Celebrating America's Women Physicians
Women have always been healers. As mothers and grandmothers, women have always nursed the sick in their homes. As midwives, wise women, and curanderas, women have always cared for people in their communities. Yet, when medicine became established as a formal profession in Europe and America, women were shut out.
Women waged a long battle to gain access to medical education and hospital training. Since then, they have overcome prejudices and discrimination to create and broaden opportunities within the profession. Gradually, women from diverse backgrounds have carved out successful careers in every aspect of medicine.
Changing the Face of Medicine introduces some of the many extraordinary and fascinating women who have studied and practiced medicine.
This 2003 exhibition honors the lives and achievements in medicine. Women physicians have excelled in many diverse medical careers. Some have advanced the field of surgery by developing innovative procedures. Some have won the Nobel prize. Others have brought new attention to the health and well-being of children. Many have reemphasized the art of healing and the roles of culture and spirituality in medicine.
Dr. Tenley E. Albright
Dr. Tenley Albright became the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating before breaking boundaries in the field of surgery.
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Dr. Tenley E. Albright. In 1956 the Olympics was in Cortina, Italy, in the mountains, and we skated outdoors. It’s sort of a hyper-sensation, hyper-perception, you’re able to think of many, many things at once. I was aware of so many things. Of the people in the audience, about where I was standing, where the sun was crossing the ice, where I’d take off in the dark and land in the sun, what the mountains looked like, what the moment was. And so when you’re there in this magical world of the operating room, with a patient and with a team, and you’re dealing with something, you never know totally what you’re going to find until you’re there. It’s sort of like that multidimensional thinking that I was aware of on the ice, where everything comes into your head at once. You have to be focused, but you also have to be conscious of all sorts of things, for the benefit of having the surgery turn out the way you want it to. Doing whatever I can to make a difference in one life, or part of one life, that motivates me to want to do that more. And anything I can do to make a bigger change—whether it’s helping to change attitudes or ways of doing things or just to encourage all of us to have sort of a sense of openness— that’s really what I’d like to do.
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Dr. Mary Ellen Avery
Dr. Mary Ellen Avery helped discover the cause of respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) in premature babies. Additionally, she trained and advocated for young physicians in a long career in academic medicine.
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Dr. Mary Ellen Avery. My next door neighbor was professor of pediatrics at Woman’s Medical College in Pennsylvania—Dr. Emily Bacon— and she kindly reached out to me in many ways, and I saw her life as more exciting and meaningful than most of the women I knew—who were my mothers friends, for example, who were busy doing good works, raising children (and I admired them greatly), but I still thought Emily Bacon had something going for her in terms of reaching out to all children. But mainly, she reached out to me, and I’m eternally grateful. So I applied to Johns Hopkins and Harvard. And Harvard didn’t take women at that time but I didn’t know it, and Johns Hopkins did. In fact they had to. They were founded by a woman who had insisted that they wouldn’t get the money to build the school if they didn’t take women on an equal basis with men, and I thought, “Hey, that neutralizes the problem in one dimension,” and Emily Bacon graduated from Johns Hopkins. So there was no question where I was going to go to medical school. I received the National Medal of Science in 1991. It is America’s highest award for all of science. And so there had been very few pediatricians if any, that had ever been given the medal. They’ve given maybe ten or fifteen a year. It’s presented by the President of the United States to the nominee. This has been very, very rewarding. And I feel that I am a citizen of this one world and that I can resonate with people with a lot in common—it’s called science and science methods. And I am so saturated and pleased to share it with anybody who will listen, and that makes for a very fulfilling life.
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Dr. Nancy E. Jasso
Dr. Nancy Jasso is one of the founding physicians of a laser tattoo–removal project for the San Fernando Valley Violence Prevention Coalition, which serves people who leave gangs.
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Dr. Nancy E. Jasso. For many people with tattoos, it’s actually life threatening to them to walk the streets. If they happen to have the wrong tattoo in the wrong neighborhood, then that means they might get shot, and they may not make it to the next day. In addition, it’s very difficult for them to secure employment when they have tattoos. There’s lots of value judgments about having tattoos, lots of concern for safety, and what their affiliations might be with either gangs or drugs, and so many people cannot get employed if they have tattoos. I have a lot of respect for the patients in the Tattoo Clinic. These are patients who are really trying to change their lives, and change is hard. And yet they’ve been courageous enough to actually try to put their life on a different track. So I figure anything that I can do to be helpful to them, I'm very willing to do. Well, I think fundamentally, being a physician is really an honor. It’s really a privilege to walk that path with another human being. People come in because they’re suffering and they’re in need of help, and I have the privilege of being there to try to assist them. And I really do see it like a partnership. It’s not really a one-way street. I certainly have my bag of tricks and all of the years of study under my belt, but it really takes kind of the two of us working together to really come up with something that’s going to help them.
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Dr. Vivian W. Pinn
Dr. Vivian Pinn served as the first full–time director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additionally, she was the first African American woman to chair an academic pathology department in the United States, at Howard University College of Medicine.
