June Brady Hyde, MD
October 19, 1929 – January 6, 2017
Passed away at home with her family by her side at the age of 87. She was born in Birmingham, England to Margaret Atkins Brady and Edward Richard Brady. June loved life and lived it to the fullest across five continents; her deepest concerns were for the poor, the disenfranchised and suffering children everywhere. She graduated from Girton College at Cambridge University where she studied medicine. June was a House Officer in Paediatrics at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
June met her husband Dr. George A. Hyde, Jr. while skiing in Austria and then followed him to New York City where she completed residencies in Pediatrics at Bellevue, Bronx Municipal, and St. Luke’s Hospitals. They married in 1958 celebrating 52 years of marriage until his passing in 2011. In 1960 they moved to San Francisco where they raised three daughters, Sandra, Karen, and Wendy. June set up the first neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) and then was the Director of Nurseries at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco for 24 years. As a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF, she was one of the first neonatologists to study Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and a lifelong ardent advocate of breastfeeding.
In her desire to embrace global health, in 1986 she completed a Master’s in Public Health at UC Berkeley and a diploma in Tropical Medicine in Liverpool. June and George were invited to teach at the medical school at the University of Nairobi, Kenya in 1987, and in 1990, they joined the medical faculty at the University of Zimbabwe, where she worked in pediatrics and HIV/AIDS. She and George returned to the Bay Area in 1999, where they spent their time traveling, skiing, and camping with their daughters and grandchildren. During their retirement, she and her husband worked as medical humanitarians and consultants in Equatorial Guinea. June continued working as a volunteer at SFGH teaching hundreds of medical students how to examine well babies.
June is survived by her daughters, Sandra of Montréal, Canada, Karen Edgerly (Bruce) of Boulder, CO and Wendy Murphy (Jerry) of Oakland, CA, her four grandchildren, Stuart and Abigail Edgerly, Matthew and Andrew Murphy, her oldest sibling Merril Sylvester of Aberfeldy, Scotland and members of her large extended family.
Friends and family are invited to attend a service at St. John’s Episcopal Church at 1707 Gouldin Road in Oakland, CA (510) 339-2200 on Monday the 16th of January at 11 AM. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the local affiliate of the Genesis Project - a community organizing and social justice network (http://www. genesisca.org), or the J. F. Kapnek Trust – the largest Pediatric HIV Prevention Program in Zimbabwe (http://jfkapnektrust.org).