October 25, 2010

Contact:   Bill Giduz

Dr. Murphy treats patients at St. Damien Hospital in Haiti.

A Davidson alumnus physician who was moved to organize a medical mission to Haiti following the January 12, 2010, earthquake will speak about his experiences during Fall Convocation on Saturday morning, October 30. His talk will be titled "Countries Without 911: Answering Their Call."

The event is being held in conjunction with Family Weekend on campus, and is open to the general public beginning at 10:30 a.m. in Duke Family Performance Hall. There is no charge to attend. For more information call 704-894-2201. For a full schedule of Family Weekend activities, visit this site.

The keynote speaker at Convocation will be Dr. Greg Murphy '85, a urologist and general surgeon in Greenville, N.C., who has conducted short-term medical missions in developing countries for 20 years. But Murphy said he never saw a situation as dire as that faced by the Haitian people. Two weeks after the quake, he and 15 other medical personnel he recruited began seeing patients at St. Damien Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

Arranging logistics to make the trip was difficult, and the situation they encountered once they arrived was shocking. "It was like joining a cauldron of chaos," he recalled.

"We did everything from orthopedic surgeries to basic medical care to burying the dead," he reported. Murphy also spearheaded an effort at his St. Peter's Catholic Church in Greenville to raise funds for supplies and transportation expenses. His service in Haiti was recorded and reported nationally on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

Murphy traces his philanthropic inclination to his undergraduate experience at Davidson. As a Stuart Scholar, he received a stipend for a summer experience abroad. He was active in the campus Catholic youth organization, and through it met a missionary from India who led him to volunteer at a leprosy clinic near Calcutta. "Talk about being bathed and baptized in culture shock!" Murphy recalled. "I had never traveled outside the country before, and then I landed in Calcutta in middle of the night, all alone."

However, the two months he spent there ignited a spark of compassion that has lit Murphy's path ever since. In medical school he served at a Swedish mission hospital in Swaziland, Africa. He has made seven mission trips to Nicaragua, served in Jamaica and helped organize a relief effort to serve victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. And for the past two summers he has accompanied a group of Davidson pre-medical students on their medical mission trips to Kenya.

Murphy will embark on another mission to Nicaragua just two days following his talk at Davidson, and he is organizing a follow-up trip to Haiti for January 2011.

In addition to Murphy's reflections, Convocation will include presentation of several awards. The college will honor two students with Goodwin-Exxon Awards for outstanding character. The Alumni Association will recognize the current sophomore who recorded the highest grade point average during the first year of studies. One outstanding faculty member will receive a Boswell Family Fellowship to fund a half-year sabbatical, and another will receive the Thomas Jefferson Award for outstanding teaching.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,800 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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