Dr. MacGuffie was a very impressive woman. She was a friend of my Mother. She was very nice and very very smart.

She will be missed.

R.I.P., Dr. MacGuffie | In the Wings.

Dr. Martha “Bobby” MacGuffie of New City passed away on Monday, March 7, leaving a legacy of accomplishments that stretch across the globe. In the minds of many people, the 87-year-old epitomized the belief that one person can make a difference.

She was widely recognized as a humanitarian and activist and well respected as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. Pamela Hudson, one of MacGuffie's five daughters said, “She was a ‘oner.' Her accomplishments are so difficult to even count. She left a phenomenal legacy.”

Dr. MacGuffie was born on Jan. 22, 1924, and died in her sleep early Monday morning at Nyack Hospital, where she had been admitted with a stomach virus a few days earlier. She had been ill for several months and was being cared for by Hudson and her husband.

Dr. MacGuffie did not believe in barriers.

In 1945, when few women attended medical school, she applied to and was accepted at five. She was the first woman surgeon to graduate from Columbia Medical School. The mother of eight children, she directed her grief over the deaths of her two youngest sons, Reid and Rob, to helping Kenyan children affected by the AIDS epidemic, the disease that killed her sons.

Her first trip to Kenya, Africa gave her a mission. She founded SHARE in 1987 to bring help and hope to Kenyan children living in extreme poverty. MacGuffie and Dr. Renée M. Brilliant, a pediatric hematologist, based SHARE in New City with an affiliate in Kisumu, Kenya. Over the course of more than 20 years, Dr. MacGuffie left her private practice in Rockland County on a regular basis to travel back and forth to Kenya.