Grandmother to 17, great-grandmother to 13 and counting, and mother of five, Elizabeth Chittenden Lowry was born in Cananea, Mexico, July 16, 1909, to Horace and Katharine Hastings Chittenden. Grandma, as she's lovingly called by kin and friends alike, started her career as a pediatrician in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1939. Originally, she aspired to be a nurse, but her father redirected her saying, "If you are interested in the medical profession, you will want to be the doctor." And so she was, Dr. Lowry- for thousands of children over the course of 40 years. Grandma graduated from Vassar in 1931 and Cornell Medical School, as one of two women graduating, in 1935. After marrying Thomas Lowry, a medical school classmate, in 1936, she interned at Grace New Haven Hospital, where she contracted Scarlet Fever, battling it for a month - years before the advent of antibiotics. In 1939 she moved with her husband to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she practiced pediatrics full-time for 32 years, meanwhile raising her five children.

In 1971, after her own children were grown and her husband passed away, Grandma moved to Connecticut, where she continued to practice medicine at Guilford Pediatrics.  When she retired in 1979, she devoted herself to the “inexpensive hobby” of farming 4 acres of her grandfather’s and son’s land, raising pigs, sheep, and chickens, and entertaining her grandchildren and the neighborhood kids with the daily chores of farming: assisting the birthing of lambs, collecting fresh eggs from under brooding hens, harvesting peas, strawberries, and corn in the unrelenting summer sun.  

It has been 30 years since Grandma retired from pediatrics, 10 years since she laid down her bicycle, 7 years since she was ice skating figure eights on a frozen pond with grandchildren and cross country skiing with her beloved sister, Marj, in Vermont, and 4 years since she reluctantly gave up the last of her farm animals. But the grandma we know and love continues to inspire us to laugh at life and to never stop moving or aspiring to reach our goals.  We, who as children used her medical bag for pretend doctors visits, played cops and robbers in her hay barns, witnessed her as midwife to laboring sheep, brunched on Sunday in the company of her famous “lady doctors,” cannot do enough to celebrate this extraordinary woman.

If you ask Grandma to remark on the achievement of being one of few women doctors in the mid-1900’s, she’ll dismiss the praise; “There were lots of us back then; it was nothing particularly unusual,” she’ll say.  While humble perhaps to a fault, she does occasionally betray a sense of glee at reaching an age none of her ancestors managed.  This year in July Grandma will mark her centennial.  And though she has never tolerated birthday gifts, or any acknowledgement of another year’s passing, 100 seems too monumental an achievement to let slip by uncelebrated. 

Grandma’s Pediatric AIDS Initiative has been established to honor Grandma’s first 100 years of life in a manner that even she cannot refuse to celebrate. This initiative partners with the Botswana-Baylor Children’s Clinical Center of Excellence to fund clinic visits for children with HIV and AIDS.  For children living with HIV/AIDS, regular clinic visits are critical to ensuring uninterrupted treatment with anti-retroviral therapy, a requisite for long-term health.  The reality in Botswana, and in much of the world where pediatric AIDS is prevalent, is that poverty creates a barrier to ongoing care; many families simply cannot afford to transport their children to and from scheduled clinic visits.  Grandma’s Pediatric AIDS Initiative will directly fund the transportation costs that prevent so many children from getting the care they need and deserve.