Grady A. Dugas

Grady A. Dugas, M. D. (October 24, 1923 - March 25, 2007), was a Louisiana physician who invented the "Safer Automatic Wheelchair Wheel Locks", a patented device designed for those who sometimes forget to lock their wheelchairs. For four decades Dugas was engaged in a family medical practice in Marion in Union Parish, a part of the Monroe Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area of northeastern Louisiana.
Background
Dugas was born in Sulphur in Calcasieu Parish in southwestern Louisiana to Sona Dugas (1894-1964) and the former Mildred Meyers (1900-1987). In 1941, he graduated from Sulphur High School as president of the senior class. He attended McNeese State University (then Junior College) in Lake Charles, the seat of government of Calcasieu Parish. In 1942, he left McNeese to join the United States Army Air Corps He served in the European Theater of Operations with the medical air evacuation unit stationed in England and France for the remainder of World War II.
After World War II, he returned to college. In 1949, he graduated from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and thereafter in 1953 from the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans. After a year of internship at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, he moved with his wife, the former Annie Jo Sehon (1929-2011), a medical technologist whom he had married in 1950, and infant son to Marion, where, in 1954, he joined Dr. Virgil Gully in the Marion Hospital-Clinic. After Gully left for health reasons, Dugas maintained the hospital until 1965, and thereafter the clinic and private practice until 1991.
Discover magazine reported in 1993 how Dugas had used maggots to cure the bedsores of an 80-year-old male patient. Some of the sores were nearly an inch deep, and infection had set in. Conventional therapies, including antibiotics and surgery, had failed. Dugas told the magazine that he remembered his grandmother, who was diabetic, had undergone successful maggot treatment in the 1930s. He followed suit, and the man's sore healed within a month. Instead of facing amputation, the patient instead went into the hospital for skin grafts.
In 1972, Marion named Dr. Dugas "Outstanding Citizen of the Year". On March 30, 1990, Marion declared "Dr. Dugas Day" with the presentation of special awards. In 2005, Union Parish proclaimed him the "Outstanding Citizen of the Year for Community Service".
Dugas and his wife are interred at Roark Cemetery in Marion.<ref name=findagrave/>

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