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UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI
A Special Reprint of the
SUMMER 2000 issue
Paving the way
At the dawn of the
Psychiatrist Jane
Dunaway, MD ’05,
as she appeared
on the jacket of her
1964 book Letters
from Dr. Jane and
as a senior
medical student.
20th century,
six women made
history at the MU
School of Medicine.
Article by Janine Latus Musick
Anna Searcy, MD,
appears with fellow
freshmen medical
students in this 1897
yearbook photograph.
In 1900, Searcy became
the first woman to
graduate from the MU
School of Medicine.
I
t was a time when women wore bustles and gloves,
when legs — even table legs — were hidden from
view. Young ladies learned the gentle traits and domestic skills that attracted husbands. Wives devoted
themselves to housekeeping. And mothers instructed
daughters that no woman of means and morals would
seek a life outside the home.
In the early days of the 1900s, few women broke
this cycle by going to college much less medical
school. Pioneers like Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, who in
1849 became the first woman to receive a medical
degree in the United States, had opened doors for
women in medicine. But many men believed with religious and scientific certainty that women lacked
the intelligence and strength to be doctors. For a female physician, the antagonism “formed a situation of
singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel,”
Blackwell said.
Indeed, only 23 women received doctoral degrees
of any kind in the United States in 1900, the year
Anna Searcy, MD, became the first woman to earn a
medical degree from MU. That was 20 years before
women could vote and almost 50 years before a
woman received a medical degree from Harvard University. Yet in 1902, MU School of Medicine Dean Andrew McAlester, MD, predicted all medical schools
soon would accept female students.
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“It has been my luck to have experience for three
years now teaching anatomy … to a mixed class, and I
must confess that the females are quite able to take care
of themselves,” he said. “The females did better work on
an average day in the dissecting room than the males.
The best theoretical, as well as practical, anatomist in
the sophomore class of over 100 was female.”
The six women who graduated from the School of
Medicine before 1910 — when the school switched to a
two-year program — seemed unaffected by the gender
bias of their time. They went on to deliver infants, treat
the sick and lead their communities. A few started
their practices riding horseback over swollen streams
and ended them after man had landed on the moon. In
between, they saw the development of penicillin, Xrays and anesthesia. The one-size-fits-most medications they carried would evolve into a spectrum so
finely nuanced that some formularies now are an inch
thick.
Like many women with medical degrees in the early
1900s, the School of Medicine’s first female graduate
returned home to care for her friends and neighbors.
Searcy practiced in and around the small towns of
Monroe County, Mo., and married John Bourne in
Macon County, Mo., in 1909. According to the bits of
information about her that have been collected, she died
suddenly from a heart ailment in 1939 in Springfield, Mo.
She was in her late 70s and had no known relatives.
From the
farm to
psychiatry
A great deal more
is known about the
School of Medicine’s
second woman graduate, Jane
Dunaway, MD, who received
her medical degree in 1905.
Born in 1879, Dunaway grew
up in Cedar County, Mo.,as
one of 14 children in a farm
family. Like most farm girls,
she helped her mother make
candles and soap, spin wool and sew clothes by hand.
But Dunaway’s mother was determined that her children
would leave the farm to receive an education.
Of the nine Dunaway children who survived to
adulthood, all but one taught in a one-room schoolhouse to help pay for their own education. As elder siblings became successful wage earners, they would send
money home to support their brothers and sisters. In
1901, Jane Dunaway followed the example of her
brother Louis, who received a medical degree in St.
Louis, and enrolled in MU’s medical school. She returned home to practice, but in 1918, she moved to
nearby El Dorado Springs, Mo., to help Louis fight an
influenza outbreak. She operated a three-bed hospital
in a downtown building.
Dunaway moved often throughout her 55-year career. She was in general practice in Oklahoma, Colorado and Missouri for a total of 17 years. She spent five
years in Puerto Rico, where she practiced at Presbyterian Mission Hospital in San Juan and at a private
mission clinic she founded in the coastal town of
Isabela. She also served on the staff of Puerto Rico’s
first board of sanitation.
Dunaway’s focus then shifted to psychiatry, and she
moved back to Missouri to join the medical staff at
State Hospital No. 2 in St. Joseph. She was on the staff
at Warren State Hospital in Warren, Pa., from 1928 to
1943 and later at psychiatric hospitals in Mercer, Pa.,
and New Wilmington, Pa. After 30 years in psychiatry,
she retired in 1960 at the age of 81.
Parker Memorial Hospital
Change in
the era
So many important events occurred at
the MU School of Medicine in the early
1900s that the arrival of the school’s first female students probably didn’t attract attention for long. Anna Searcy, MD, the first
woman to receive her medical degree from
MU, came in 1897. In 1898, the school’s curriculum switched from a three-year to a fouryear degree program. In 1901, construction
of the school’s first hospital was completed.
Two years later, a new building that held
laboratories, lecture rooms and a medical
library opened.
MU was rushing to join a nationwide
movement to modernize medical education.
