As national director of health services for Project Head Start in 1965, Dr. Gertrude Hunter helped implement the first national comprehensive health program to immunize, offer preventive medical and dental care, and treat any hidden health conditions in preschool children.
Dr. Grace James was one of the first two African American women on the faculty at a southern medical school and the first African American on the staff of the Louisville Children’s Hospital and on the faculty at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.
When Halle Tanner Dillon passed the Alabama State Medical Examination in 1891, even the New York Times took notice.
Dr. Dickens became the first African American woman admitted to American College of Surgeons in 1950.
Assistant surgeon general and rear admiral in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service.
In 1998, Dr. Ileana Vargas-Rodriguez helped establish the pediatric component of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
As a bilingual physician and educator, Dr. Flavia Mercado teaches the value of cultural competency. More than sharing a language, cultural competency requires that physicians are aware of cultural differences and treat all patients respectfully, an ideal Mercado instills in every medical student she teaches.
A practicing obstetrician-gynecologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Frances McLemore Fisk, M.D., considers herself an advocate for the rights of the patient and firmly believes in the importance of viewing health care problems within the wider context of each individual’s circumstances.
In 1987, Frances Owl-Smith M.D., became the second physician and first woman physician of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.
G. Valerie Beckles-Neblett, M.D. organizes medical missions to Haiti and Honduras, two of the poorest countries in the world. Along with the other doctors she recruits for her trips, Dr. Beckles treated thousands of people — many who had never visited a doctor before.