Dr. Edyth Schoenrich was the first woman to be appointed to the American Board of Preventive Medicine and played a leading role in the development of one of the premier preventive medicine programs in the US at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Benjy Brooks was the first woman pediatric surgeon in Texas.
1978: Dr. Carolyn Denning was the first woman to chair the National Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Medical Advisory Council and was the first to organize and initiate a multidisciplinary team approach to management of the disease.
As a nurse, vivandière, and “Daughter of the Regiment,” Etheridge cemented herself in US Civil War history as a woman unafraid to provide aid in the heart of a battlefield.
Vivia Belle Appleton, M.D., spent her early career traveling the globe, working to improve the health of children and mothers. Settling in Hawaii in 1925, Dr. Appleton practiced pediatrics there for the next fifty years, receiving widespread recognition for her medical work and community service.
In 1948, Caroline Bedell Thomas, M.D., launched a long-term study of health and risk factors for hypertension and heart disease. Her research strategy has proved so beneficial that the work she began continues today, and her data has led to the discovery of the connection between high cholesterol and heart disease.
1999: Dr. Catherine DeAngelis is the first woman to be appointed editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Biography
In her role as the first woman editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Catherine DeAngelis, M.D., has made a special effort to publish substantive scientific articles on women’s health issues. The journal plays an important role in bringing new research to light, and featured articles can lead to fundamental changes in treatment. Under her editorship, the journal published a landmark study questioning the benefits of hormone replacement therapy in 2002. She also served as editor of the Archive of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, from 1993 to 2000.
Catherine DeAngelis was born and raised in a coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania. As she grew older, DeAngelis considered working with the Maryknoll Sisters, a missionary order. Since medical school was not financially possible, she went into a three-year program to become a registered nurse, where she “read everything in the library and loved it.” After graduation in 1960 she took a job at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and later interviewed for the Maryknoll missions. At the interview she was told she would need to take some religion classes, because she hadn’t had a Catholic education. She did not consider this an appealing prospect, and was not sure what to do. Her father said, “You stopped taking orders from me when you were two, so life as a missionary sister doesn’t make sense.” She then talked to her high school chemistry teacher, she told him, “I still want to be a doctor”. His response was, “Why not, then?” When she was accepted in Wilkes University on his recommendation, she went home and told her parents she was going to college.
During her undergraduate years she worked as a nurse and set up an infirmary at Wilkes. She also worked in a laboratory, gaining valuable experience in immunology research. She went on to the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, again doing lab work, teaching student nurses and working in the V.A. hospital medical library to help cover her expenses.
After medical school, DeAngelis wanted to do pediatric transplant surgery, but began with a pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Working four hours a week at a free clinic in Baltimore, she began thinking about scientific ways to address the general problems she saw there. She had heard about Harvard University’s program in health law and economics, and its community clinics, and realized that she could apply for a master’s degree in public health fellowship with stipend, at the National Institutes of Health. So she earned her master of public health degree at Harvard and worked at the Roxbury (Massachusetts) comprehensive community clinic. She noticed that many patients were not receiving basic care, primarily because of access and financial problems. With a little more training for nurses, she thought, some of these problems could be addressed. To solve the problem, she wrote a textbook for nurse practitioner-medical resident teams, Basic Pediatrics for Primary Care Providers, published in 1973.
Form 1973 to 1975 she worked as a faculty member at Columbia College of Physicians on improving health care systems in Harlem and upper Manhattan in New York using physician-nurse practitioner teams. She then took a position at the University of Wisconsin, where her former chair of pediatrics, Robert Cook, MD was vice chancellor. He suggested she might want to be dean of the School of Health Sciences, but instead, she chose to organize a system for children’s health care, which she did for the next three years.
In 1978 DeAngelis decided to move back East. She considered an offer from the University of Rochester, rather than Johns Hopkins, because she was impressed with the recruitment and interview process she had experienced. She was interviewed by resident’s, not professors, and sent to dinner with one of the residents, rather than with senior faculty. She changed her mind and decided to take up a position at Hopkins after being persuaded by the chairman of the department of pediatrics there. In 1978 she began as chief of the new Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, then became deputy chair of the department, and was appointed vice dean for academic affairs and faculty in 1994.
