Dr. James Cobey Sails Calmer Waters These Days April 12, 2022

MSDC member Dr. James Cobey has led a storied career spanning more than five decades. 

He earned his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University and his M.P.H. from the Hopkins’ School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1969. With these credentials, he set off to impact international public health. 

Dr. Cobey has extensive experience working with international organizations including United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip, the American Red Cross as an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) health delegate, Orthopaedics Overseas -- now Health Volunteers Overseas -- to send physicians abroad to teach, and he has led the initiative International Campaign to Ban Landmines. 

Throughout this career he has visited Israel and Egypt in the Gaza Strip, Nigeria, Haiti, Thai-Cambodia border, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia Sierra Leone, Malawi, Hong Kong, and Tanzania to bring healthcare to marginalized people. 

His lifetime of work was recognized with the awarding of the Global Humanitarian Award from Johns Hopkins University in 2019. 

This dedication to public health began with a fourth-grade friendship with a classmate from Thailand. “I had a friend in 4th grade from Thailand. We were very good friends, and I had the opportunity to travel to Thailand when he went back when I was 18 years old. This friendship and trip captivated me, and I became interested in Thai history and monarchy,” said Dr. Cobey. 

While earning his medical degrees, he also pursued a history degree in 19th century Thai Foreign policy. “I have always supported liberal arts education and feel that those studies greatly enhanced my work,” he said.  

Both of Dr. Cobey’s parents were in the medical field and he knew that’s where he would find his career. “My father was Chief of Orthopaedic Surgery. I scrubbed into my first surgery with him when I was about 16 years old. It was a leg amputation on a patient that had been hit by a car. I held the retractor,” he said.

Dr. Cobey is a board-certified orthopaedic surgeon in an independent practice with a heart for philanthropy. His practice specializes in major trauma, spine reconstruction, and total join replacement. 

His intertest in international public health was cemented in college. “I went to Gaza during my 3rd and 4th years of college, and it changed my view of the world. From that experience, I knew I wanted to become involved with international health. My degree in history helped me with my view of the world.”

His career and life were furthered enhanced when he met Janet Heinrich at Johns Hopkins University in 1969. “We had a shared interest in Public Health. After school, we went to Haiti to work at a mission hospital and I proposed to her,” he shared. 

While working with the ICRC he was one of the only physician members with a background in public health. “The sickest people in refugee camps never make it to the hospital. It’s important to get out into communities to find the sick people.” Dr. Cobey made it a point to get doctors into communities to observe community health habitats. In the 1980s he spent much of his time with Orthopaedics Overseas sending doctors abroad to teach. 

While Dr. Cobey has done much with his talent as a physician, his greatest accomplishment is his landmine campaign. In 1991, he travelled to Cambodia to study landmines and learned that one out of 235 people have stepped on a landmine. He wrote a campaign to stop them. To date, 160 countries have signed the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

After a lifetime of international travel for the betterment of humanity, Dr. Cobey and his wife now spend time navigating calmer waters. “I have a 36-foot sailboat that I’ve had for 30 years. It’s our house on the water. We have it docked on the Chesapeake, but over the years we have chartered boats in many places including the Mediterranean and Caribbean,” he said. 

Although he has sailed throughout the world, some of the worst storms he has encountered where nearby in the Chesapeake. “Winds would reach 60 miles per hour within 20 minutes. We’ve sailed in a lot of storms,” he recalled.
 
He and his wife have been married for 52 years and have three children together. Their oldest, Frederick, is the chief of Cardiac Anesthesiology at Tufts Medical Center, his middle child, Laura, is a nurse in Vermont, and the youngest, Abigail, is a psychologist nearby in Alexandria. 

Dr. Cobey has been an MSDC member since 1977. He enjoys being a part of an organization that helps the health of people in the community and appreciates the issues that MSDC tackles. MSDC takes care of physicians so that they can take care of others.

Do you know a physician who should be profiled in the MSDC Spotlight Series? Submit a nomination to Robert Hay, hay@msdc.org, for a future story. MSDC membership is encouraged for featured physicians.