Prologue to 

Her Daughter the Engineer: 

the Life of Elsie Gregory MacGill 

At 24, she was bright, pretty, popular — and even a little famous.

She was, after all, the first woman in her country to graduate from university in electrical engineering. Now, she was thought to be the only woman in the world completing an advanced degree in aeronautics, and she was preparing for marriage. Her future burned bright.

Then a slight tinge of tenderness, barely noticeable, floated across her

lower back. It was an odd feeling, different, but not initially disturbing because she had been fighting a flu-like cold for days and sitting long hours at the desk studying. Unconcerned, Elsie MacGill pushed aside the

discomforts to join other University of Michigan students celebrating the

end of the school year with a night out across the border in Windsor. It

was May 1929.

That evening, her dress seemed to chafe her skin, and at times she was

numb and stiff. But once back in her room in Ann Arbor, Elsie went to

bed as usual without telling anyone. The next morning something was

clearly wrong. When she awoke and touched her back and legs with

the tips of her fingers, she felt nothing. Within a single night, Elsie had

become completely paralyzed from the waist down. The diagnosis, acute

infectious myelitis,  suggested an inflammation of the spinal cord, likely

related to the mundane virus that had caused her cold. But there was talk

of “poliomyelitis”,  and the University Hospital staff pronounced her

likely to “not walk again”. She was far from her childhood home, her

closest friends, and family.

Over the next few years, Elsie would spend most of her time confined to home, sometimes in pain and often engulfed by the dismal prognosis of a life in bed or, at best, in a wheelchair. In fact, the damage that befell her

body that spring never fully left it, and eventually would lead indirectly to her death. Yet, 50 years later, those who knew Elsie best would say that the enduring disability engendered by this day was “the least important

thing about her”.  Such was the life of Elizabeth Muriel Gregory MacGill that a dramatic, lingering event — devastating for some, defining for many — proved ultimately to be a mere sidebar to a greater story, a story

that changed the history of Canada, established illustrious milestones in the United States, and touched lives beyond. 

This book strives to tell her story.