When she was made a full professor in 1984, Dr. DeAngelis was only the twelfth woman in Hopkins’s 94-year history to receive that rank. As vice-dean, she instituted a range of policies to improve these statistics: 68 percent of all women who have been made professor since the founding of Hopkins received their promotions while DeAngelis was vice-dean. Her success is especially ironic as her application to attend medical school there was rejected.
Elizabeth Karlin was a tireless advocate for women’s rights and health issues. In 1992, she was honored as “feminist of the year” by the Wisconsin chapter of the National Organization for Women. Throughout her career she was an outspoken advocate for women’s reproductive rights.
Born in New York City, Karlin graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science when she was 16 years old. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Antioch College in Ohio, and an M.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School. After working abroad as a general practitioner in Tanzania, she returned to Madison to establish a practice in internal medicine.
In 1990, however, her practice was to change. Her friends, concerned about the lack of local doctors with training, encouraged her to become an abortion provider, which she did after studying with a fellow physician in Madison. As director of the Women’s Medical Center on Madison’s West Side, she offered, in her words, “a full range of medical care and counseling to women who largely have no other access to health care…who least expect kindness, excellence or even cleanliness.”
The mother of two children, Karlin consistently asserted her belief in the value of motherhood and family, while fighting to preserve women’s reproductive rights. “I don’t do abortions because it’s a filthy job and somebody has to do it,” she explained in a 1995 New York Times article. “I do them because it is the most challenging medicine I can think of. I provide women with nurturing, preventive care to counteract a violent religious and political environment. I hope to do it well enough to prevent repeat abortions.”
Through the 1990s, Karlin was both praised and reviled for her public pro-choice stance. In 1992, she was honored as “feminist of the year” by the Wisconsin chapter of the National Organization for Women. At the same time, anti-abortion protestors repeatedly vandalized her clinic. She was the target of constant harassment and abuse. She was forced to wear a bullet-proof vest and hire security to protect her clinic and staff.
Karlin’s involvement with the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy began in 1996, when she became one of four named plaintiffs in the case of Karlin versus Foust, which challenged Wisconsin’s mandatory delay and “informed consent” law requiring a waiting period and counseling for women seeking abortions. Shortly after her death, he Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ultimately upheld the Wisconsin law in 1999.
Elizabeth Karlin died in 1998 at age 54, at her home in Arena, Wisconsin, only a few months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a close friend of Karlin’s from her days as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, visited her during her illness and was vocal in her praise. Her friend and journalist Molly Ivins called her “one of the most life-affirming people I’ve ever run across.” The University of Wisconsin Foundation commemorated Karlin with the Elizabeth Karlin Fellowship in Women’s Health. awarded to women who train to become leaders in women’s health and women’s health research.
Milestones
1918: Dr. Emily Bacon was the first pediatric specialist in Philadelphia.
1937: Dr. Emily Bacon was the first woman president of the Philadelphia Pediatric Society.
1928: Dr. Emily Bacon was the first woman on the senior staff of Mary J. Drexel Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia.
Biography
Emily Bacon was the first physician in Philadelphia to devote her practice exclusively to pediatrics—the care of children. She introduced numerous innovations in her fifty-year hospital career, including the creation of a “well-baby” clinic, and a counseling service for troubled children. She was also a much-loved teacher and combined her clinical practice with a teaching career at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania for over thirty years.
Born in Moorestown, New Jersey in 1891, Emily Bacon entered Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1908. During her college years, she was very active in the school’s social and athletic life, serving as class president for three of her four years, participating in several literary societies, and playing right halfback on the field hockey team. Apparently, Bacon recalled her college years with great fondness. She maintained a strong relationship with Wilson for much of her life, serving as an alumnae trustee and a member of the Wilson College Board for nearly two decades, from the early 1930s to the 1950s.
After graduating from Wilson in 1912, Emily Bacon earned her doctor of medicine degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1916. She returned to Philadelphia to accept a pediatric residency at Mary J. Drexel Hospital, a position she held until 1928, when she was the first woman appointed to the senior staff at the institution. When the hopsital merged with the nearby Lankenau Hospital a few years later, Dr. Bacon was appointed Lankenau’s first chief of pediatrics.