But that was 100 years ago, when the
School of Medicine bragged about the lifesize plastic man and female pelvis in its anatomical collection. Tuition was free. Library
fees jumped from $5 in 1900 to a whopping
$10 in 1904. Altogether, a student’s average
annual expenses — including room, board
and books — didn’t exceed $200.
Besides the money, the only requirements for getting into the first publicly
supported medical school west of the Mississippi River were a “good high school
education” and “evidence of good moral
character.” Students who met these requirements were encouraged to learn
more about the School of Medicine by requesting a catalog that contained the
photographs shown here.
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Parker auditorium
Laboratory of relational anatomy
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Fast-paced practice
in St. Louis
From top, Grace Scholz
Mountjoy, MD ’06, as
she appeared at the
age of 50, as a senior in
medical school and at
the age of 91 with her
two grandchildren.
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Grace Scholz Mountjoy, MD, graduated from the School of Medicine in 1906
at the age of 25. During her time in medical school, she lived in the home of a local
reverend and married his son, John
Mountjoy. She practiced ophthalmology
in Columbia with Guy Noyes, MD, who
became dean of the School of Medicine.
In 1910, she had a son, Philip, who became an otolaryngologist.
Mountjoy moved to St. Louis to join
her father, a general practitioner, in
1913. But six months after the move,
he was killed in a streetcar accident
near his office. She took over his practice and ran it for nearly 50 years. Her
office was on a cobblestone street just
off the streetcar line.
Mountjoy charged 50 cents for an
office visit and $1 for a house call, says
her grandson, John, also an otolaryngologist. At any hour of the day or
night, she would have her son or husband escort her to a streetcar that would take her
to patients’ homes. She’d tell the men what time she
planned to return, and they’d be waiting to take her
home.
That system was cumbersome, though, given the
unpredictable nature of childbirth. For this reason,
Mountjoy bought one of the first Fords with a selfstarting motor. Until that time, starting a car required
Summer 2000
turning its handle, and it was considered proper etiquette for men to help women. But when men rushed
over to crank Mountjoy’s car, they would jump back in
astonishment as it fired up by itself.
One winter night in 1920, Mountjoy’s car got stuck
in a snowdrift en route to a woman in labor. Police officers drove her to the hospital, and after the baby was
born, they gave her a ride back to her car, which had
stopped just a few feet from a lake. The near tragedy
scared Mountjoy into giving up evening deliveries.
Over the course of her career, Mountjoy performed
minor surgery at her office, her home, her patients’
homes and Christian, DePaul and Deaconess hospitals.
She stayed in St. Louis until her death in 1985. She
was 97.
“My grandmother would always speak up, but she
was very kind,” John Mountjoy recalls. “She loved to
talk and to carry on conversations about her practice.”
Missouri’s medicine woman
While Mountjoy practiced in the city, her classmate
Ruth Seevers, MD, took a train home to the small town
of Osceola, Mo. Seevers’ father, a physician, met her at
the train, and they immediately visited her first patient.
It was familiar territory for the new doctor. As a child,
Seevers drove her father’s horses between visits to patients so he could rest. She inherited the horses and
patients when he died in 1909, just three years after
she began practicing.
With the horses and her dog — a constant companion and guardian named Cub — Seevers traveled day
and night over country roads. When she approached
a flooded creek on foot, she would ask a man from
the nearest farm to carry her across. Sometimes there
would be someone waiting to pick her up on the other
side. Other times she would walk a mile or more to
reach patients.
Seevers also traveled in boats and train cabooses to
reach patients. Once, she trundled along on a railroad
handcar. Another time she was ferried up a half-frozen
river to care for a baby who had spinal meningitis.
“The only way I could get that baby back to town
where I could take care of it was back down the river,”
she said. “So I put the little thing on a pillow, wrapped
it all up in a blanket and got back in the boat. The man
guided the boat down the river while I held on to a
paddle and pushed the pieces of ice away when they
were about to hit us. That was, I think, the hardest trip
I ever did make.”
In 1917, Seevers bought her first car, one she had to
crank so hard “my arms turned black and blue,” she said.
From the tales of her run-ins with robbers and morphine addicts to the intoxicated father dragged out by
his heels, stories about Seevers abound in published
interviews and in the memories of Osceola residents.
The intoxicated father, as the story goes, had passed
out on the floor next to Seevers while she was delivering his son. Seevers stopped what she was doing
and pulled the man outside to make room for her to
work.
Then there’s the story of the 50-cent baby. When
Seevers confronted a father who hadn’t paid her for
several deliveries, the father fished in his pocket and
pulled out 50 cents. “I guess the kid’s worth that
much,” the father said.
Sometimes Seevers was paid in cash, but she often
would accept eggs, cabbage or firewood. When she had
to stay with patients for long periods, she would sleep
under tables and on straw ticks in corners.
During the Depression, Seevers used poultices
made of milk and bread, green mullein leaves or meat
fat. She kept shelves of more sophisticated medicines
in her office just off the courthouse square. She’d
count out pills, put them in a small envelope and label
it with the drug’s name and dosage.
