It is with a heavy heart that I write this memoriam in honour of Dr. Mercy Alexis, a woman I have known affectionately as “derm mom” for the past sixteen years. Dr. Alexis passed away peacefully after a lengthy illness on June 7, 2022.
Dr. Mercy Akuffo Alexis was born in Ghana to a family of eleven children. At the young age of 20 she travelled to the Netherlands to attend medical school, where she graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1971. Shortly after completing medical school, she moved to Canada where she went on to pursue her postgraduate medical training at the University of Western Ontario and her dermatology residency at the University of Toronto from 1973-1976. In 1976 she received her certification in dermatology by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (FRCPC) and practiced dermatology in the Greater Toronto Area for the next 44 years.
Dr. Alexis was an outstanding dermatologist who took care of a diverse patient population. She worked in both a community practice setting and also in academia at Women’s College Hospital, where she was appointed in 1998. In 1979, she was appointed as a lecturer by the department of medicine at the University of Toronto where she taught and mentored countless generations of Canadian dermatologists.
As the first black female dermatologist in the country, Dr. Alexis was instrumental in inspiring other BIPOC medical students to pursue a career in dermatology. In addition, she helped inform the wider Canadian dermatology community on culturally safe care and treatment of skin disorders in people with diverse skin types.
Dr. Alexis was an active member of several dermatology associations including the Canadian Dermatology Association, the Toronto Dermatologic Society, the American Academy of Dermatology and the Skin of Color Society to name a few. She was passionate about life-long learning and regularly attended dermatology conferences, educational events and meetings where she would often be seen sitting in the first row taking copious notes, ready to ask a question of the speaker. In 2022, Dr. Alexis was awarded a Presidential Citation by the American Academy of Dermatology.
Outside of her medical career, Dr. Alexis was known as an avid dancer, a world traveller, a workout enthusiast, a dedicated and selfless mother and perhaps her most cherished role, a grandmother to her three delightful grandchildren.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank ‘derm mom’ for being a constant source of encouragement and inspiration for me personally, and for so many of us who knew her, for her dedicated service to the field of dermatology and for her gift of mentorship. She will be greatly missed by the dermatology community at large and especially by her many friends and loved ones including her partner John, her son Andrew, who followed in her footsteps to become a leading expert in dermatology, her daughter Violet, an outstanding teacher, her beautiful daughter-in law Dr. Ama Alexis, and her three incredible grandchildren William, Naomi and Xander.
