R. Jan Gurley

Physician-writer

Dr. Jan Gurley, a board-certified internist physician, is the only Harvard Medical School graduate, ever, to have been awarded the coveted Shoney’s Ten-Step Pin for documented excellence in waitressing. Her health/science background covers the vast territory from sub-cell systems, to human studies, to the captivating science of seeing patients one-on-one. Her training includes basic science research (graduating magna cum laude from Harvard), then a residency at UCSF in Internal Medicine, as well as a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship (Stanford/UCSF Joint Program) in epidemiology, public health and public policy, followed by work as an administrator of large divisions of the San Francisco DPH where she currently sees patients in a clinic for the homeless. Doc Gurley’s health writing has appeared in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chronicle Sunday magazine, along with regular pieces in BlogHer, KevinMD and as one of SFGate's City Brights. Jezebel has called her "indispensible." Her research has appeared in academic publications including the New England Journal of Medicine. You can read more about her at www.docgurley.com.

Articles

Mary, Melodie and the Mission district: Women brutalized on our sidewalks

She’d slept one night in the Mission District under a bush, and woke in the dark when someone grabbed her ankle. Four men held her down and raped her. Now, almost three months later, she spoke in a flat, detached voice like this was somehow normal, just another blank to be filled in like her cough, or whether she had an allergy, her eyes drifting all around the room.

Steve, Tori and the Western Addition: raising children without a stable bed

<p><p><em>This is one in a series of articles, running between Thanksgiving and January, examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77054&quot; target="_blank">Looking for death</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77250&quot; target="_blank">Gunpowder on the streets</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77641&quot; target="_blank">Will losing your home kill you?</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77908&quot; target="_blank">Hidden in plain sight: dying and homelessness</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=78376#commen…; target="_blank">Be selfish: Give a gift to a homeless person</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=78423&quot; target="_blank">The Tenderloin: substance abuse and Nate</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=78591&quot; target="_blank">Starving in the Financial District: Ken and food insecurity</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?blogid=114&amp;entry_…; target="_blank">The Sixth and Mission Death Corridor: Assaults, brain trauma and homicide</a>.</em></p><p>If you're like me, you probably like to tell yourself that we don't actually need to&nbsp;<em>read&nbsp;</em>Oliver Twist to know that it's bad for children to grow up on the street. Especially since Dickens discreetly omitted the worst sexual predations that can happen to a child behind a dumpster. As a developed society, we're way beyond needing to revisit that lesson, right?</p></p>

Steve, Tori and the Western Addition: Raising children without a stable bed

Awareness of the risks to children from not having a stable home also means that parents who are already desperately trying to juggle the demands of managing a life without an address, or a stable food supply, or often a phone, are also frantically trying to do what’s best for their kids, often under mind-blowingly stressful circumstances.

The Sixth and Mission death corridor: assaults, brain trauma and homicide

<p><p>If you are sent to live on the streets, it is for most people the same as being sent, without a mouth guard or helmet, into a boxing ring. A ring where the gong never sounds and there's no rope to mark the place where someone could take a swing and blow out your eye socket.</p><p>Doesn't matte

Starving in the Financial District: Ken and food insecurity

With no money, a right leg amputated at the knee (due to an infection), no prosthesis, and living completely dependent on a wheelchair that has, at times, been stolen, and a brother to push him over our city’s hills and curbs, it’s quite a trek for Ken to make it to a location where’s there’s a food possibility.