Seevers had delivered 3,000 infants by the start of
World War II, when she stopped counting, and many
girls were named Ruth in her honor. She refused to
schedule appointments with patients. Instead, she
saw them as they arrived at her office — some days
she’d see five patients, others 30. When Seevers was
well into her 90s, patients would still come up to her
house, see the sign that said “Knock Louder” and wait
as she doled out medication and advice.
Years before she died at the age of 102, Seevers
was considered a legend in Osceola and was known
throughout Missouri as the oldest practicing female
physician in the state. Today, 15 years after her
death, people in Osceola still share stories about the
woman they called Dr. Ruth.
Larry Lewis, now in his 70s, remembers when
Seevers treated him for pneumonia when he was a
child. Penicillin wasn’t available at the time, and Lewis
was near death. Seevers brought him a puppy in the
hope that it would give him a reason to live. “She was
holistic,” recalls Lewis, now an Episcopalian priest. He
also remembers receiving a shot from Seevers when he
was 8 or 9 years old. “As she gave it, I said, ‘Gosh,’
and she said, ‘Young man, you may be able to talk like
that in your mother’s kitchen, but you cannot in my
office.’ ”
Another Osceola resident remembers rushing her
1-year-old to Seevers’ home when the infant was having convulsions. By the time the mother and her husband arrived with the baby, the convulsions had
stopped. When the man apologized for what he called
his wife’s overreaction, Seevers turned to him and
said, “Listen to me, young man, a baby who is having
convulsions is a very frightening matter!”
In 1963, Osceola named Seevers “first
citizen” of the town for her service as a
physician and for her devotion to the business community, library board, school
board and cemetery association. Although
people still boast of Seevers’ accomplishments, she did not. She always considered
herself a simple country doctor.
“I remember a professor in medical
school,” Seevers told a newspaper reporter when she was 90. “Someone came
in and called him Doc, and he just had a
fit. He gave us an hour lecture on trying
to maintain the dignity of our position. I
thought, well, that’s all right, but he doesn’t
know anything about the country. I heard
country folks call my father Doc all my life.
They used to ride up on horseback to the
gate and call, ‘Doc … Oh
Doc.’ I can hear it yet sometimes.”
Missouri Alumnus photos
Before her death in 1969, Dunaway’s compassion
for her patients — especially those who were mentally
ill — was captured in her 1964 book Letters from Dr.
Jane, a compilation of letters she had written to a
nephew who wanted to become a physician. “The purpose of these stories,” she wrote, “is to try, just try, to
lead a few people to understand what a very thin line
there is between the emotionally disturbed, who seek
help, and the remainder of us average
… erratic, eccentric, bigoted, biased,
superstitious persons who are dependent upon alcohol, tobacco, tranquilizers or other people and who need
help but are too arrogant to recognize
the fact.
“The people with whom I’ve been
dealing are just people, usually
original, individualistic, never boring,
sometimes charming or entertaining
and always interesting.”
Much more than
the town doc
Lake Brewer, MD, also spent her
career as a country doc. In 1882, she
became the first baby born in Ridgeway,
Mo. At the time, mules were dragging
iron through town to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Those tracks carried Brewer
home after she received her medical degree in 1908.
Brewer was on call the moment she returned to
Ridgeway and continued to see patients until a few
years before she died at the age of 85. During her
years of active practice, Brewer wouldn’t even
travel to the county seat 10 miles away without
contacting the central telephone switchboard to
tell operators where she would be and when she
would return. She would post the same information in the window of her home and office in case a
patient dropped by.
“Experience has shown me that the person
who forgets himself in service to others is the
happiest,” Brewer said. “The unhappy people,
the sick people emotionally, are those who think
about themselves. Work, and interest in others,
I know will cure many vague illnesses.”
Brewer never married, but the family of
one of her best friends informally adopted
her. The friend’s children all called her
Auntie Lake. One of those children, Marion
Guffey of Columbia, Mo., remembers Auntie
Lake as outspoken, to say the least.
“You wouldn’t call her sweet and charming,”
Guffey says. “She was respected by everyone but not
Ruth
Seevers,
MD ’06, at the
age of 90 at
her home in
Osceola, Mo.,
and as a senior
medical
student.
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Pathology and practice
in Montana
Lake Brewer,
MD ’08, in her office in
Ridgeway, Mo., and
as an undergraduate
student at MU. Center,
Brewer’s roll-top office
desk holds some of her
medical belongings.
6
Missouri Medical Review
necessarily liked by people who
weren’t big enough to take her
advice for what it was.”
Brewer once called the postmaster into her office as he walked
by and told him he just didn’t look
well and ought to get a
checkup. She knew everything
about everyone in town, but she
never divulged a secret, in spite of
her friends’ needling, Guffey says.
In the early days of Brewer’s practice, people
would pick her up in a horse and buggy, bury her
in lap robes and put a warm brick at her feet.
