The cosmologists tell us we are made of ‘star-stuff,’ that the elements and energies of which we are comprised have their origins in the sun.

For most of us, that’s theoretical. But some people seem to embody this truth. Their very presence emanates a certain shine that illuminates and invigorates everyone and everything around them.

Gladys Taylor McGarey was one such person.

Through her long and storied life, Dr. McGarey’s light touched and enlivened so many people in so many places. As a practicing physician, a prime mover in the field of holistic medicine, and the matriarch of a vibrant family, Gladys showed us—with her deeds as with her words—that the universe is made out of love.

Dr. Gladys’ earthly life ended on Saturday, September 28, just two months shy of her 104th birthday. She leaves in her wake a vast legacy of good works, all rooted in what she called the 5Ls: Love, Life, Labor, Laughter, and Listening.

As Holistic Primary Care’s publisher, Meg Sinclair noted last year, in her review of Dr. McGarey’s most recent book The Well-Lived Life, “This wise woman is not only a Godmother of Holistic Medicine, she’s a Fairy Godmother of life itself, spreading love, and always pointing us toward the fundamental truth that we really do need each other to grow and live healthy, fulfilling lives.”

Gladys Louise Taylor’s early life is the stuff of story books. She was born on the banks of the River Ganges in Fatehgarh, a town in the province of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India.

Her parents, Drs. John and Elizabeth Taylor, were both osteopathic physicians who studied with A.T. Still, the founder of osteopathy, and who served as medical missionaries representing the Reformed Presbyterian Church. In India, the Taylors provided free, full-spectrum medical care in remote regions to anyone in need regardless of creed or caste. Their patients included many with Hansen’s disease (leprosy).

The Taylors served in India for 55 years. They witnessed India’s struggle for independence from the British, including Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent protest efforts, and also the bloody violence of the 1947 partition of the former British Raj into the modern nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. As a child, she lived in tents amid nature untamed, or in towns teeming with people whose languages and cultures were very different from her own.

Despite her innate intelligence, young Gladys struggled in school, especially with reading.

“The word dyslexia wasn’t yet coined back then, but I was the class dummy. School was very hard for me. I absolutely did not know the difference between the word “God” and “Dog”….they looked like the same word to me,” she said in an extensive interview with Holistic Primary Care back in the Spring of 2020.

Gladys returned to the US as a teenager in 1935, and undertook her undergraduate education at Muskingum University, New Concord, Ohio. Like her parents, she felt the medical calling, and answered by enrolling in and graduating from the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia—a gender-segregated medical school founded by Quakers in 1850, which later on merged with the Hahnemann Medical School, and was ultimately absorbed into Drexel University.

In that era there were very few women in medicine—Gladys estimated the number to be in the dozens. When she interned at the Deaconess Hospital in 1946, she was the only woman in her cohort, and was obliged to sleep on an x-ray table because there was no women’s housing on the campus.

During her training years, she met William McGarey, also a physician, and they married in 1943. Together, they had six children, along with a shared medical practice in Wellsville, OH. After William’s US Air Force service, the McGareys relocated to Arizona, which remained Gladys’ home base ever since.

Early on in her career, Gladys recognized both the powers and the limitations of conventional allopathic medicine. She understood that while pharmaceutical and surgical interventions could indeed save lives, they often failed to heal what truly ailed people at deeper levels. They could repair damaged bodies, but they could not touch peoples’ souls. They did not have much to offer for promotion of true health or prevention of disease.

Though she was well-trained in allopathy, she was also deeply influenced by the writings and teachings of Edgar Cayce and other transcendentalists who contended that spiritual, psychological, and social factors were as important as physical and chemical factors in determining a person’s health status. She sought a way to somehow bridge the medicine of the spirit with the medicine of the body.

That quest led her to study and utilize Eastern modalities like acupuncture, and to speak openly about the vital role of love in the healing process. She and her husband were among the first medical doctors in the US to practice what we now call holistic medicine.

In 1978, the McGareys co-founded the American Holistic Medical Association (now called the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine) together with kindred spirits Evarts G. Loomis, and Norman Shealy, who died this past July at 91 years of age.

