Alexander, Hattie Elizabeth (05 April 1901–24 June 1968), microbiologist and pediatrician, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of William Bain Alexander, a merchant, and Elsie May Townsend, both of Scottish ancestry. The family remained in Baltimore throughout Alexander’s relatively happy and comfortable childhood. She attended Baltimore’s Western High School for Girls prior to enrolling in Goucher College, to which she won a partial scholarship. While at Goucher, her enthusiasm for a variety of sports—hockey, baseball, basketball—exceeded that for academics, and she was an unimpressive student. Nevertheless, she exhibited marked, though largely unapplied, skill in Dr. Jessie King’s bacteriology class, and fellow students in the Goucher yearbook declared that “ambition fires her; hygiene claims her; kindness portrays her.”...
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Alexander, Hattie Elizabeth (1901-1968), microbiologist and pediatrician
Allison Aydelotte
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Andersen, Dorothy Hansine (1901-1963), pediatrician and pathologist
Allison Aydelotte
Andersen, Dorothy Hansine (15 May 1901–03 March 1963), pediatrician and pathologist, was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the only child of Hans Peter Andersen, a secretary for the YMCA, and Mary Louise Mason. Andersen’s father died in 1914, leaving her alone to care for her invalid mother. The two moved to Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, where Louise Andersen died six years later. At the age of nineteen Andersen, with no close relatives, became fully responsible for her own upbringing....
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Apgar, Virginia (1909-1974), physician, anesthesiologist, and teratologist
Jacalyn Duffin
Apgar, Virginia (07 June 1909–07 August 1974), physician, anesthesiologist, and teratologist, was born in Westfield, New Jersey, the daughter of Charles Emory Apgar, an insurance executive, and Helen May Clarke. She had two brothers, one of whom died of tuberculosis at age three. Apgar’s father conducted amateur experiments in electricity and astronomy, which stimulated her interest in science and medicine. After schooling in Westfield, Apgar attended Mount Holyoke College, obtaining her A.B. degree in 1929. She completed her M.D. at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, in 1933. Then followed two brilliant years in surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, but the department chairman, Alan Whipple, discouraged her from surgical practice. He cited the depression and financial insecurities experienced by his previous female trainees and urged her instead to consider anesthesia, not yet a medical specialty but often done by women nurse practitioners. Apgar spent six months in anesthesia training at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and six months at Bellevue Hospital in New York City before returning to Columbia-Presbyterian in 1938 as director of the Division of Anesthesiology; she was the first woman to head a medical division in that institution....
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Barrows, Isabel (17 April 1845–25 October 1913), ophthalmologist, stenographer, and reformer
Thaddeus Russell
Barrows, Isabel (17 April 1845–25 October 1913), ophthalmologist, stenographer, and reformer, was born Katharine Isabel Hayes in Irasburg, Vermont, the daughter of Scottish immigrants Henry Hayes, a physician, and Anna Gibb, a schoolteacher. The family moved to Hartland and then Derry, New Hampshire, where Isabel Hayes graduated from Adams Academy. In 1863 she married William Wilberforce Chapin, a Congregational minister. The following year the couple traveled to India for a missionary assignment. Less than a year after arriving in India, William Chapin died of diphtheria. Six months later Isabel Chapin returned to the United States. She moved to Dansville, New York, where she worked as a bath assistant at a water-cure sanatorium....
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Chinn, May Edward (1896-1980), physician and cancer researcher
Robert C. Hayden
Chinn, May Edward (15 April 1896–01 December 1980), physician and cancer researcher, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the daughter of William Lafayette Chinn, a former slave who had escaped to the North from a Virginia plantation and had unsteady employment as a result of race discrimination, and Lulu Ann Evans, a domestic worker. Occasionally William Chinn worked at odd jobs and as a porter. Raised in New York City, May Chinn was educated in the city’s public schools and at the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School (N.J.), and she attended Morris High School in New York. A severe bout with osteomyelitis of the jaw plagued her as a child and required extensive medical treatment. Her family’s poverty forced her to drop out of high school in the eleventh grade for a factory job. A year later she scored high enough on the entrance examination for Teachers’ College at Columbia University to be admitted to the class of 1921 without a high school diploma....
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Dunham, Ethel Collins (1883-1969), pediatrician and pioneer neonatologist
Marion Hunt
Dunham, Ethel Collins (12 March 1883–13 December 1969), pediatrician and pioneer neonatologist, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Alice Collins and Samuel G. Dunham, a wealthy utility executive, both descendants of early New England settlers. Dunham grew up surrounded by five younger siblings and more than a dozen cousins who lived nearby. In a family history she wrote in 1955, Dunham described her upbringing as harmonious and happy; manners and ethics were taught by example. A concern for those less fortunate came naturally. An aunt organized an annual winter workshop where Ethel and her young relatives made articles for sale to benefit local charities. Dunham graduated from high school in 1901 and spent the next two years as a boarder at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. Between 1903 and 1909, she enjoyed a life of travel and leisure common for privileged young women. During this time, Dunham decided to study medicine, a remarkably challenging choice. At age twenty-six she returned to Hartford High School for a physics course and was accepted as a student at Bryn Mawr College in 1910. Four years later, despite her relatively advanced age, she gained admission to Johns Hopkins Medical School....
