Ana María Vázquez
Essayist and playwright
Category Archives: Writer
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Celina Vázquez
Mexican academic, researcher and translator
Alice Eversman
American singer and music teacher
Elena De Sayn
Russian-American violinist, teacher and music critic
Hannah Arendt
German-American philosopher
Anne Hull
American pianist and composer
Dr Vivia Belle Appleton
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.
Dr Edith M Lincoln
Dr. Edith M. Lincoln, a pediatrician who pioneered the use of drugs for treating tuberculosis in children, was head of the children’s “chest clinic” at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan from 1922 until her retirement in 1956.
Born in New York City, Edith Maas graduated from Vassar College in 1912 with a stunning academic record that won her admission to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She received her medical degree in 1916. In 1917 she became one of the first women physicians to be accepted as an intern at Bellevue Hospital. She recalled later that she was advised to take her meals with the nurses, but insisted on eating with the other interns. She married Asa Lincoln in 1917 and the couple had two children.
After completing her training in pediatrics, Dr. Lincoln was appointed to start the children’s chest clinic at Bellevue in 1922. She joined the faculty at the New York University School of Medicine in 1930 and twenty years later was named a clinical professor of pediatrics.
Many of the pediatric patients that Dr. Lincoln saw at her clinic came from low income families who received public assistance and lived in crowded conditions. In the 1930s, one of every five children admitted to the tuberculosis ward of Bellevue Hospital died of the disease, usually within a year. Most of these children were first diagnosed in the hospital because a tuberculin test was part of the examination on admission. Sadly, the death rate of children with tuberculosis remained unchanged until streptomycin became available late in 1947.
Dr. Lincoln was instrumental in studying the effect of drugs on reducing the death rate of children from a first infection of tuberculosis, often called primary tuberculosis. In 1949, working with grants from the Federal Public Health Service and the National Tuberculosis Association, she found that a dozen children treated in her chest clinic with streptomycin and promizole recovered from tuberculous meningitis (an acute inflammation of the cerebral tissues caused by the tubercle bacillus) and miliary tuberculosis (which spreads throughout the body via the bloodstream), two forms of the disease that had almost always been fatal.
When the drug isoniazid became available, she undertook a clinical experiment that showed that children with pulmonary tuberculosis who were treated with the new drug avoided developing tuberculous meningitis. Before that, tuberculous meningitis caused 60 percent of deaths from primary tuberculosis.
In 1939 Dr. Lincoln was named chair of the pediatric section of the New York Academy of Medicine. In 1951 she received the Elizabeth Blackwell citation given annually to an outstanding woman physician; and in 1959 she was awarded the Trudeau Medal of the National Tuberculosis Association for her early work with chemotherapy for the treatment of childhood tuberculosis.
Alice Gustava Smith
Alice Gustava Smith, better known by her students and readers as Sister Maris Stella, taught English at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University) in St. Paul for nearly fifty years. During that time she also published books of verse that built her reputation as a skilled and spiritual poet.
Smith was born in Alton, Iowa, in 1899. During her junior year in high school she moved to St. Paul to attend Derham Hall High School. At that time, Derham Hall was located on the campus of the College of St. Catherine.
Smith graduated from Derham Hall in 1918. Two years later she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph and took the name Sister Maris Stella. In 1924 she received her undergraduate degree from the College of St. Catherine with majors in English and music. Shortly after receiving her degree, she became a faculty member of the college.
Sister Maris Stella’s career took off when she sailed to England and earned her master’s degree in English at the University of Oxford. Soon after returning from Europe she became a star in the English Department at St. Catherine’s. She loved teaching and became a popular creative writing teacher as well as a poet-in-residence.
In 1939, Sister Maris Stella published her first volume of poetry, Here Only a Dove. During the 1940s she continued to write poetry for magazines. The English poet and novelist Alfred Noyes included a dozen of her poems in The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry, an anthology he edited in 1946.
By the end of the decade, Sister Maris Stella had published her second volume of poetry, Frost for St. Bridget. A nature lover, she linked the Irish St. Bridget with the frost in bleak trees, where, as she wrote in one poem, “Under the moon the orchards bloomed with hoarfrost, the white hills lay pale.”
During this poetically creative period, Sister Maris Stella continued to teach English at the College of St. Catherine. For almost twenty years she also served as chairperson of the school’s English Department. She enjoyed teaching literature, the history of the language, and, especially, creative writing. With such a busy schedule, she found less and less time to write her own poetry.
Then, in the early 1950s, the poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton visited the college as a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer. After Sarton returned home, she started a fellowship program for writers like Sister Maris Stella who had little time to travel and write. Sarton believed that writers often suffered from “divine discontent” when they lacked time for creative work.
Sister Maris Stella was surprised and pleased to receive a grant that allowed her to participate in Sarton’s program during the 1958–1959 academic year. She traveled to the Southwest, where she wrote poetry in a desert landscape markedly different from Minnesota’s. Several of these new poems were later published by North Central Publishing Company in a special Christmas edition.
Another highlight in Sister Maris Stella’s career was a collaboration with Paul Fetler, a music professor and composer from the University of Minnesota. Fetler wrote a cantata inspired by her poem “The Veil and the Rock.” The first performance of the cantata was held at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
After serving in the English Department at St. Catherine’s for close to fifty years, Sister Maris Stella retired from active teaching in May 1971. By then, she had returned to using her birth name, Alice Gustava Smith. It was under this name that St. Catherine’s Alumnae Association published her Collected Poems in 1982. The book included several new poems as well as poetry selected from earlier volumes.
Sister Alice died in 1987. Although she suffered from ill health toward the end of her life, she is remembered for her acceptance of aging and her spiritual outlook on life. Her colleagues often quoted her poem “Joseph of Dreams,” which includes the line, “in that last hour be a great light.” They agreed she herself was a great light for others, especially young women writers, for whom she was a strong guide.
Estelle Ishigo
Artist and musician Estelle Peck Ishigo (1899–1990), a white woman who married a Nisei man, is best known for chronicling life at the Heart Mountain, Wyoming, concentration camp through her drawings and paintings.