Dr. Carmen Grange was born in 1922 in Colón, Panama to Jamaican parents working in the Canal Zone. Grange studied pre-med at Trinity College in Dublin and returned to the USA to do her residency, eventually opening a practice on West 13th Street. A resident of Charles Street since 1964, she was also Medical Director at Greenwich House, and affiliated with Beekman Downtown Hospital.
“I wanted to be a doctor and nothing would stop me,” says Carmen Grange, referring to the time when she was a young girl in Jamaica. “I was born in Panama but my parents separated when I was young and I was sent to Jamaica to live with my grandmother. She was a midwife and I would accompany her when she did her work. That’s why I wanted to do medicine from an early age.”
Grange was to discover that—for various reasons—it wasn’t going to be easy to attain her dream. “Sometimes it was the issue of my being a woman and sometimes because I was a woman of color,” she says. “It took some time but I just persevered. I was attending college in Jamaica but I couldn’t get into pre-med there. They suggested that I go into social work, instead! So I applied to Trinity College in Dublin and they accepted me. That was in 1959 and I was there for about five years.” What was that experience like? “I felt welcomed in Dublin,” she replies. “I had no problem being a woman of color studying medicine. It was nice, too, because there were people from all over the world doing the same thing. After I finished, I came back to the USA to do my residency.”
When Grange started her own practice—eventually opening an office on West 13th Street—she focused on internal medicine. “I liked internal medicine because I liked taking care of people with my hands,” she says. “I took care of patients of all colors. You have to like what you’re doing, which I always did.” Did she ever again face the kind of resistance she did while trying to get into medical school? “No. Once you’re a doctor—woman or man—you’re a doctor,” she says with a shrug. “And I don’t really miss it because I’m so old now. People still ask me questions that I’m able to answer, though.”
Grange never married even though she did have the opportunity while in Dublin. “I refused to get married because the man was Danish and I didn’t want to move to Denmark,” she says, smiling. “I wanted to come back to America. However, I’ve had a wonderful, intellectual family life thanks to my 16 nieces and nephews who are still around me. I helped educate them all. I spent all my money on them and it was worth it. Today they’re lawyers, doctors, and even a veterinarian. What was the point of making all that money if I didn’t spend it on them?”
Grange moved into her high-rise on Charles Street in 1964, the year it was built. “I had family connections with this part of the world from way back when,” she says. “When I moved in I used to have a great view of both the East River and the Hudson River. Of course, it’s changed a lot but I still I like the West Village. I did a lot here because I was always an active person. I love the local restaurants, too: Baby Brasa, Morandi—in my building, and the Riviera Café, which is gone now.”
These days Dr. Grange finds herself homebound due to suffering a heart attack a few years ago. But she maintains her connection to family and her long-time church, St. John’s in the Village. “I’ve had a good and busy life,” she says. “I especially loved all the traveling because in those days it was so nice. Not like today, which is so complicated. As a doctor I went to meetings and conferences all over the world and I met a lot of interesting people. It’s a big, varied world and Thank God for it. My grandmother used to say, ‘If you can’t do any good, at least don’t do any evil!’ I’ve never forgotten those words and they’re still true.”
Photo: Maggie Berkvist