Dr Clara Marshall
In 1882 Dr. Clara Marshall became the first woman on the staff of the Philadelphia Hospital.
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Dr Edyth Hull Schoenrich
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 Frances Brooks
Dr. Benjy Brooks was the first woman pediatric surgeon in Texas.
Dr Carolyn R Denning
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.
Dr Charlotte Silverman
Dr. Charlotte Silverman built her career in epidemiology at a time when new developments in the filed brought many benefits and unkown risks. As an associate chief at the Food and Drug Administration she helped test and monitor these innovations and their long-term consequences.
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 Caroline Bedell Thomas
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.
Annie Etheridge
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.
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.
Dr Doris Honig Merritt
1978: Dr. Doris H. Merritt was the first woman to chair the Board of Regents for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, where she was instrumental in establishing the library’s electronic information system.
Inspiration
I was being discharged from the U.S. Navy after World War II and wanted an interesting and useful profession that would allow me to live independently.
Biography
Doris Honig Merritt, M.D., the first woman to chair the Board of Regents for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, helped establish the Library’s electronic information system in 1978. During her career in university administration, Dr. Merritt coined the term “grantsmanship” to describe the art of procuring grants, and herself brought millions of dollars in grants to the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
As World War II was coming to a close in the mid 1940s, so was young Doris Merritt’s two-year stint in the Navy Officer Corps. As she looked for an interesting job alternative, an interesting and useful profession that would give her some measure of financial independence, she decided on medicine. She had graduated cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa in English literature from Hunter College of the University of the City of New York in 1944, and had to take pre-medical courses from 1946 to 1948 before she was accepted into medical school at The George Washington University School of Medicine. When she earned her doctor of medicine in 1952, she and her physician husband Donald Merritt went to Duke University for residencies—she in pediatrics, he in internal medicine. She was an assistant resident in pediatrics at Duke University from 1954 to 1955, and a fellow in pediatrics from 1955 to 1956.
Dr. Doris Merritt came to be a high-powered fundraiser for academic medicine almost by accident. “I was introduced to administration simply by following my husband, which women were expected to do then. ” When her husband took a position at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in 1957, Dr. Doris Merritt didn’t find work in pediatrics, her specialty. Instead, she found a new career. Dr. Merritt took a position as an executive secretary for the Division of Research Grants at the National Institutes of Health. Through this introduction to grants work, Dr. Merritt realized she could serve as an effective facilitator, and that she loved to watch the progress of different projects. She devoted the next forty years to “grantsmanship”—a term she coined in the 1960s to describe successful approaches to fundraising for research.
In 1961, Dr. Merritt accompanied her husband to the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, where she was named director of medical research grants and contracts. Instead of reviewing grants applications as she had done at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Merritt directed applications. She was very successful: two of the project grants received by Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) that Dr. Merritt secured in her first year as director were still ongoing more than thirty-five years later.
The following year, when Dr. Merritt became assistant dean for medical research at Indiana University School of Medicine, she was one of the first women in the United States to be assistant dean of a coeducational medical school. Between 1961 and 1978, Dr. Merritt was instrumental in bringing $55 million in new construction grants to the Indianapolis campus. From 1961 to 1997, under her guidance, IUSM research dollars grew from $1.8 million to nearly $105 million.
In 1978, Dr. Merritt returned to Bethesda and was appointed special assistant to the director of the National Institutes of Health for research training and research resources. In 1978, she was the first woman to chair the National Library of Medicine Board of Regents, Dr. Merritt helped create the library’s electronic information system. In 1986, she was named the first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health.
Following her husband’s death, Dr. Merritt returned home to Indiana and in 1988, became dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine. She also held positions as interim dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, and vice chancellor for research and graduate education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. After officially retiring in 1998, Dr. Merritt served on the Indiana University School of Medicine’s National Center for Women’s Health and the Women’s Fund of Central Indiana. She also designed and created databases for student research in drama, short stories, and biography as a volunteer for the North Central High School.
After 1994, three schools of the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis designated annual honors, awards, and lectureships in Dr. Merritt’s name. Dr. Merritt also received the National Institutes of Health Director’s Award and the Governor of Indiana’s “Sagamore of the Wabash” citation. While proud of all this recognition, Dr. Merritt said, “In some respects, I have been most touched by the Certificate of Recognition I was awarded by the Washington Township School Board for the volunteer work I have done in the North Central High School Information Center. The staff has been wonderful in allowing me the privilege of working there at my own speed for the past three years, and I will continue to do so as long as I have the energy and wit to function productively.”
Question and Answer
What was my biggest obstacle?
Because my bachelor of arts degree was in literature and philosophy, I had to make up two years of pre-medical requirements.
How do I make a difference?
I helped by advising and mentoring countless individual investigators and trainees and by keeping the administrative rails greased in my positions as dean and vice chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis and as research training officer and first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research at the NIH. Now I make a difference by consulting and serving on community boards and in a local high school as well as at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Who was my mentor?
There were no mentors fifty years ago.
How has my career evolved over time?
After receiving my boards in pediatrics, I became involved in federal research administration at the National Institutes of Health, as well as in academic research administration at Indiana University. Opportunities continued to arise that advanced me through the ranks to distinguished university professor with honorary degrees from both Purdue and Indiana Universities.