Born: 1 February 1898, United States
Died: 1 April 2012
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Leila Alice Daughtry
The following is shared from The New Georgia Encyclopedia, which allows the use of protected materials for noncommercial educational purposes.
Leila Denmark was the oldest practicing pediatrician in the United States when she retired in 2001 at the age of 103. In seventy years of practice, Denmark rarely charged patients more than ten dollars for an office consultation, and it was not unusual for her to spend an hour counseling a new mother. Her Alpharetta farmhouse office was visited by families from all walks of life.
Leila Alice Daughtry was born in Bulloch County on February 1, 1898, to Alice Cornelia Hendricks and Elerbee Daughtry. She received her A.B. degree from Tift College in Forsyth, where she met her husband, John Eustace Denmark. She studied chemistry and physics at Mercer University in Macon and in 1928 became the third female to graduate with a medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia (later Georgia Health Sciences University) in Augusta. Upon graduation she began her internship in the segregated Black wards at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, and later in 1928 she joined the staff of Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children (later Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta), where she was Egleston’s first intern.
Denmark set up a clinic in her home in 1931, after the birth of her daughter, and when the Central Presbyterian Church opened its charity baby clinic in Atlanta, she donated time each week. Subsequently, from 1933 to 1944 Denmark conducted research in the diagnosis, treatment, and immunization of whooping cough, which was fatal for many underprivileged babies. Her research at the charity clinic, assisted by Eli Lilly and Company and Emory University, resulted in the development of the pertussis vaccine, which is still used today.
At the midpoint of her career, Denmark wrote Every Child Should Have a Chance (1971), a book explaining her child-rearing philosophies. Unmoved by generations of baby experts advocating “hands-off” parenting, Denmark placed responsibility for a child’s health and happiness solely with the parents. She was also concerned that the reliance on specialists did not teach children to think for themselves.
Denmark also believed strongly that a woman should not leave home to join the workforce, a stance that drew criticism from the media as well as others in the medical community. She believed that children placed in day care would grow to have little self-discipline or confidence in others.
The following is republished from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
When she retired in 2001, Leila Daughtry Denmark, M.D., was America’s oldest known practicing physician. She was one of the first women pediatricians in Atlanta, and has been seeing patients and advising parents for more than seventy years. Her remarkable career has been reported locally and in the national news, and in 1998, when she was 100 years old, her ongoing work was featured in a profile in People magazine.
Leila Alice Daughtry was born in Bulloch County, Georgia, in 1898, to Elerbee and Alice Cornelia Hendricks Daughtry. She was the third of their twelve children, and grew up in a farming community, attending high school at an agricultural and mechanical school. She earned her undergraduate degree at Tift College in Forsyth, Georgia, and after graduating in 1922 taught high school physics, chemistry and biology for two years.
In 1924, Leila Daughtry enrolled at the Medical College of Georgia as the only woman in a class of 52 students. In 1928, she was the third woman to graduate from the school with a doctor of medicine degree. That same year she married John Eustace Denmark. She then went on to a two-year internship at the Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children in Atlanta, where she was the first intern and admitted the first patient at the newly founded institution. In 1930 she began a second internship at Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia, and had a daughter, Mary Alice.
In 1931, Dr. Leila Denmark began her private practice in pediatrics in Atlanta. In 1932 a deadly epidemic of whooping cough swept through the community, prompting Dr. Denmark to begin studying the disease. Over the next six years she published her research in the Journal of the American Medical Association and, with Eli Lilly and researchers at Emory University, developed a successful vaccine.
Dr. Denmark developed an extraordinary familiarity with the health and well-being of children. Her patients reported that she could often determine exactly what was wrong with a child when they first walked into the office, just by looking. When she first launched her career, there were very few effective medicines for some of the most serious ailments affecting her patients, but even though far more drug therapies became available, Dr. Denmark promoteed common sense preventive medicine and therapy over pharmaceutical remedies wherever possible.
Running an office out of a farmhouse near her home until her retirement in 2001, Dr. Denmark kept costs down by leaving a sign-up sheet for patients instead of hiring a receptionist, and charging just $10 for the first visit and $8 for every visit thereafter. In 1935 Dr. Denmark received the Fisher Award for outstanding research in diagnosis, treatment, and immunization of whooping cough for her work on the vaccine. In 1953 she was named “Atlanta Woman of the Year”, and in 1970 she received a Distinguished Service Citation from Tift College, as “a devout humanitarian who has invested her life in pediatric services to all families without respect to economic status, race, or national origin”. Among numerous other honors, Dr. Denmark also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Atlanta Business Chronicle in 1998.”
Denmark received many honors and awards, including the Fisher Award (1935), “for outstanding research in the diagnosis, treatment and immunization of whooping cough”; honorary doctorates from Tift College (1972), Mercer University (1991), and Emory University (2000); Atlanta’s Woman of the Year (1953); Atlanta Gas Light Company’s Shining Light Award (1989); the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s lifetime achievement award (1998); and the Emory University/Wesley Woods Heroes, Saints and Legends Award (2000). In 2000 the Georgia General Assembly named the Leila Denmark Interchange on Georgia 400 in Forsyth County in her honor, and two years later it commended Denmark “for her stellar medical career.”
Denmark died in Athens on April 1, 2012, at the age of 114.