Brooklyn's Progress
January 2003

A memorial service in honor of Josephine Swift Billings (also known as Mrs. George M. Billings), who died on Thursday, November 14, in Bloomfield, Connecticut, was held on Monday, December 2, at 4 pm in Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims at  75 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights. She was 95 and had lived in Brooklyn for many years.

Affectionately dubbed as "The Grand Dame of Health Care" in New York, Mrs. Billings was long-time volunteer advocate of improving health care in New York City. She dedicated her life to the cause of better health care for the people of New York and  capped a life dedicated to voluntarism as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Brooklyn Hospital Center. She was awarded the 1993 Founders Medal in recognition of her long and distinguished service to the hospital, the Borough of Brooklyn and the City of New York.

For six decades she was a prominent volunteer in New York City’s not-for-profit health care and hospitals. Mrs. Billings served on the Board of the United Hospital Fund of New York and spearheaded the work of several important committees including the chairmanship of the Committee on Distribution, which allocates monies to the various not-for-profit beneficiaries of the Fund. In 1979, on the occasion of the Fund's 100th anniversary, Mrs. Billings, together with Laurance S. Rockefeller, received the United Hospital Fund's Distinguished Service Award.  Mrs. Billings became an Honorary Director of the Fund in 1984 and later returned as an active director, a position she held for a number of years. 

Mrs. Billings also served as the Vice Chairman of the Health and Hospital Planning Council of Southern New York; a member of the  Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Community Blood Council of Greater New York, now known as the New York Blood Center; and was the first Chairman of the New York State Citizen's Council on Traffic Safety.  Formerly the Chairman, Executive Committee of Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, Mrs. Billings also was the founder and first President of the United Church Women of Brooklyn and was one of the founders of the Protestant Council of the City of New York.

Mrs. Billings, born in Brooklyn,  was the daughter of Mrs. Oscar W. Swift, who had been president of The Brooklyn Thoracic Hospital. For more than 60 years she was married to lawyer George M. Billings, who died in 1988.
 
Long before the country's efforts on health care reform, the campaign for better health care had been the untiring work of Mrs. Billings. In 1933 when the Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn Heights chose one of its members to be one of its three representatives on the board of a hospital dedicated to the treatment of people with tuberculosis, the church's elders could hardly have thought their action would have a monumental impact on the well-being and health of New Yorkers in the years to come.  That was the year Mrs. Billings became a member of the Board of Managers of Brooklyn Thoracic Hospital, which 18 years later, in 1951, she was to head as President, following in the footsteps of her mother, Mrs. Oscar W. Swift, who had been president of the hospital from 1931 to 1947.

From that momentous day in 1933, Mrs. Billings had  worked tirelessly as a volunteer in service of others.  Her spirit of voluntarism -- that of doing all that one can to ameliorate the conditions of those less fortunate, was the basis of her philosophy and her life's work.

It was the merger of Brooklyn Thoracic with The Brooklyn Hospital in 1957 that brought Mrs. Billings on the board of trustees of Brooklyn's first voluntary hospital.  She was named Hospital president in 1970. Mrs. Billings served as Chairman of the Board of a 653-bed institution that had incorporated several other Brooklyn health care facilities over the years to become The Brooklyn Hospital Center.

In addition to the Founders Medal from The Brooklyn Hospital Center and the Distinguished Service Award from the United Hospital Fund, Mrs. Billings also received the following honors: the Woman of the Year Award from the Junior League of Brooklyn; the Forsythia Award from the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens; the Spirit of Life Award from the New York Congregational Home; and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn.