Free A Mighty Purpose by Adam Fifield Page B

century.”
    Growing up in China and regularly associating with Chinese, he later claimed, had spawned in him a “complete lack of race consciousness.” Whether or not this was true or a rare burst of braggadocio, Grant’s ability later in life to quickly establish a rapport with people from other cultures was undoubtedly influenced by spending his formative years as a minority resident in a developing country.
    Grant’s China roots began with his grandfather, a Baptist medical missionary from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, named James Skiffington Grant. After graduating from medical school at the University of Michigan, James S. Grant joined a university-sponsored volunteer program to open a health clinicin China. He was supported by the Baptist Foreign Mission Society. Dr. Grant went to the seaport town of Ningpo in 1889, and his son John Black Grant was born there on August 31, 1890. The clinic Jim Grant’s grandfather helped found would become a major hospital. Dr. Grant was known for his deep personal commitment. He made house calls and skipped summer vacations to tend to patients. When hospital beds were filled up, he would sometimes invite patients into his home and reportedly even once offered one his own bed. He remained in China during the violent Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when foreigners and Christians were targeted and many fled. He knew the horror of disease intimately—he lost a brother to appendicitis and a son, John Grant’s younger brother, apparently to dysentery.
    Jim Grant was five or six years old the last time he saw his paternal grandfather. He recalled in his oral history that the elder Grant “had a stubbie”—he had lost part of his middle finger somehow.
    John Black Grant left China to attend Acadia College in Nova Scotia. As World War I enveloped Europe, he tried to volunteer for the Canadian Army but was turned down because of poor vision. “One of his great regrets was that he didn’t participate in the war at that time,” Jim Grant remarked. His father chose Jim’s middle name, Pineo, to honor one of his friends who died in the Great War.
    After graduating from medical school at the University of Michigan in 1917, John Grant joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division. He briefly worked in North Carolina on a rural health project and was then sent back toChina to take part in a Rockefeller-funded program to combat hookworm disease. With some real-world experience under his fingernails, he enrolled at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore before returning to China in 1921. He was sent again by the Rockefeller Foundation, this time to become the first-ever professor of public health at the medical educational facility Rockefeller had funded and built in Peking. The sprawling, state-of-the-art, twenty-five-acre Peking Union Medical College was intended to be China’s answer to Johns Hopkins. It comprised a hospital, classrooms, laboratories, residences, and a school.
    As a young man, John Grant found himself in a position of immense responsibility and influence. Thin and bespectacled, he eschewed small talk and projected an air of self-confidence “that could border on brashness,” according to a 2005 profile in
Johns Hopkins Public Health
magazine. Though he aroused idealism in his students and inspired many to devote themselves to public service, he was not demonstratively warm or effusive. As Jim put it, “he was not a man to talk a lot.” Several decades after his service in China, John Grant’s then graduate student Conrad Seipp would characterize the legendary doctor in the preface of a book of Grant’s collected writings: “Singleness of purpose is one of the outstanding characteristics of the man … There is in him a tenacity and a constancy, even an obsessive quality in the advocacy of his views on health care, but most of all there is a profound integrity.”
    John Grant’s father had been wary of his son becoming a