“They’d take her out in the boondocks to deliver a
baby,” Guffey says. “Any time of the day or night,
she’d go to deliver a baby.
“I remember all of us [sitting] at the table, and
someone would come to the door and say, ‘Hurry,
Doc Lake, Sarah Jane’s really bad,’ ” Guffey says.
“She would leave her dinner and take care of
whatever it was.”
Brewer was the city physician, a Sunday school
teacher, a business adviser and a member of many
medical groups. She stopped delivering babies in 1940
but practiced medicine at least until her 50-year career mark in 1958. When she was 82, patients still
came to her home for advice, comfort and medication.
“Auntie Lake was the pillar of the town,” says Guffey,
who has saved several medical items from Brewer’s
office.
The office also displayed memorabilia from
Brewer’s alma mater. She was, after all, the first
woman to hold both a bachelor’s degree and a medical
degree from MU. She also was an enthusiastic member of the women’s basketball team. Her 1902 yearSummer 2000
Caroline McGill, PhD, MD, and Ruth Seevers were
classmates in medical school until McGill changed her focus to teaching and research. McGill, who may have been
the School of Medicine’s first female faculty member, was
teaching anatomy at MU as early as 1905. By the time
she received a doctorate in anatomy and physiology from
the school in 1908, she had published five articles, three
of them in prestigious German journals.
Education always was a priority in McGill’s family.
As a girl in Laclede County, Mo., she and her siblings
trapped and sold rabbits to save money for college.
During the hourlong horseback ride from the family
farm to school, McGill passed the time by riding backward and reading a book propped up on the horse’s
rump. At the age of 17, she got a job teaching elementary school, staying with a family in a one-room cabin
and sharing a bed with the family’s children. She
taught the six-month winter session to earn enough
money to attend high school in the spring. In 1901, the
high school awarded her a teaching degree.
Later that year at the age of 21, McGill arrived at
MU with three calico dresses, $150 and her mother’s
handwritten recipe for divinity candy, which stated:
“Beat! Beat! Beat! And beat until you can beat no
more.” McGill used that recipe, as well as chopping
wood and doing light housekeeping for faculty members, to pay for expenses during her first year of medical school. The next year she accepted a zoology teaching assistantship at the University.
During her time at the School of Medicine, McGill
spent one summer studying pathology at the University
of Chicago and was granted a fellowship for a summer of
study at the Woods Hole Zoological Lab in Massachusetts, now the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. After
returning from Woods Hole, she used a Sarah Berliner
Fellowship to travel and study for one year in Europe.
“Miss McGill certainly deserves the great honor that
she has received, for she is the hardest worker that I
ever knew,” said Clarence Jackson, MD, junior dean of
medicine at MU, when McGill received the fellowship.
“She does twice the amount of studying that an average student does. She further deserves the honor because she has worked her way through medical
school.”
When McGill returned to Missouri in 1910, she
had to choose between accepting a full professorship
at the School of Medicine or moving to Montana to
serve as that state’s first trained pathologist. She
chose the latter and spent two years doing lab work
and trying to establish basic sanitation in the frontier town of Butte. She then earned her medical degree at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, receiving the degree in two years instead of the standard four.
In 1916, at the age of 37, McGill returned to
Butte and hung her shingle. The city was plagued by
labor battles, crime and diseases common in mining
towns. She treated patients with diabetes, tuberculosis and influenza. There was a nursing shortage, so
McGill would sit by her patients’ bedsides giving what
comfort she could. That may have inspired her to
help establish a nursing school at the local hospital. If a woman couldn’t afford to pay for tuition at
the school, McGill would count out the cash.
McGill traveled by horse to miners’ cramped and
unsanitary houses until 1918, when she bought a
car. She became a familiar figure plowing through
the muddy streets of Butte wearing her ever-present
hat and a coat made for a man. She would drive as
far as 300 miles to deliver a baby, then set up her
portable pharmacy and let word spread that she was
in the area. She’d consult with anyone who showed
up at the door, conducting minor kitchen surgeries
and dispensing medication while she waited for the
baby to appear.
McGill never married. Instead, she divided her
time among her three passions — medicine, which
she practiced until 1956, collecting artifacts and
outdoor activities. “I do not believe a woman can be
a full-time doctor, a full-time wife and a full-time
mother and do all three well,” McGill said. “I chose
medicine.”
An avid hunter and fisher, McGill loved nature
and surrounded herself with like-minded people. In
1936, she bought a 320-acre ranch, which she
opened to friends, family members and patients.
She owned more than 4,200 acres, all preserved for
Montana wilderness lovers, when she died in 1959
at the age of 79.
Before her death, McGill donated her substantial
collections and quite a bit of money to establish what
has become the Museum of the Rockies at Montana
State University in Bozeman. The museum recently
created a special exhibit and 75-page catalog about
McGill. Both are titled An Extraordinary Life.
