When John Gurley’s wife was diagnosed with dementia, he visited her every day in the Memory Unit and hired a woman to help provide more personal care for Yvette.
The lessons both learned in trying to minimize the impact of dementia led Gurley to write a memoir/love story that also included a few suggestions on what others facing the same dilemma could do to help their loved ones. The author kept learning more over the 32 months he cared for Yvette so he wrote two more books about his experiences and then wrote a fourth one after Yvette died.
Many readers have found the methods he used to elevate Yvette’s quality of life so helpful and inspiring that they purchased each book and shared them with friends. Moreover the Memory Unit has now added some of the actions he learned into their regular treatment protocol.
A retired professor of economics from Stanford University, Dr. Gurley has also published books on capitalism, communism, China’s economy, and the Soviet Union. He has been living in a retirement community on campus since retiring 28 years ago.
Born in Alameda, California, he earned his BA degree in 1942 from Stanford and his PhD ten years later from the same university. He has lived in Palo Alto at Stanford since 1961.
At Stanford Dr. Gurley did research in Marxian theory, Soviet and Chinese economics, and in economic systems. He taught classes in economics, money and banking.
He also wrote books on challenges to capitalism and challenges to communism, the Soviet Union and China’s economy. Dr. Gurley was among those professors who pioneered the study of relationships between finance and economic development. He served as managing editor of the American Economic Review magazine while at Stanford for six years.
Professor Gurley helped Bank Indonesia to develop a simple model for estimating the demand for money, based mainly on previous changes in the rate of inflation.
John Gurley and Edward Shaw of Stanford and Hugh Patrick of Yale collaborated on a study of the South Korean financial system commissioned by the U.S. Aid program in 1965 which led to a stabilization program that served as the basis of annual aid to Korea. As a result of that study, more Koreans relied on traditional banks rather than the black market for their finances.