Shigeru and May Horio Memorial Scholarship Fund
| History: |
This scholarship honors the memory of the late Dr. Shigeru and May Horio.
Shigeru Horio was born in San Francisco, California, in 1920 to first generation Japanese immigrants who worked as domestic servants, his father a cook and his mother a maid. He became interested in studying medicine at age 13 when visiting his mother who worked in the home of the chair of Ophthalmology at Stanford, which had its clinical training at the Stanford-Lane Hospital (now the California Pacific Medical Center) in San Francisco. He graduated in 1937 from Lowell High School, known for teaching many immigrant children who went on to college. He was the first in his family to attend college and matriculated into a combined B.S.-M.D. program, receiving a B.S. in medical science with honors in 1941 from the University of California at Berkeley. He was in his second year of medical school at the University of California at San Francisco where the preclerkship courses were held on the Berkeley campus in 1941-42. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and declaration of war with Japan, all persons of Japanese ancestry including American-born citizens, about 120,000 individuals, were ordered to leave the West Coast on very short notice by the end of March 1942. His parents, through their employers, found jobs in Salt Lake City, Utah and were not incarcerated in the internment camps.
Shigeru transferred to the University of Utah, which was expanding from a two year to a four year school. Because he had to leave Berkeley before the end of the semester, he repeated part of his second year at the University of Utah, starting in January 1943. Dr. Horio received his M.D. in September, 1944, graduating with Utah’s first four year class. During this time he married May Yoshino whom he had known in San Francisco prior to the forced evacuation in 1942 and had a son, David, just prior to graduation.
Dr. Horio did a rotating internship at Detroit Receiving Hospital and then volunteered to join the army. WWII was over and physician volunteers were no longer needed. Because many veterans were resuming their residencies, he was only able to get a one year pathology residency position at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. He and his family then came to Hawaii in 1946 where he spent one year as a pathology assistant at Kuakini Hospital and then a two year internal medicine residency at Queen’s Hospital, where his two daughters Katherine and Patricia were born. He and his family returned to San Francisco where he opened a private practice in the area now known as Japan Town. Because of his interest in medical education, he was a volunteer clinical instructor in medicine at U.C. San Francisco and Stanford Medical Schools.
He was the first Japanese-American in Hawaii certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1952.
Despite having been rejected as an Army volunteer in 1945, partially because he was Japanese, he was drafted in 1953 and stationed at Tripler Army Hospital. After discharge in 1955, he opened a private practice and was on the medical staffs of Queen’s, Kuakini, and St. Francis Hospitals, the last where he was Chief of Medicine in 1961-62.
Although he was not formally trained, he had an interest in nephrology and published in 1961 in the Hawaii Medical Journal a series of patients treated at Queen’s with the first hemodialysis instrument. He also published in the same issue an early case history of angiostrongylus eosinophilic meningitis.
He joined Kaiser Hospital in 1962 and remained on staff until his death in an auto crash in 1976 at the age of 56.
His community service consisted of his being a strong supporter of blood donation, being a high volume donor, and serving on the Blood Bank of Hawaii Board of Trustees. He also served as the physician to the men’s alcohol rehabilitation program of the Salvation Army. From 1967 with the founding of JABSOM until 1976, he was a volunteer clinical instructor and assistant professor of medicine.
After his death, because of his long-standing support of medical education, his wife, family, and Kaiser Permanente Medical Group established a JABSOM medical student scholarship in his memory. While she was alive, May Horio attended the graduation convocation of many of the scholarship recipients.
May Horio, née Yoshino was the seventh of ten children born to first generation Japanese immigrants in Alameda, California in 1918. She graduated from Alameda High School in 1936 and was attending San Francisco State College (now University)studing nursing when WWII started. She and her family were forced to leave Alameda and were sent to one of the internment camps in Topaz, Utah, 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. With some background in nursing, she worked in the camp clinic. Her future husband Shigeru sent her nursing uniforms. With his sponsorship, she left the camp to enroll in nursing school in Salt Lake City, but was denied admission to all nursing schools because she was Japanese. She married Shigeru in 1943.
She was a homemaker for twenty-three years when, encouraged by her family and wanting to fulfill her life-long desire for a college education, she enrolled in the University of Hawaii, receiving a B.A. in Sociology in 1968 and an M.S.W. in 1970. In 2009, she was bestowed posthumously, along with all other Japanese-Americans whose college education was interrupted by the forced evacuation, an honorary bachelor’s degree by the California State University system.
Because of her interest in nursing and medicine, she became a medical social worker and worked at Kuakini Medical Center until retiring in 1990. She died of metastatic ureter cancer in 1994 at the age of 76.
After her death, the scholarship was renamed the Shigeru and May Horio Memorial Scholarship.
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| Description: |
The purpose of this fund is to provide scholarship assistance to first-year medical students enrolled in the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. |
| Level: |
Graduate |
| High School: |
N/A |
| Residency: |
Hawaii Resident |
| GPA: |
N/A |
| Enrollment Status: |
N/A |
| Contact Person: |
Student Services |
| Contact Department: |
Office of Student Affairs |
| Contact Address: |
651 Ilalo St, MED 3rd Floor
Honolulu, HI 96813-5534 |
| Contact Website: |
http://jabsom.hawaii.edu/deans-office/osa/financial-aid-scholarship |
| Contact Phone: |
(808) 692-1002 |
| Contact Email: |
[email protected] |
| Application Info: |
http://www.star.hawaii.edu/scholarship |
| Press Release: |
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