Left, Caroline
McGill, PhD ’08,
MD, sits with the
son of one of her
ranch employees
in Montana, where
she owned several
hundred acres of
wilderness. Below,
McGill appears as
an undergraduate
student at MU and
later in her standard uniform and
a hat she often
was seen wearing
in Montana.
Museum of the Rockies photos ©
book photograph was accompanied by the statement:
“Aim: To be a basketball coach.”
Each spring, Brewer returned to MU for alumni reunions. “She did much more than treat the ill and injured,” an MU alumnus and former patient said when
Brewer died in 1967. “She was a friend and inspiration
to the young people of our community. … Many people
scattered throughout the world, myself included, can
thank Dr. Lake for the encouragement they received to
‘go on to college and make something from what God
gave you.’ ”
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From the 1960s through the 1980s, MU produced
female physicians who would go where few if any women
had gone before. They pursued specialized training,
entered the ranks of leadership and made their voices heard
in professional organizations. At the same time,
they became wives, mothers and role models
for the women who would follow in their footsteps.
Article by Rich Gleba
S
ixty years after women first arrived as students at the MU School of Medicine, their
numbers had barely increased. In fact, more
women graduated from the school in 1906 than
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in 1960. No wonder patients at the University’s
new hospital were convinced the female medical students and residents were really nurses.
It took the civil unrest of the 1960s and
Elizabeth
Plogsted
James,
MD ’65
During her interview for admission to the
School of Medicine, Elizabeth Plogsted James,
MD ’65, thought being a woman might be a
problem at MU. Five male faculty members
were firing questions at James — a single
woman with no children — when one of the
men asked her how she could raise five children when she had to be on call all night.
“This guy had been on my case because of
my gender throughout the entire interview, and
by the time he got to that question, I was irritated,” she says. “I told him I’d never been in
that situation, but if I were, I would be resourceful enough to handle it. Then he got
quiet, and I thought I had just cut my throat.”
Today, James is a high-ranking member
of the full-time faculty at the School of Medicine. She is director of neonatal and perinatal
medicine, a position she has held since 1971,
and serves as a professor of child health and
obstetrics and gynecology. She also has been
E. Dorinda
Loeffel
Shelley,
MD ’66
Who should resign? That’s the question E.
Dorinda Loeffel Shelley, MD ’66, and her husband faced when they got married in 1980. Each
was the chair of a dermatology department, but
there was more to their titles. She was the only
female chair of dermatology in the United States.
On the other hand, he ran a large department at
the University of Pennsylvania, home of the first
medical school in the nation.
“My husband very graciously gave up his
chair to become one of my professors at the
branch of the University of Illinois College of
Medicine in Peoria,” Shelley says. “I didn’t want
to leave the residency program I was trying to
start and I loved living on a 60-acre farm.”
Shelley and her husband, Walter Shelley, MD,
PhD, worked together until they retired in 1997
from the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. During their 14 years as professors at the college,
she served as chief of the division of dermatology.
“I wanted my students to learn that medicine is more than a science, so I always tried to
show them how to be sympathetic and cut toenails. Older patients who couldn’t bend down
or weren’t strong enough just adored having
me work on their toenails, and I didn’t want my
students to think that was beneath their dignity,” Shelley says.
Teaching medicine runs a close second to
Shelley’s first love — writing about medicine. A
revised version of the Shelleys’ 1986 textbook
Advanced Dermatologic Therapy is scheduled to
be released next spring at the American Academy of Dermatology’s annual meeting. The Shelleys also are well-known for writing a diary that
contained a daily record of their clinical practice
and family life from 1990 to 1995. The diary was
published in a series of more than 60 articles
that appeared in the medical journal Cutis.
“People were more interested in our family than
in our clinic,” Shelley says. “They would come
up to us at meetings and ask us about our three
children.”
MUtation photo
Making their mark
From the ’60s
instrumental in the development of MU’s neonatal intensive care unit and neonatal transport program.
“I have always felt that in this setting,
people are treated according to their abilities,
not their gender,” James says. “If you are a
competent student, resident or faculty member, people recognize that.”
It would have been difficult not to recognize James throughout her higher education.
She was the first white woman to enroll full
time at Lincoln University, a historically black
college in her hometown of Jefferson City, Mo.
“I didn’t think about being the only white person. I was there to learn. That approach carried over to my days in medical school,” she
says.
“I was always aware that I stuck out like a
sore thumb to patients, residents and faculty
members, but it wasn’t uncomfortable because
of the relationship I developed with my classmates,” James adds. “We pulled together
pretty quickly because it was clear that if we
didn’t pull together, we would fall apart.”
After completing a fellowship at the University of Colorado in Denver, James spent more
than seven years as the only neonatologist at
MU. Another neonatologist arrived about the
time James’ daughter was born in 1978, allowing the new mother to take some time away
from work. Also that year, James’ mother retired and offered to help care for the child.
“Female physicians who don’t have that
kind of support — and it’s hard to buy that
kind of support — tend to find that they must
drop out of the advancement loop for several
years if they have children,” says James, wife
of Ronald James, MD ’65, and mother of two.
