Remembering Dra. Gracia Tupas Hamoy (UP Medicine ’60)
November 12, 1933 – March 12, 2026
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In 1960, a class of young physicians left the hallowed halls of the UP College of Medicine at the Philippine General Hospital and into a country that needed them. Many would go on to distinguished careers. One of them, Juan “Johnny” Flavier, would become Secretary of Health and a senator, celebrated for championing the Doctor to the Barrios program. But years before Flavier wrote his famous book, and decades before the program bearing that name was formally established, a quiet classmate of his had already made her choice. Dra. Gracia Tupas Hamoy went home.
Home was Dapitan City, at the northeastern corner of Zamboanga del Norte, the same city where José Rizal had lived in exile and practiced medicine among its people more than half a century earlier. Like Rizal, Dra. Gracia could have gone anywhere. She had finished at the top of her high school class at the Rizal Memorial Institute in 1951 and completed her liberal arts degree at UP Diliman before entering the UP College of Medicine. She was accomplished, credentialed, and free to pursue the career paths her batchmates were choosing: specializations in the United States, residencies at Manila’s finest hospitals, the professional opportunities that a UP Medical degree unlocked.
Instead, she returned to the Rizal Memorial Hospital in Dapitan and began what would become a lifelong vocation: physician to her own people. She was the first Dapitanon woman to become a doctor.
Her practice was pediatrics, and in the rural countryside of Zamboanga del Norte, that meant confronting malnutrition as a daily reality, not as an abstract public health issue or cold hard statistic. Her response was characteristically direct: she established the MALWARD, a ward for malnourished children at the Rizal Memorial Hospital. It was a modest intervention by the standards of national health policy, but for the children it served and the families it reached, it was everything.
To those of us in the family, she was Tita Geez. There was a large pantry in the dining room of our grandfather’s house that contained not canned food or soup stock but an assortment of pediatric medications – ready remedies for the coughs, colds, allergies, scrapes, and bruises of childhood. Whenever any of us cousins came down with the typical ailments that children collect, it was Tita Geez who appeared, calm and knowing, dispensing both medicine and reassurance in equal measure. She never married and never had children of her own. All of us, her gaggle of nephews and nieces, and in time, the grand-nephews and grand-nieces, were her children.
Her career advanced as the years passed. She served as Acting Chief of Hospital of the Rizal Memorial Hospital and eventually retired as Chief of Hospital of the Piñan District Hospital. But titles were never the point. The point was always the opportunity to serve others: the next patient, the next child, the next family that needed her.
Dra. Gracia passed away at 9:45 in the morning of March 12, 2026, in Dapitan City. She was 92 years old. She is survived by her sisters Putli and Eva, her brother Sacdal, and the many nephews, nieces, grand-nephews, and grand-nieces who called her Tita Geez. She was predeceased by her brothers, Rene and Thaddeus, and their beloved parents, Leoncio and Leoncia.
When we speak of doctors to the barrios, we often recall the program, the policy, the institutional framework. But before there was a program, there were people who simply went where they were needed and stayed. Gracia Tupas Hamoy was one of them. She chose Dapitan. She chose her people. And for more than sixty years, that choice never wavered.
Photo and tribute piece by Dra. Hamoy family