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Fraser, Sarah Loguen (1850-1933), a pioneering African American physician specializing in pediatrics
David Marc
Fraser, Sarah Loguen (29 January 1850–09 April 1933), a pioneering African American physician specializing in pediatrics, was born in Syracuse, New York, as Marinda Sarah Loguen, the daughter of Caroline Storum and the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Both parents were lifelong activists in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and they established their family home as a “station” (safe house) in the underground railroad, harboring some 1,500 African Americans who passed through Syracuse en route to asylum in Canada during the decades preceding the Civil War. The U.S. Fugitive Slave Act, which criminalized any failure to report knowledge of the whereabouts of an escaped slave, became federal law the year of Sarah Loguen's birth. This posed new threats to the entire family and especially to Reverend Loguen, who had escaped from slavery in his youth....
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Jackson, Edith Banfield (1895-1977), pediatrician and psychoanalyst
Sara Lee Silberman
Jackson, Edith Banfield (02 January 1895–05 June 1977), pediatrician and psychoanalyst, was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the daughter of William Sharpless Jackson, a railroad executive, mining entrepreneur and banker, and Helen Fiske Banfield, an 1879 graduate of Vassar College. Jackson graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Vassar College in 1916 and from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1921. She held an internship at University of Iowa Hospital in 1921–1922 and a pediatric internship at Bellevue Hospital in 1922–1923. After four years on a rickets research project at the Yale School of Medicine, Jackson began a residency in psychiatry at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1928. Between 1930 and 1936 she completed a training analysis with Sigmund Freud and participated in seminars at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. Upon leaving Vienna, Jackson provided Anna Freud with the seed money to establish the world’s first day-care center for infants from impoverished families. The “Edith Jackson Krippe” became the prototype for the Hampstead Nurseries for refugee children that Anna Freud directed in England during World War II....
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Jordan, Sara Claudia Murray (1884-1959), gastroenterologist and cofounder of the Lahey Clinic
Shari Rudavsky
Jordan, Sara Claudia Murray (20 October 1884–21 November 1959), gastroenterologist and cofounder of the Lahey Clinic, was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the daughter of Patrick Andrew Murray, the owner of a carriage repair shop, and Maria Stuart. The Murrays sent all seven of their children to the local public schools, where from an early age Sara excelled at academics. In 1901 she matriculated at Radcliffe College. There she majored in the classics under an accelerated program, receiving her diploma in three years instead of the customary four. She then entered a doctoral program in classical philology and archaeology at the University of Munich, where in just four years she finished a dissertation on two medieval interpretations of a tenth-century Greek text. This work was published two years later in Germany. She returned to the United States briefly to take a teaching job at Adelphi University but in 1913 returned to Germany to marry Sebastian Jordan; they had a daughter the following year....
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Kenyon, Josephine Hemenway (1880-1965), pediatrician and health educator
Donald L. Opitz
Kenyon, Josephine Hemenway (10 May 1880–10 January 1965), pediatrician and health educator, was born in Auburn, New York, the daughter of Charles Carroll Hemenway, a Presbyterian minister, and Ida Eliza Shackelford. When Kenyon was eleven, the family moved to Glasgow, Missouri, where her father accepted a position as president of Pritchett College. Later she studied at Pritchett, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1898 and a master’s degree the following year....
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Levi-Montalcini, Rita (22 April 1909–30 December 2012)
Joyce Tang
Levi-Montalcini, Rita (22 April 1909–30 December 2012), Nobel Prize–winning neuroembryologist, was born Rita Levi in Turin, Italy, the youngest of four children of Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a painter. She later added her mother’s maiden name to her surname. Born into a Jewish middle-class family, young Rita was aware of the different roles men and women played in the family and in society. Her caring but domineering father made all the household decisions, while her submissive mother would willingly accept her husband’s decisions without challenges. However, Rita had several women as role models or sources of inspiration. Her two aunts had doctoral degrees in literature and in mathematics, respectively, and helped foster her confidence in women’s intellectual capacity. When her governess’s tragic death from cancer inspired Rita to go into medicine, her cousin Eugenia enthusiastically supported and joined her to take up medical studies. She also had the backing of her mother and her twin sister, Paola....
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Rodríguez-Trías, Helen (7 July 1929–27 Dec. 2001), pediatrician, public health activist, and feminist
Felicia Kornbluh
Rodríguez-Trías, Helen (7 July 1929–27 Dec. 2001), pediatrician, public health activist, and feminist, was born in New York City, the daughter of Damian Trías, a businessman, and Josefa Rodríguez, a schoolteacher. Her parents relocated to Puerto Rico while she was still an infant, but she returned to New York City in ...
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Russell, Jane Anne (1911-1967), endocrinologist
Charles W. Carey Jr.
Russell, Jane Anne (09 February 1911–12 March 1967), endocrinologist, was born near Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Josiah Howard Russell, a rancher and deputy sheriff, and Mary Ann Phillips. She completed her early education in the public school system of Long Beach and received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1932, graduating first in her class. During her first year as a graduate student at Berkeley she worked as a technician in the biochemistry department, and from 1934 to 1937 she worked as an assistant in the university’s Institute of Experimental Biology....
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Scharrer, Berta Vogel (1906-1995), cell biologist and pioneering neuroendocrinologist
G. Terry Sharrer
Scharrer, Berta Vogel (01 December 1906–23 July 1995), cell biologist and pioneering neuroendocrinologist, was born Berta Vogel in Munich, Germany, the daughter of Karl Phillip Vogel, a prominent judge in the Bavarian state court, and Johanna Weiss. Berta grew up in happy circumstances at home and in school, and she showed an early interest in biology and in becoming a scientist. But after 1914 her life was shadowed by World War I, by Germany's defeat and economic chaos, and ultimately by the rise of Nazism, which gained an early foothold in Munich. Scharrer entered the University of Munich in the swale of Adolf Hitler's conspiracy to overthrow of the Bavarian government, and she graduated with a Ph.D. in 1930, as the Nazis came to national prominence....
