About
Dr. Reilly Maginn – Surgeon, Adventurer, Storyteller
by
Fran Morley
Reilly Maginn, MD, FACS, has a story to tell.
In fact, the retired surgeon who resides in Daphne with his wife, Elizabeth, and their dog Sugar, has hundreds of stories, many based on experiences in his long and varied medical career that has taken him around the world.
Maginn(rhymes with again) has made a second career out of his stories. Since he began focusing on writing fiction and memoirs a few years ago, numerous publications have featured his work and he’s won several regional and national awards. In 2004, he took first, second and third place in the category Young Adult Fiction at the Alabama Writers’ Conclave – not bad for a Yankee. “They kept joking it must be a mistake, but I kept going up on stage to collect my awards,” the affable Reilly said.
Maginn’s own story begins in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother, a nurse, raised Reilly and his five siblings on her own after her husband was killed in an accident when Reilly was only seven years old. “I learned much about hard work from my mother, and as a child I was always doing something to try and help out,” he recalled.
Following service with the Navy in Korea, Reilly returned to St. Louis and put himself through college at St. Louis University and St. Louis University Medical School. After receiving his medical degree, he was appointed a Heart Fellow and went to Harvard to study kidney transplants for a year. He followed that with an appointment to the National Institute of Heatlh and study at Cambridge University in England, where he assisted on the first liver transplant performed in England.
When he returned to America, he accepted a teaching position at St. Louis University and helped set up the first kidney and liver transplant units at the facility. In the late 1970’s he left academia to go into private practice, but a few years later he answered another call.
“In many ways, the higher you move in academia, the less surgery you practice. I wanted to get back to being a surgeon. So, we moved to Montana, and I became a cowboy surgeon. I was a bit over-trained for Miles City, Montana, but I did everything there, and I loved it. We loved everything about it except for one thing-the winter temperature. It gets down to 40 below zero there! One cold February day I came home and told Elizabeth that I had read about a need for a surgeon in the South Pacific, and she said ‘if it’s warm, let’s go.’ The couple “sailed south till the butter melts,” in Reilly’s words.
Reilly and Elizabeth, a registered dietitian, spent the next 15 years working in much warmer climates. Their travels took them to Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Taiwan, and Saipan in the Pacific and to the Caribbean Islands of St. Lucia, and Dominica. The Maginns worked in rural church-run clinics and in larger facilities.
“I consider myself a medical outreach physician, not a medical missionary,” Reilly said. “Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn’t. It all worked out, but you just never know what to expect. Once I was appointed professor of surgery for the World Health Organization medical school in Fiji, but there was a military coup before I could start, and the kicked all the Caucasians off the island after the coup.”
Reilly made his first attempt at retirement in 1995; he and Elizabeth came to the Eastern Shore on the advice of a friend. “We have a 35-foot catamaran, so we wanted to be some place warm and near the water. We were here three years when I was offered a ‘write your own’ ticket opportunity to return to Samoa. They had lost their surgeon and were desperate, so off we went again. That was my only big failure in life. I failed at retirement!”
Never one to give up, Reilly took another shot at retirement a few years later, and the couple returned to Daphne in 2001. These days, Elizabeth works as a certified diabetes educator at Thomas Hospital in Fairhope and when he’s not busy with his hobby of container gardening, Reilly writes; a lot.
I have several hundred stories and articles finished and I’m working through the revision of a novel,” he said. “As a clinical professor of surgery at St. Louis University, I wrote more than 35 articles for medical literature, so I have a background in writing. But a couple of years ago, I saw an article about a contest called ‘Remembering,’ sponsored by the National League of American Pen Women, and I submitted a story called ‘Pago Potpourri’. It was my first submission, and it won first place. Subsequently, I’ve won that contest four years in a row, with stories about my childhood, my mother, Boy Scouts, and my medical experiences.
“I thought golly, writing is so easy! Of course, I’ve learned since then, that it’s not always quite that easy to get published.”
These days Reilly is back in school, studying creative writing at the University of South Alabama. He accepted the position as president of the Baldwin Writers Group (“I missed a meeting and got elected,” he jokes.) and helped increase membership in the group from a handful to more than 30. Last year, the (BWG) Baldwin Writers Group sponsored its first Wordsmiths Workshop and drew participants from all over the Southeast.
Recently, Reilly was nominated as vice president and program chair for the Alabama Writer’s Conclave, a workshop that is held at a different state university each year. ”I really enjoy writing and people seem to enjoy reading my stories,” he said.
Reilly Maginn's debut novel, BIO, a medical action thriller is a truly frightening tale of Jihadist bioterrorism. A story of weapons of mass destruction that could happen here in the US. Set in the south Pacific, a volunteer American physician/surgeon faces off against not only a deadly virus, but also the radical muslim terrorists who developed it. There is a fittingly appropriate conclusion. The novel is a real page turner and soon will appear on the big screen.