“It’s a difficulty that is built into gender.”
Making room for women: Barbara Buchanan
McCanse, MD ’65, shares a microscope
with a fellow student in this 1963 yearbook
photograph. Today, she is a retired child and
adolescent psychiatrist in Belton, Mo., and
the wife of Andrew McCanse, MD, BS Med ’52.
Frustration for
all: After showing
disappointment with
a lab experiment in
this 1966 yearbook
photograph, Cathy
Jarvis, MD ’69,
became an internist in
Florissant, Mo.
MUtation photos
MUtation photo
Women arrive: The three women of the Class of 1962 — from left, Sue Marten, MD, Dorothy LeBoeuf,
MD, and Ann Johanson, MD — appear together in this 1960 yearbook photograph. Johanson
is a pediatric endocrinologist in San Mateo, Calif., and serves as a consultant for Genentech, a
pharmaceutical company. LeBoeuf recently retired from a family and geriatric medicine practice she
started in Pea Ridge, Ark. She still provides care to area nursing-home patients. Marten is deceased.
1970s for women to make dramatic progress
in medicine. They began entering medical
schools in record numbers after it became illegal for employers and schools to discriminate on the basis of sex. At MU, the number
of female medical students peaked in 1990,
the first year women outmanned men in the
freshman class.
The seven female graduates and former
residents featured in this article demonstrate the variety of new opportunities that
were offered to women in medicine from
1960 through 1990. They also represent
changes that occurred at MU, where female
medical students couldn’t wear pants until
the early 1970s and separate call rooms for
men and women weren’t offered in all programs until 1981. It may sound sunny, but
these women say adversity did not drive a
wedge between them and the School of Medicine. On the contrary, they believe the quality
of their medical education has allowed them
to excel in their careers.
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Missouri Medical Review
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From the ’70s
Jean Edwards Holt,
Missouri Alumnus photo
MD ’72
Marriage and medicine: New MDs Sue and
Jay Marshall hold their 3-month-old daughter
at their MU commencement ceremony in 1972.
The couple now practices in Chesterfield, Mo.
Medicine always has been a family affair for
Shelley. Her mother, an obstetrician-gynecologist, received her medical degree in 1935 at
Washington University in St. Louis, but she
couldn’t find an internship in the city. “By
the time I came along, they were begging me
to come to St. Louis for an internship, which
shows you how far things had come,” Shelley
says. “I went there and worked with my mother
at St. Luke’s Hospital, and we had fun delivering babies together.”
Shelley didn’t meet another female dermatologist until she began attending meetings of
the American Academy of Dermatology in 1967,
the year she began her residency at MU under
her mentor and longtime director of dermatology Philip Anderson, MD. In the following
years, she joined other female academy members to form a social club that became the
Women’s Dermatologic Society. In 1980, Shelley
served as its second president.
With support from the group, women have
been elected to most of the academy’s top positions. “No women were on committees for decades, but we changed all that,” says Shelley,
who is writing about the history of women in
dermatology in America. “There was always a
debate over whether dermatology needed a
women’s group, and now the question is
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Missouri Medical Review
Summer 2000
From her medical school days through her
rise in the ranks of organized medicine, Jean
Edwards Holt, MD ’72, has stayed at the top of
her profession.
Holt was the first woman to graduate at the
top of her class at the School of Medicine since
the school’s four-year degree program was reestablished in 1956. Today, she is the first
woman to serve as the Southern Medical
Association’s counselor from Texas. She also is
presently being considered for the presidency
of the association, which has not had a woman
president since it formed in 1906.
Shortly after Holt completed her internship
and residency training at MU, she became a faculty member at the University of Texas Health
Science Center in San Antonio. From 1990 to
1991, she served as acting chair of the Department of Ophthalmology. She now serves as a
clinical professor for the department and maintains a busy private practice.
“I’ve never had any doors closed on me because I’m a woman, but there is still a glass
ceiling that needs to be broken in some areas of
medicine, particularly academia,” Holt says. “My
joke is that’s all going to end because the professors now have daughters in medical school.”
A founding member of the health center’s
Women’s Faculty Association, Holt holds a reception for female faculty members and medical
students each year in her private office. “I always tell young female medical students that
they can be a first-class anything, but they can
never be a first-rate man,” says Holt, who also
chairs a women’s committee for her county
medical society. “I tell them not to try to beat a
man at a man’s game. Be a woman, and be
proud of it.”
Of all her accomplishments, Holt is most
proud of her marriage to G. Richard Holt, MD
’70, and their three children. “I don’t want anyone telling young women they can’t have a fam-
ily and a career in medicine,” Holt says. “I’m
very proud of my career, and my children are
proud of it, too. My children have always understood that the only time they don’t come
first is when I’m committed to surgery.”
In 1999, Holt’s career took a new direction.
She received a master’s degree from the
health-care administration department at
Trinity University in San Antonio. An adjunct
professor for the department, Holt has taught
classes, written articles and given presentations across the country to help physicians
better understand the business of medicine.
