Philanthropy in Action:
Louise Montague
A gift in memory of her late husband, Benjamin Montague, MD '44, allowed Louise Montague to support a cause close to her heart: supporting the caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease
Above: Louise Aylor Montague was a member of the UVA School of Nursing’s Class of 1942.
Louise and Benjamin Montague loved camping and hiking. Over the years, they made many trips across the United States and Canada.
In addition to their mutual love of the outdoors, they had another thing in common. Both were alumni of the University of Virginia. Louise graduated from the School of Nursing in 1942, and Benjamin graduated from the School of Medicine in 1944. They were married for 57 years. In 2002, Benjamin died after battling Alzheimer’s disease.
Louise was Benjamin’s caregiver in his final years, and she saw the toll it took on him. As a nurse, she also was keenly aware of the toll the disease took on her as a caregiver. To honor her husband’s memory, she decided to donate to the UVA School of Medicine.
“She said that she wanted to donate money for Alzheimer’s research because it’s a horrible disease, and that’s what she did. After a few years of giving, Mrs. Montague wanted to know more about what could be done,” says Barry Collins, executive director of the UVA Medical Alumni Association and Medical School Foundation. “We met with Carol Manning, director of UVA’s Memory and Aging Care Clinic, and they came up with a program that focused on the caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s.”
The clinic’s care coordination program was the result of their collaboration, and it was a novel idea at the time. “She had cared for her husband, and it was a huge lift. She had very minimal support as a caregiver, and in our discussions, we talked about the fact that yes, we ultimately need a cure for Alzheimer’s, but in the meantime, we have all these people living with the disease and almost all of them have unpaid family caregivers,” Manning says. “We talked about figuring out ways that we could help both the patient and the caregiver through our research. People think about the patient, but the backbone of our healthcare system for people with Alzheimer’s disease is their unpaid family caregiver.”
The program’s mission is two-fold. It provides care coordinators who do everything from making initial in-home visits to going to doctor’s appointments with the person who has dementia and their caregiver. Care coordinators also help caregivers manage difficult behaviors, including how to deal with their loved one’s agitation. In addition, the program also includes a research component that compares people who have care coordinators and those who do not. “What we have found is that, while the disease progresses, the caregiver burden and stress is more manageable for those with care coordination as is their ability to cope with those difficult behaviors,” Manning says.
Louise made donations to the research fund for the rest of her life, and her generosity continued after she died in 2021 as well. By designating Alzheimer’s research at UVA as the beneficiary of her estate, she donated an additional $3.1 million. In addition to the care coordination program, the funds have been used to support a clinician’s memory research and are currently being used to fund a new faculty member for next year who is an Alzheimer’s and related dementias researcher.
“We are enormously grateful to donors like Mrs. Montague for making such an impact with their philanthropy,” says Collins. “Her gift will help ensure that people facing Alzheimer’s, including caregivers, have the support they need.”
Manning agrees. “There’s a whole field called caregiver science now, and she was a visionary in being able to see that this was important and was actually a field of research,” she says. “I think it’s a very important legacy. She was at the forefront of this field by her donation to us, and she enabled us to create an entire program and develop a model Alzheimer’s clinic.”