The AHMA was utterly unique at the time of its founding. It gave medical doctors and other conventionally-trained practitioners a safe haven forum in which to explore things like acupuncture, herbal medicine, the placebo effect, energy medicine, meditation, and the role of mindset in promoting illness and restoring health. It nurtured the lives and careers of many of today’s leading holistic, integrative, and naturopathic clinicians. Dr. Gladys was involved with the organization as a mentor, speaker, and guiding spirit throughout its many changes.

Gladys continued to practice in Scottsdale well into her elder years. She was among the first MDs to introduce spirituality, dream interpretation, and lifestyle coaching into clinical settings.

“We need to realize what we as physicians are really doing. We are working with people who have diseases, not diseases that have people,” she said, in the first article Holistic Primary Care published about her and her work back in 2003.

Acutely aware of the ways that our belief systems affect our health, she challenged many of the dogmas and doctrines that shape modern medical practice. One of her biggest criticisms was the constant use of combat metaphors.

“The fun of medicine was lost when medicine became a war machine,” she insisted during a talk at an AHMA conference years ago. She questioned language like: “wars” on cancer and heart disease; “barrages of radiation” to eradicate “invasive” carcinomas; “first-line interventions” with “magic bullets” from the “therapeutic armamentarium. She advocated not just for more humane treatments, but for better metaphors based on the principle that love is the most powerful medicine, and the wellspring of everything else.

Gladys also taught that what we initially experience as problems, setbacks, or misfortunes often contain hidden gifts that only become apparent later.

Reflecting on her lifelong struggle with dyslexia, she recalled that “When we started the AHMA in 1978, a few years after that, there were about ten of us sitting around the table. As we got to talking, we realized that of the ten of us, six were severely dyslexic. We thought, ‘Well, maybe the reason we began to think about medicine in a different way is because we had to learn in a different way.’ The ability to step out of the box and see things from a different angle….it turns out to be a blessing.”

Gladys’ parents named their daughter very, very well. In her words, her deeds, her very presence, one sensed that she was truly glad for the simple fact of being alive. Her bright smile could lift the heaviest of hearts, and her eyes conveyed the wordless wisdom of the ages.

Her essential love of life remained undimmed through some major upheavals—a wrenching divorce in her 60s, a harrowing personal encounter with cancer, the loss of a beloved daughter. She never sugar-coated the realities of pain, grief, fear, illness, and conflict.

But likewise, she never let any of these things douse her essential belief in the goodness of life. She understood the cycles and rhythms of life, the ways of plants, the hearts of children. She knew how to make a stranger feel like kin.

“Once you’re able to receive love, health and happiness will follow. Then the only natural response is to start spreading it to everyone you meet.”

It is for these qualities, along with her sound clinical acumen and her deep understanding of nature—human and otherwise—that Gladys Taylor McGarey was loved and revered by so many people. They are the reason that so many of the nation’s best and most compassionate clinicians continued to turn to her as a teacher, guide, and matriarch.

Anyone who had the privilege of meeting Gladys McGarey, speaking with her, and partaking of her insights, was touched for life.

Over the course of her years, Gladys distilled her wisdom—dyslexia bedamned!—into several books, Living Medicine, Born to Live, and The World Needs Little Old Ladies, along with her most recent The Well-Lived Life, and its companion, The Well-Lived Life Workbook. In 2003, Gladys’ daughter Analea McGarey published Born to Heal—a comprehensive account of her mother’s truly epic life.  

In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, we hosted an open conversation with Gladys in which she reflected on the meaning of the pandemic from the perspective of someone who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s, and many personal and societal crises. It is well worth a listen!

Gladys remained active—writing, speaking, teaching, gardening, and riding her bike– until her final days. In her later years, she established the Foundation for Living Medicine, to continue her work for the transformation of healthcare.

Though she herself is now gone from this world, Gladys Taylor McGarey’s spirit and her legacy will live on, carried forward by her family, by those whom she healed, and those whom she taught.

Per her family’s request, if Dr. Gladys touched your heart, please consider contributing to The Foundation for Living Medicine as it endeavors to manifest Gladys’ vision of a Village for Living Medicine and a community based on holistic principles.