The first image readers will see before opening Jupiter resident Charles Modica’s upcoming memoir, Docs on the Bay: The Dream That Became America’s Most Unlikely Medical School, is its cover. The author is being carried through the ocean on the shoulders of five young men.
Those men were members of the first graduating class of St. George’s University in 1977, newly minted doctors celebrating an improbable achievement. At the time, the fledgling medical school in Grenada, West Indies, was virtually unknown. Yet its students had just earned the second-highest scores among international medical schools on the U.S. medical boards, now known as the United States Medical Licensing Examination.
The photograph captures a moment of triumph—but also the culmination of a long and unlikely journey. Modica co-founded the university with his father, Louis Modica, but the concept itself was his. That journey, decades in the making, is the subject of his new book.