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Dr. Vivian W. Pinn. Having the opportunity to come be the first permanent Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) represented not only a career change for me, but also a very, very exciting opportunity that I have tried to make the best of in every way that I could. We didn’t really have a good focus on what is now called Women’s Health up until about the time this office was established. The office at NIH is really the first office established within the Federal Government to focus on women’s health issues. It was established to make sure that women are included in clinical studies funded by the NIH—in other words, included in research—and to make sure that research is addressing the health of women in studies. I always wanted to be a physician and I always thought that was what I wanted to do. But my sophomore year in college, my mother developed a bad pain in her back. And the doctors thought it was arthritis. And I can remember going with her to the doctor and having him say, “Francina, if you just wore those oxfords I gave you and stood up straight and did those exercises, you wouldn’t have that pain.” But it turned out what he had missed, was that she had a bone tumor. I interrupted my career and stayed home with my mother and took care of her 24 hours a day until she died, which was in February of 1961. Then I went back to school with even more resolve that I wanted to be a physician, and I wanted to be the kind of physician who paid attention to my patients, and didn’t dismiss my patient’s complaints—something that has really carried through and I think has been central to my way of thinking and approaching women’s health in this portion of my career.
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Dr. Esther M. Sternberg
Dr. Esther Sternberg is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking work on the mind–body connection in illness and healing.
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Dr. Esther M. Sternberg. It’s really hard to say “Okay, I’ve made a discovery, and I know I’ve helped thousands of people, or millions of people.” It’s when you see the one patient that really has benefited from that discovery that you really know that you’ve helped. When the family member can come up to you and say, “Thank you, you helped save my mother.” That really makes a difference. And I think that’s what motivated me from the beginning when I started seeing patients on a one-on-one basis, when you know that you’ve saved a life. And then if you make a discovery in the lab, in a rat, that you know can be applied to saving many lives — that really is tremendously rewarding. For so many thousands of years, the popular culture believed that stress could make you sick, that believing could make you well. And people believe what they feel. But scientists need evidence. And there really wasn’t any good, solid scientific evidence to prove these connections. Nor was there a good way to measure them. And scientists only believe what they can actually measure. Once scientists and physicians believed that there was a connection between the brain and the immune system, you could then take it to the next step: that maybe there is a connection between emotions and disease. Between negative emotions and disease, and positive emotions and health. And we can then say, okay, maybe these alternative approaches that have been used for thousands of years — approaches like meditation, prayer, music, sleep, dreams — all of these approaches that we really know in our heart of hearts really work to maintain health... Maybe there is a scientific basis for it.
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Dr. Donna M. Christian-Christensen
Dr. Donna Christian–Christensen is the first woman physician to serve in Congress and the first woman delegate for the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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Dr. Donna M. Christian-Christensen. If you had asked me when I was graduating from George Washington in 1970 if I would be here doing this, I would have said no. And if you had asked me in 1996, when I got elected, if I would be in a position to influence national health issues, or international health issues, I would have told you, “Oh, no, that wasn’t possible,” but today it is. And it’s really an honor and a privilege, and a responsibility, to be able to do that. Starting coalitions is a lot of work. You end up doing all of it yourself. So I thought, well let me see, maybe I could join an organization that already exists that I could work through, and do some of the same kinds of things. And so I ended up joining the Democratic Party. And I was the first female delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands— the first female delegate from any of the territories as a matter of fact—and then the first female physician ever to serve in the Congress. I think it’s really important for young people of color to see people of their own racial or ethnic background in positions like mine—not only on the political front, but also as a health care provider—so that they will know that yes, it’s possible for them. Because sometimes in their day-to-day environment it may not seem that way. So I think it’s really encouraging for them to see us and to interact with us.
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Dr. Nancy L. Snyderman
Dr. Nancy Snyderman had a decades’ long career in broadcast medical journalism, serving as a correspondent for ABC television’s Good Morning America for 15 years.
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Dr. Nancy L. Snyderman. No matter where I have been at any stage of my life I’ve always been a doctor first, and everything else second— except maybe being a mom. But I’ve never seen myself as a doctor correspondent who just happens to do surgery. I’ve always defined myself as a practicing surgeon who happens to also have a second career in broadcast journalism. I started combining my love of television with my love of medicine. And the two weaved themselves together quite well. The passion in broadcasting is different. The best stuff I’ve done has been in the worst places on earth. Kosovo. Mogadishu. Bosnia. The Persian Gulf. Afghanistan. Pakistan. I think when you get a chance to look around you and see the world suffering, and you’ve reached down deep inside yourself and tried to explain that to people who may never have the good fortune to travel, in the same way, that’s where I get my passion. And if you look at the people entering medicine today, they’re as bright as people have ever been. The youngsters entering medicine today will enter on their own terms. And they’ll make medicine what they want it to be. But I want young people—particularly young girls—to discover the thrill of science, and biology, and physics, and how it all works. And for my two girls, every time we can draw science or biology into life, we do it. Medicine’s filled with a lot of kicks. And the other great thing is, it’s this blank canvas. You want to go into medicine? You get to do anything you want to do. Become a neuropsychiatrist, become a physicist, become a neurosurgeon, be in the lab, see patients, work part-time, full-time, have kids, don’t have kids— you get to do it on your own terms. It’s great. And you can always put food on the table.
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