Twenty-five years can seem like the blink of an eye, a long time or even a lifetime. In the case of the Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, no matter one’s perspective, 25 years has proven to be immeasurable—and wonderful. Immeasurable because one can’t put a figure on saving lives.
Wonderful because a pediatrician, his wife, their leap of faith—and the team they surrounded themselves with—have created diagnostic tools, information, treatments, and protocols from which the rest of the world can benefit.
It started in 1989 when Dr. D. Holmes Morton, a Harvard-trained physician with an interest in metabolic genetic disease, traveled to Lancaster County to study glutaric aciduria type 1 (GA1), an inherited disorder that had affected three of the children of Aaron and Malinda Allyger. The Allygers were “Plain people,” a term describing Mennonite and Amish populations—descendents of Swiss Anabaptists who fled religious persecution and settled in Pennsylvania and other parts of
the country beginning in the mid-1700s.
Click here to read the full Rural Health Fall 2014 Newsletter