She remained at Lankenau until 1952, and even after her retirement as chief of pediatrics was a pediatric consultant until 1965. During this same period, she was also affiliated with the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP). Bacon accepted a position as an instructor of pediatrics at WMCP in 1919, becoming a full professor six years later. She became professor emeritus in 1953, and retired from teaching at the age of 62.
By all accounts, Dr. Emily Bacon was a well-loved and much-respected teacher, pediatrician, and colleague. She made many contributions to the practice of pediatrics in Philadelphia, including a pioneering effort to establish a ‘well-baby” clinic at Lankenau as well as a counseling service for traumatized children. Her well-respected skill in the field of pediatrics also made her a frequently requested speaker, and she often appeared before parent-teacher groups, nurses and church and club women to discuss issues of child health, nutrition, and preventive medicine. Routinely described as dedicated, unselfish, and fair, Bacon no doubt had a lasting impact on the health of thousands of Philadelphia children, as a pediatrician and as a teacher, helping to train generations of physicians in pediatrics.
1875: Dr. Emeline Cleveland was one the first American women physicians to perform major gynecological and abdominal surgery.
Biography
Emeline Horton Cleveland entered medicine with strong religious convictions and a desire to minister to the suffering. From her earliest years, she dreamed of service as a foreign missionary, but instead went on to a brilliant career in medicine, becoming a highly respected physician and one of the first American women physicians to perform major gynecological and abdominal surgery. At a time when women’s entry into the profession faced serious opposition, Dr. Cleveland was a striking example of women’s capabilities.
Born in Ashford, Connecticut, in 1829, Emeline Horton was third in a family of nine children. When she was 2 years old, the family moved to a farm in Madison County, New York, where the children were educated at local schools and by private tutors. Determined to realize her dreams of becoming a missionary, she taught school for a number of years, saving her wages to pay for entry to Ohio’s Oberlin College in 1850.
Her future husband and longtime friend, Giles Butler Cleveland, entered Oberlin’s Theological Seminary around the same time and the pair began to plan their missionary career together. After graduating from Oberlin, Emeline Horton registered at the Female (later Woman’s) Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1853. The couple married in 1854, a year before Emeline Horton Cleveland received her medical degree. Her husband’s poor health stifled any plans to enter missionary service and Dr. Cleveland set up a private practice in Oneida Valley, New York, to support them both.
In the autumn of 1856, Dr. Cleveland was invited back to the Female Medical College to teach anatomy. The couple moved back to Philadelphia, where Giles Cleveland found work as a teacher. But another illness during the winter of 1857-1858 left him partially paralyzed, making Emeline Cleveland fully responsible for supporting the family. Cleveland remained at the Female Medical College until 1860.
Since Philadelphia hospitals refused to allow women medical students into wards or clinics at this time, it was difficult for them to receive instruction with patients. Dr. Ann Preston, a colleague of Cleveland’s at the Medical College, along with several Quaker women who lived in the area, were firmly committed to both adequate training for female physicians and to a woman’s right to be treated by a woman doctor. They were determined to establish their own hospital and offer Cleveland the post of chief resident. They set out to secure Cleveland the best available training and paid for her to study abroad. In August 1860, Cleveland went to Paris to study obstetrics and gynecological surgery. She earned a diploma and toured the lecture halls and hospitals of Paris and London, studying surgery and hospital administration.
In 1862, Dr. Cleveland took up the position of chief resident at the newly established Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia, established by Dr. Preston. During the next seven years, Dr. Cleveland developed some of the first training programs for nurses and nurses’ aides in the United States. She also gave birth to a son, who would later follow her into a medical career. She continued teaching at the Female Medical College as well as running a private practice until 1878.
When Dr. Preston died in 1872, Dr. Cleveland succeeded her as dean of the Woman’s Medical College, where she remained until ill health forced her to resign in 1874. In 1878, Cleveland was appointed gynecologist at Pennsylvania Hospital’s Department for the Insane, becoming one of the country’s first woman physicians to be hired by a major public medical institution. That same year, she died of tuberculosis at age forty-nine. Described as a woman of great charm and intellect, Cleveland helped to establish the legitimacy of women’s surgical roles in the face of immense opposition. She also did much for the development of the Woman’s Medical College at a critical stage in its development. Illustrating her commitment to this institution and to her colleagues there, her final request was to be buried beside her friend and fellow physician, Dr. Preston.