“About 10 percent of health-care business
CEOs are physicians, and only a handful of
them are women,” Holt says.
Carole
Vogler,
MD ’78
Many female pathologists choose careers in
academic medicine, but few have reached the
same level of leadership as pediatric pathologist Carole Vogler, MD ’78, professor and vice
chair of pathology at Saint Louis University.
Shortly after joining the university as an
assistant professor of pathology and pediatrics
in 1985, Vogler began studying a lysosomal
storage disease that had been discovered at
the university by William Sly, MD. Vogler uses
a murine model of the disease — called MPS
VII, or Sly Syndrome — to test experimental
therapies, which include enzyme replacement,
bone marrow and stem cell transplantation,
and gene therapy. She collaborates with investigators working with the MPS VII model at
Washington University in St. Louis as well as
scientists at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar
Harbor, Maine.
Outside the lab, Vogler keeps in touch with
medical students and residents as director of
the residency program in pathology and a faculty leader of the freshman support group.
She places a high value on her contact with
students and residents and on mentoring.
“Every physician needs a mentor, but there
are not enough women leaders in academic
medicine to serve as mentors,” Vogler says.
“There is a glass ceiling in medicine, but I also
think women in general are less interested in
leadership positions than men. Women are less
driven by the need for power and more interested in the caring aspects of medicine and
their families.
“For a woman to balance a family and a career, it’s essential that she find a husband who
shares her values,” adds Vogler, who is married
to Gary Vivian, MD ’78.
It was a love of science that attracted Vogler
to pathology after she earned a bachelor’s degree from the St. Louis College of Pharmacy. If
she had taken her grandmother’s advice about
progressing to medical school, Vogler’s research
on topics related to pediatric pathology would
not have appeared later in the New England
Journal of Medicine or the proceedings of the
National Institute of Sciences. “My grandmother said I couldn’t possibly go to medical
school because I was a woman, that I was
making a mistake,” she recalls.
Today, Vogler acknowledges a need for more
women to achieve the rank of dean, assistant
dean, department chair and division director at
medical schools. When women take on leadership roles, she says, they prove they can be
just as effective as leaders who are men.
“Women and men handle situations completely differently. For example, women tend to
be consensus builders, and men tend to give
orders,” Vogler explains. “We have a female
medical school dean at Saint Louis University
who is an effective leader, and it’s clear that
her leadership style is very different from a
man’s style.”
policy at the School of Medicine, is leading a
program that is training a multidisciplinary
group of health-care professionals to assume
leadership positions at academic medical centers across the country. Men and women are
represented equally in this group, whose members now are working with mentors to cut
costs and improve quality in MU’s health
system.
“Training leaders — men and women — is
something we haven’t done very well in medicine,” Kivlahan says. “Many of the men in top
positions in academic medicine became leaders
through default or traditional channels as
good researchers or teachers. It’s often not because they were good leaders, good managers
or good health-policy experts.”
Two things will occur for women to advance
to leadership positions in medicine, Kivlahan
says. First, women will seek more leadership
training and identify mentors. “Step one involves
making sure those of us in mid- to high-level positions in medicine are committed to mentoring
women in the next generation,” she says.
Kivlahan is an excellent role model. She
earned a master’s degree in public health from
MU while completing a Robert Wood Johnson
Academic Family Practice Fellowship. Leading
up to her appointment as director of Missouri’s
Department of Health in 1993, she served as
medical director of the state’s Department of
Social Services and as chief medical officer for
the Health Resources and Services Administration in Washington, D.C.
“Second, women will seek opportunities
to gain experience. The current struggle is that
the existing network of leaders has little experience with women serving in leadership roles,”
Kivlahan says. “I believe this will change only
when the current leadership provides the opportunities for those of us in the next generation.”
A good sign, Kivlahan says, is that female
physicians in leadership roles are proving they
can have a family, be a quality physician and
still be an effective leader.
“Achieving balance is a process, not an outcome. It takes continual focus, commitment
and creativity,” says the mother of two an wife
of Bernard Ewigman, MD ’79, a professor of
family and community medicine at MU. “I tell
women medical students to do some soulsearching and determine their priorities. It’s
the women in medicine who are confused about
their priorities who have real problems both at
work and at home.”
From the ’80s
Coleen
Kivlahan,
MD, Res ’80
After serving as the first woman director of
the Missouri Department of Health, Coleen
Kivlahan, MD, Res ’80, decided to use what
she’d learned to turn physicians into better
leaders. And what she’s working on now at MU
will ensure that women are no longer left out of
the running for top positions in medicine.
Kivlahan, a professor of family and community medicine and assistant dean for health
MUtation photo
whether we should disband. The answer is no
because we like to get together.”
New kid on the block: First-year medical student Lucille Kayes, MD ’89, poses for this 1985
yearbook photograph a few months before the birth of her daughter Rebecca. In an accompanying
statement, Debra Howenstine, MD ’88, writes: “One of the things that I really like about our class is its
diversity. It provides us with the chance to benefit from each others’ experiences.”
