Social Justice for All Creatures Great and Small: A Spotlight on DCMS Member Dr. Marie Crandall

Story by Lana Sumner-Borema, DCMS Intern

The young Marie Crandall grew up in a lower middle-class neighborhood in Detroit where she “saw very clearly the intersection of race and economic status and life outcomes including violence.” She noticed the lack of funding in her public schools, and saw her peers “on the more tragic side of early teen pregnancies, car crashes, and gun violence.” This was her reality, though she knew that something must be missing. Life shouldn’t always be this tragic. Crandall never dreamt of being a doctor, she just wanted to stop some of the unnecessary death and trauma the police did not seem to be able to lessen. This ultimately led her to the world of trauma surgery.

At the time Dr. Crandall began her undergraduate degree in neurobiology at UC Berkeley, she recalls already being out of money and only halfway through her undergraduate career. She decided to take a year off to work at the National Institute of Health. Ironically, the Smithsonian rather than her laboratory time had the most impact on Crandall during her time in Washington, D.C. This was the first time Crandall got to see a side of life filled with art and history and without terrible trauma around every corner.

“Growing up as a Detroit public school student, I didn’t have any experience with art and history and archives,” she said. “I had good teachers and they tried their best, but I didn’t have the breadth and depth of education that some people can afford to get from schools with more resources.” 

Crandall’s ability to leave behind the harsh reality of life she witnessed as an adolescent and spend a year “learning” in a peaceful environment significantly influenced her future research.

After finishing her work at the NIH, Crandall was able to return back to U.C. Berkley for her final two years of undergraduate studies. She could now prepare for the MCAT with a “little more breathing room,” as she explains. She was no longer working three jobs and school at the same time. Finally, at UCLA’s medical school, Crandall describes this experience as the first time she could solely focus on school.

“It was the finally the first time I could just go to school and learn, and it was exactly what I wanted to learn. It was anatomy and physiology and how the body works and how to fix it.” 
The joy of finally being able to combine science with humans was also worrisome for her as she felt socially out of step with her peers in medical school. 

“I already felt I was very different than many medical school students as I was always more political, and I never saw a surgeon that was like me… I didn’t know if I would fit in.”
“When I was applying for medical school in 1991 and taking the MCAT, less than probably ten percent of surgeons in America were women. Only 11 percent of surgical residents were women.” 

Fortunately, Dr. Crandall did not have to face these percentages in residency at Rush University in Chicago as her class was 40-percent female at a time where the national average was only around 20-percent. It was a welcome change to not feel isolated as a woman on top of other characteristics that set her apart from her fellow students at medical school.

“Rush was a welcoming place. It was an incredibly welcoming place that made me the surgeon I am.” 

Crandall points out that unlike many women who have faced discrimination in the workplace, she has thankfully never felt the effects of this. However, she points out that in surgery, “when you are working 120 hours a week, you don’t normally notice the differences. You are just exhausted, you eat, you sleep, you work.” 

Crandall follows up this statement with a smile, adding, “we can’t do that anymore by the way- it’s illegal.” 

The differences in Crandall’s social perspective she ultimately feared would set her apart in medicine have driven her to great achievements in research. Following her residency at Rush, Dr. Crandall went on to complete a Trauma and Surgical Critical Care Fellowship at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington and a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Washington. Crandall explains that she chose Harborview due to their studies that combined community safety with trauma.

“They were the ones that demonstrated the association between pedestrian walkways and elderly getting hit by cars. They showed the difference between firearm-related deaths between Seattle and Vancouver. Showing those kinds of relations and having really true legends in the field to work with was really foundational. They have become people I look up to and have admired for my entire career.” 

When asked why she started research, Dr. Crandall gives three initial reasons why anyone would get into research. The first is “intellectual curiosity.” The second is winning arguments. “If you have the data, you can usually support your arguments, and who wants to be wrong?” she notes. The third, and the reason Dr. Crandall resonates with the most: “the desire to want change.” She further explains, “we want to either prevent, treat, comfort, or cure. In my case, I wanted to expose disparities and posit solutions.” 

