Chrissie Collins; Helped Establish MedicAlert

While her parents were vacationing in Italy, the high school sophomore cut her finger playing with an air rifle.

A neighbor rushed her to the local hospital, founded by her grandfather, and her uncle, a doctor, gave her a sensitivity test before giving her a tetanus shot. Even the small test dose sent her into shock.

“It was five days before we knew whether she would live or die,” her mother, Chrissie Woolcock Collins, later told The Times.

That was 1953.

The girl did live, and her parents set about trying to protect her and anybody else with severe allergies or life-threatening medical conditions from future potentially fatal incidents.

Chrissie Collins, who with her late husband Dr. Marion Collins established MedicAlert, one of the oldest and best-known identification systems for life-threatening conditions, died Monday. She was 94.

Collins, who had remained active on the international nonprofit organization’s board, died in Turlock, in California’s Central Valley, where she taught music, reared four children and launched a lifesaving concept.

MedicAlert has saved about 80,000 lives and put warning bracelets or pendants on 4 million members in 41 countries around the world since its incorporation nearly half a century ago.

“Through 44 years of ups and downs, change and challenge,” said current MedicAlert Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Tanya J. Glazebrook, “she was the constant voice of reason and the gentle but insistent reminder that our mission is as vital and relevant today as it was in 1956.”

Collins, added former foundation board president William T. Robinson, was “living proof that one or two people can make a difference--forever.”

To protect their daughter, Linda, after her near-tragedy in 1953, Collins and her husband originally attached a paper note to her ornamental bracelet, explaining to any emergency personnel that she was allergic to tetanus antitoxin, aspirin and sulfa.

But when young Linda enrolled at Stanford University, Dr. Collins designed a metal bracelet for her--the caduceus or staff of Aesculapius, a traditional medical symbol, flanked by the words Medic and Alert in red. A San Francisco jeweler crafted the bracelet, now in the Smithsonian Institution, with Linda’s allergies engraved on the back.

“Other people saw it and said, ‘I ought to have one of those. I am allergic,’ or ‘I have a daughter with diabetes,’ ” Collins told The Times in 1978. “We began having them made up, one at a time.”

A couple of months after their daughter left for college, the Collinses had 200 bracelets made and distributed them to doctors attending a conference of the American College of Surgeons.

“We were beginning to realize we had something people really needed and wanted,” she said.

They mailed literature about MedicAlert to hospitals and law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and Canada. Peace officers suggested adding a method to obtain additional medical information.

So in 1958, the couple and their fledgling organization added a system in which emergency personnel could telephone 24 hours a day to get information. The first switchboard was that of the Turlock Community Hospital, founded and partially staffed by the family.

Word spread, especially after an article in the national This Week Sunday magazine on June 6, 1960. Within days, the Collinses had 100,000 orders for bracelets.

“We were not prepared,” she recalled. Until then, MedicAlert had been run solely by the couple and their children.

Chrissie Collins enlisted, in her words, “the whole town of Turlock,” working out of her family room to enroll new members and ship bracelets.

As the organization grew, volunteers remained essential--mostly off-duty medical personnel who were trained to provide callers with crucial medical history.

“They believe MedicAlert contributes to the health care they are delivering,” former MedicAlert president Fred Hodder said in 1982. “They consider it part of their professional responsibility and recognize it will help in the emergency when a person cannot speak for himself.”

Although MedicAlert, which has been imitated by other systems over the years, came to include a wallet card with more information, its leaders pointed out that the bracelet remained the most visible lifesaver. The organization used developing computer technology to store and update members’ information, but resisted electronically coded or microfilmed listings of medical details on wallet cards, saying they often prove difficult to read in emergencies and contain too much information to be immediately helpful.

Collins and her associates found that the bracelets were most popular among those with allergies (penicillin topped the list), diabetes, seizure disorders and heart conditions.

Born July 30, 1906, in Douglas, Isle of Man, British Isles, Collins moved to Turlock with her family when she was 6. She met her future husband, who died in 1977, when the two were in eighth grade.

Graduated from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Collins taught and supervised music education in Turlock schools and directed her church choir.

Her work with MedicAlert garnered several honors--among them the C. Everett Koop Health Advocate Award from the American Hospital Assn.

In addition to her daughter Linda, Collins is survived by three other children, Michael, Tom and Margaret; eight grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.