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Missouri Medical Review
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Ann
Peick,
MD ’81
For Ann Peick, MD ’81, there’s an identity
crisis that comes with being a surgeon. Some
people don’t know how to react when Annie
Peick — the friendly, recipe-swapping mother of
two — transforms into Dr. Peick, the physician
who’s all business about patient care.
“If a male doctor wants something done, it
gets done without question. If I want something
done, I’m cranky or a number of other things I
don’t care to repeat,” Peick says. “I respond by
saying that the problem isn’t Dr. Peick — it’s a
problem with patient care. It’s like Harry
Truman said: ‘I never gave anybody hell. I just
told the truth, and they thought it was hell.’ ”
Peick, who has a private practice in St.
Louis, makes no apologies for being aggressive
about her goals. That attitude helped her get
into medical school after she was initially
turned down. Faculty member Elizabeth James,
MD ’65, encouraged Peick to keep trying because the school viewed persistence as a form
of motivation. “I told them that they’d see me
on their doorstep until I was through menopause,” Peick says. “I think I got in the following year because they didn’t want to put up
with me that long.”
Before completing her fellowship at MU in
1987, Peick got married, had a child and served
as chief resident. “Even when I was pregnant, I
toted my own weight just like everybody else,”
she says. “I wasn’t treated any better or worse
because I was a woman.”
That changed when Peick left MU to become
an assistant professor at another university.
Even the residents there were hostile toward female surgeons. “People looked at me like I had
a third eye, like I should have been in the
kitchen, barefoot and pregnant,” Peick says. “It
was an eye-opening experience.”
After nine years of private practice in Poplar
Bluff, Mo., Peick returned to her hometown of
St. Louis in 1998. She currently is the director
of trauma services at St. Anthony’s Medical
Center and serves on the staff of the Level I
trauma center at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center. Peick recently was appointed to the board
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Missouri Medical Review
Summer 2000
of trustees of the American Society of General
Surgeons and has held a variety of high-ranking
positions with the Missouri State Medical Association and the Missouri State Surgical Society.
Now in a city where patients have many
health-care options, Peick says being a female
physician can be good for business. Women
are the primary health-care consumers, and
they often prefer to be treated by another
woman.
“Women tell me about all types of problems,
many of which I can do nothing about, but I
think 90 percent of helping them is taking the
time to listen and let them know they’re not
crazy. I think that’s part of the art of medicine,”
Peick says. “Maybe I’d act the same if I were Dr.
Andy Peick, but I’m not sure.
Patricia
Wetherill,
MD ’87
Showing just how far a woman can go with a
medical degree from MU, Patricia Wetherill, MD ’87,
has crossed the globe while fighting a disease that
now infects more than 34 million people.
Wetherill serves as director of the AIDS and
Palliative Care Consultancy Program at the
Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, one of
the first countries in the world to have reported
AIDS cases. The program is available to all
people dying of AIDS in the state of Victoria. It’s
Wetherill’s job to coordinate their care in the
hospital, their communities or their homes.
“There’s so much energy in the treatment of
HIV. It’s constantly cutting-edge medicine and
cutting-edge technology,” Wetherill says. “It’s easy
to get caught up in the fight against AIDS because
you are involved with a very dynamic group of
people who are working at a rapid pace.”
When Wetherill first encountered HIV patients
as an intern at San Joaquin General Hospital in
Stockton, Calif., the medical community knew
much less about the disease than it does today.
Few treatments were available, and research
had yet to show how quickly the virus mutates.
“We were blissfully ignorant back then,” Wetherill
recalls. “We thought we just needed a few more
medications, and then we would have a cure.”
After Wetherill completed her residency at
Cover girl: Missouri Medical Review first reported
on women in medicine at MU in a 1982 issue
that featured this photograph of family practice
resident Joyce Floyd, MD ’80, on the cover. In the
cover article, Floyd said, “Now there are so many
women residents that I seldom feel conspicuous.”
MU, she pursued a fellowship at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., where she was part
of the school’s AIDS Clinical Trial Group. A
principal investigator of several trials, Wetherill
continued her research at Yale and served as
an HIV specialist in surrounding health-care
facilities until 1998, when an article on the
group’s research that Wetherill co-authored appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 1999, Wetherill moved to Melbourne
with her husband, Todd Baumgartner, MD
’86, director of pharmaceutical research and
development for Bristol-Myers Squibb in Australia and New Zealand. They have two children. “There have been times since I had the
children that I have altered my hours and
had less of a career,” Wetherill says. “You
can’t do everything if you choose to have a
family.”
Wetherill continues to make time in her
schedule for mentoring, something she benefited from during her time at MU. She participated in a women’s internal medicine group at
Yale and now advises residents in Australia.
“As females, we need support from each other,
and we need to serve as role models for each
other,” Wetherill says. “There’s no book on how
to be a woman in medicine.”