Medicine was always her chosen profession.
Growing up on a family farm in Bucks County, Pa., Ries attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse. She was a voracious reader, with a particular penchant for literature on epidemics, devouring everything she could find on yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza, and the bubonic plague. Ries and her siblings—a sister, Anny ’59 H&HD, who died in a car crash in 1975, and a brother, John ’81 Lib—were all first-generation college students, and all of them graduated from Penn State. College was tough for Ries, particularly chemistry, an essential science for a future doctor and one she actually failed her first year because, unbeknownst to her, she was colorblind.
“In the old days, we titrated experiments to color,” says Snyder. “For her, the colors never showed up, and so she failed her chemistry.”
Ries’ colorblindness is a longstanding joke between the two.
“When I’m really mad at her, I’ll mix up her socks,” Snyder says. But for Ries’ 80th birthday in 2020, Snyder indulged her by painting two walls in their house the brightest shades of yellow and orange she could find, and in 2016 she acquiesced to Ries’ purchase of a fluorescent green Jeep.
Fortunately, Ries’ colorblindness was diagnosed early in her time at Penn State, and she got the help she needed to complete her bachelor’s degree in secondary education and, the following year, a master’s in education and biological science. She went on to medical school at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania—which later became a part of Drexel University—where she completed a fellowship and residency and served on the faculty before moving, in 1979, to take a position with the Indian Health Service on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
The job was rewarding yet also challenging. “The government gave us very little, [and] we had to work on a budget, but working there I learned that you can do a lot,” Ries says. “You can give people the care they need with very little.”
She did not know at the time just how invaluable that lesson would prove to be.
Ries left South Dakota in 1981 and moved to Salt Lake City. It felt like a small place—“I live in the center of the city, but at the time, it was mostly farmland around here,” Ries says—where people knew each other, and looked out for each other, but also talked about each other. She’d taken a job in the adult medicine division of an HMO, and she wasn’t planning on staying very long. But fate took its course in the first year, when a patient named Joe came to her office. He’d been sick for a while, struck down by illness after illness; his lymph nodes were swollen and painful. Ries examined him thoroughly. Just as she’d read up on the epidemics in her childhood, she was avidly consuming the emerging literature on this mysterious new illness. She knew what was wrong with her patient.
Joe—who is still alive and still in touch with Ries—was her Patient Zero, and one of Utah’s first-known HIV/AIDS cases. Shortly after she began treating him, a doctor she knew who was leaving Salt Lake City sent Ries two more HIV-positive patients. “He was going to Washington for a fellowship, and he kept saying, ‘What am I going to do, no one wants to take them,’ and twisting my arm,” she says. “Finally, I agreed to take the jump. He had two, I had one, and I knew there were going to be a lot more.”
She knew that because, even though Utah authorities were in denial, HIV/AIDS was barreling its way through that state like General Sherman to the sea. Ries knew that the numbers would only increase. She also knew her time at the HMO was limited: like every other practice, it wanted nothing to do with caring for HIV/AIDS patients. If those patients were to be cared for at all, she’d have to find a way to do it on her own.
So Ries set up a private practice next to Holy Cross Hospital, Utah’s first Catholic hospital. It was founded in 1875 and run by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, with whom she had formed a strong bond. That relationship would lead to Ries chairing the hospital’s ethics committee, and to Holy Cross funding and housing Utah’s first—and, for close to a decade, only—ward dedicated to HIV/AIDS patients. The ward was a 10-bed unit that operated at full capacity with just a sprinkling of nurses (most refused to even go near the ward) until the hospital was sold and renamed in 1994.
“We admired her work,” says Sister Bernadette Mulick, one of the Sisters of the Holy Cross who trained as a physician assistant with Ries, worked closely with her for years, and was instrumental in the creation of the HIV/AIDS ward. “Those patients were the lepers of our time, outcasts in our city, but she and Maggie didn’t discriminate against them in any way. They cared for them when no one else would.”