded by Dr. Elbyrne Gill in 1926 as the Commonwealth’s first specialty hospital. This photo was taken circa 1930-1940.

- with permission of the History Museum of Western Virginia.

After state-funded renovations of Gill Memorial, the building re-opened in 2017 as home to RAMP, a hub of entrepreneurial activity in downtown Roanoke.

Dr. Elbyrne Gill, founder of the Gill Memorial Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, was able to use Roanoke’s position as a rising city in the New South to further his professional goals.

Dr. Alexander Fleming (center), who is known as the discoverer of penicillin, attended Dr. Elbyrne Gill’s 1950 Spring Congress in Roanoke. He is flanked by Dr. Gabriel Tucker (left) and Dr. Gill (right).

- Photograph by Alton B. Parker with permission of the History Museum of Western Virginia.

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Born in Bedford, Gill went to Vanderbilt University to become a doctor like his father. His studies also took him to the University of Pennsylvania and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, as well as in London, Berlin, Paris and Vienna. Gill told Ware he found some of the New York professionals elitist. “He said people up there looked down on the South so much, and he was determined to do more for the South,” she recalled. Gill’s civic resume was indeed extensive. He served as chairman of the Roanoke Board of Health and as president of the Roanoke Booster Club, a post he held for more than two decades. The doctor was especially vocal about how he believed Roanoke needed a civic center. Although Gill didn’t live to see what is now called the Berglund Center built, voters had approved a bond issue to build the facility the summer prior to his death. Gill and his wife Ruth had three daughters. “We’d go into a hotel or something and he would say, ‘This is the Gill Female Academy,’ ” Ware said. “He was dear and sweet.” Before his death, Gill launched the Elbyrne G. Gill Eye and Ear Foundation, and his family continues to run it in his honor. Each year, the foundation gives money to organizations earmarked to preserve vision and hearing or to provide professional train-ing. It gave about $50,000 in 2015-16 to recipients that include the Bradley Free Clinic and the Virginia Society of Eye Physicians and Surgeons, according to Gill’s grandson, John Chaney.

Today, Gill Memorial is home to the new RAMP business accelerator. But generations of Roanokers know the downtown Roanoke building as a specialty clinic founded by a longtime civic leader and health-care entrepreneur.

Dr. Elbyrne Grady Gill always strived to make things better. “He was constantly thinking of how to improve,” said his daughter, Betty Byrne Ware.

In 1926, Gill founded the Gill Memorial Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital at 709 S. Jefferson St. in downtown Roanoke. The facility is believed to be the Commonwealth’s first specialty hospital. Ware recalled her father opened the hospital to solve a problem: He was frustrated that the operating rooms were often already in use at the private Shenandoah Hospital on West Campbell Avenue when he needed one. Looking back, Ware marvels how her father managed to open his own facility and keep it going through the Great Depression. “I don’t know how in the world he made it,” she said. At the time, Roanoke was a comparatively new city, and Gill’s entrepreneurial efforts “encountered fewer impediments to success than they would have in an older municipality, where an entrenched medical establishment was already in place,” said historian Rand Dotson, author of “Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912: Magic City of the New South.” Indeed, like dozens of other successful local businessmen, Gill was able to use Roanoke’s position as a rising city in the New South to further his professional goals. A year after opening the hospital, Gill took on another big project. He launched a five-day ‘’Spring Congress” where doctors received additional schooling on diseases of the eye, ear and throat.

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formed in the early 1920s. After serving in a host of leadership roles, Gill was named the 1943-44 president of Lions International. “Dr. Gill expects to give a great deal of time during the coming year, not only to the work of the Lions Clubs, but to their objective of postwar stabilization committees in all clubs, and to use the facilities of the order for rehabilitation of service men after the war,” read a July 23, 1943, article about his new post in the World-News. In 1956, Gill formed an eye bank, a feat the World-News described as a first for the South. Eye banks recover and distribute eyes and tissues for use in corneal transplants and research. A year later, a newspaper article documented how Gill had successfully completed the first successful corneal transplant in the Star City. A 1944 profile of Gill in Commonwealth magazine described how he often provided medical care for free to the poor. The article tells of him bringing 35 blind or partially blind students from the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind in Staunton to Roanoke where he provided treatment that allowed them to be able to leave the institution. Ware has her own recollection of her father’s generosity. When the Gill family took a trip to the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, they met a young woman serving bread at the resort who had crossed eyes. Dr. Gill offered to correct them for free. “I was mortified,” Ware remembered. “I was so embarrassed he was calling attention to her crossed eyes, but she did it. And then, the next time we were over there, she had gotten a higher position in the dining room and she was engaged to be married.”

“He said there was no training for doctors after they graduated from medical school,” Ware said. “They didn’t know what the latest innovations were.” The postgraduate courses proved successful, continuing for over four decades and drawing more than 5,000 medical professionals. A Jan. 1, 1967, article in The Roanoke Times called Gill’s postgraduate course for ophthalmologists and otolaryngologists the first of its kind in the United States. “Since then, the idea has been taken up by a number of hospitals and medical schools throughout the country,” the news report stated. The postgraduate courses brought prestigious speakers such as Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, and Lt. Commander Charles Best, the co-discoverer of insulin, to Roanoke. “How you get such top men for the lecture course would be very difficult to understand, except were it not for your magnetic personality and persuasive influence in the medical profession,” a Dr. J. Kenneth Hutcherson of Louisville, Ky., wrote to Gill in a 1965 letter. The 40th Spring Congress was held a few months after Gill died suddenly from a heart attack on Sept. 30, 1966. The event was billed as a memorial to the medi-cal pioneer, a move the Roanoke World-News called “a fitting gesture for one who helped bring such prominence to Roanoke in his field.” Gill was also involved with the international Lion’s Club almost from its 1917 inception. He was interested in the community service organization, Ware said, because of its work to prevent blindness and improve eye health for people around the world. He was a charter member of the Roanoke Lion’s Club when it