Growing up in a neighborhood with trauma was a reality for Crandall, but with time and experience, she recognized there was a more peaceful world available to society. This experience gave her the ability to ask why her community back home wasn’t able to achieve this peace. It also helped her recognize the possibility that trauma might discriminate. 

“Trauma can affect anyone and it overrepresents people who are uninsured, of lower socioeconomic status and belong to disadvantaged communities.” 

Crandall also explains the “normalization” of firearm violence in the United States. 

“I think we have politicized it so much that we don’t recognize the plain truth: guns kill people. Period. You can’t argue with that fact. In places where there aren’t so many guns, people don’t die in such large numbers due to them. It is comparable to smoking. Before people started smoking so many cigarettes, not as many people died from lung cancer.” 

Returning to the Midwest years later, Crandall took a position at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and began working on a project identifying “trauma deserts,” which is defined as an area with no trauma center within a five-mile proximity. Her research likely resulted in the University of Chicago opening a trauma center in 2018 in an area of the city with originally no trauma center in proximity, leading to “markedly improved access for that area of the city.” Though that research may seem obvious now, at the time it had not been studied by anyone else. 

“If you were shot more than five miles away from a trauma center, you were more likely to die. What it really showed was that there was a whole area of the city on the Southside/Southwest side that was uncovered by trauma centers within a five-mile radius,” She said, emphasizing that “in a city of three and a half million people with seven trauma centers, the most distressed area of the city did not have a trauma center in proximity. Around the same time, the University of Chicago was planning on closing their emergency room.” 

Crandall and her team were asked to “testify in front of state, local, and national government” with her research and instead of closing the emergency room, the University instead formed a new trauma center in a highly distressed area. 

It’s one of the successes Crandall is still most proud of.

“It’s amazingly gratifying that the work we did demonstrated a disparity and had an actionable plan that actually came to fruition.” 

After relocating to Jacksonville in 2015, Crandall was able to begin research on the correlations between gunshot wounds and income.

“People who were injured by gun violence most commonly come from our most impoverished neighborhoods.” 

She also found that solutions to address the issues of poverty and interpersonal violence have to be “better than policing.” This research has “helped impact funding decisions in the last couple fiscal cycles which showed the City of Jacksonville invested in some community-based violence reduction partnerships, including cure-violence models.”

When Dr. Crandall is not saving human lives in the operating room or through advocacy, she spends a great deal of time appreciating the lives of animals. Crandall explains her long-held appreciation for animal life.

“I am a vegan, ethical vegan. I have been for many years. Been a vegetarian since college in ’87 and a vegan for 15 years now. I haven’t worn leather since college. Haven’t used things with animal products for a very long time, so it makes sense that I would enjoy being around animals.” 

Her appreciation and love for wildlife led her to a hobby of wildlife photography. In her spare time, you’ll find her planning trips to remote areas around the globe with one goal in mind: capturing photos of unique and exotic animals. 

“I knew I wanted to see pumas and so I picked a place in Patagonia that was a spectacular place that would lead trips to track the Patagonian wildlife. I probably saw 13 pumas,” she recalls.

A few years ago, to celebrate her 50th birthday, Crandall and a friend traveled to Rwanda to go gorilla trekking in a national park. From there, they continued through Africa.

“We went through Namibia and did a self-drive and saw desert-adapted elephants and leopards and lions. There was one stretch where we saw fifty to a hundred elephants. We saw black rhinos, white rhinos, gorgeous birds. It was just so beautiful and peaceful.”

On another trip, Crandall visited Western Sichuan in China for a wildlife tour. 

“We got to visit panda preserves, and saw a red panda in the wild which was awesome.” 
She has also been on trips to Kenya, Tanzania, and the Galapagos, among others. Her trips in planning include the Maldives in February to photograph the reefs and a future trip to Borneo to spot “orangutans and pigmy elephants.” 

Dr. Crandall’s accomplishments span far and wide. In January 2021, she was elected the president of the Association of Women Surgeons, a position in which she hopes to continue influencing positive change. She is a peacemaker inspired by a humble upbringing. Seeing the issues in her neighborhood and escaping them wasn’t enough; she took initiative into her own hands and now works to fix these problems through advocacy and treatment. She has the tools and knowledge to truly change the world.