Women Doctors in War [1 ed.] 9781603445726, 9781603441469

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Women Doctors in War

Number 128: Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series

WOMEN DOCTORS IN WAR Judith Bellafaire and Mercedes Herrera Graf

Texas A&M University Press College Station

Copyright © 2009 by Judith Bellafaire and Mercedes Graf Manufactured in the United States of America All rights reserved First edition This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bellafaire, Judith, 1954– Women doctors in war / Judith Bellafaire and Mercedes Graf. — 1st ed. p. cm. (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University military history series ; no. 128) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-60344-146-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-60344-146-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United States—Armed Forces— Women—History. 2. United States—Armed Forces—Medical personnel—History. 3. Women physicians—United States—History. 4. Women and war—United States— History. I. Graf, Mercedes. II. Title. UB418.W65B45 2009 355.3'450820973—dc22 2009018521

This book is dedicated to American women patriots past, present, and future. May your service not be forgotten.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Illustrations and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3.

1

Hen Medics: Women Physicians in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War Necessity’s Handmaidens: The Army’s Women Contract Surgeons of World War I

32

Finding a Place in the Sun: Women Army Doctors in World War II

61

Chapter 4. Join the Navy and See the World: Women Navy Doctors in World War II Chapter 5.

7

Out of Place: Women Military Doctors in Cold War America

96 112

Chapter 6. On the Edge of Equality: Contemporary Women Military Physicians

154

Epilogue

200

Notes

205

Bibliography

233

Index

245

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

Illustrations Mary E. Walker / 9 Susan Edson / 12 Mary E. Green / 25 Ellen Lawson Dabbs / 28 Anita Newcomb McGee / 36 Minnie Burdon / 50 Ruth Tunnicliff / 54 Achsa M. Bean / 65 Clara Raven / 76 Edith Michael Buyer / 107 Hulda E. Thelander / 115 Pauline Garber Clark / 118 Bernice Rosenthal Walters / 124 Dorothy Elias / 126 Fae M. Adams / 128 Christine E. Haycock / 131 Clotilde Bowen / 134 Janice Mendelson / 136

Gioconda Rita Saraniero / 138 Diane Colgan / 143 Anna Brady / 146 Joan Zajtchuk / 150 Eleanor (Connie) Mariano / 157 Doris Browne / 166 Cecily David / 170 Shirley Lockie / 173 Paula Underwood / 176 Rhonda Cornum / 182 Rhonda Cornum on transport aircraft / 183 Mary Krueger treating young boy in Afghanistan / 188 Mary Krueger examining child / 189 Mary Krueger playing with Afghan boy / 189 Bonnie Potter / 198

Tables Table 1: Women Physicians in the Civil War / 13 Table 2: Women Physicians in the Spanish–American War / 24 Table 3 (chart): Women Contract Surgeons in World War I / 44 Table 4: Pioneer Women Doctors in Great Britain / 67 Table 5: Women Army Doctors from Woman’s Medical College

of Pennsylvania in World War II / 77 Table 6: Women Army Doctors from Johns Hopkins in World War II / 78 Table 7: Women Navy Doctors from WMCP and Johns Hopkins in WWII / 101 Table 8: Specialties Listed for 57 Women Navy Doctors in WWII / 104

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

n piecing together the service of women doctors in various wars, we received generous help from a number of sources and individuals. Indeed, the assistance of colleagues, friends, researchers and professionals in the military, archival, and library fields was of invaluable help in the course of researching and writing this book. Rather than thank a host of people individually, we ask readers to consult the bibliography, where we have listed the various libraries and collections across the country that we consulted. People there are a credit to their professions and their respective institutions. Yet we owe special thanks to several institutions and individuals for lending us their help to document these women. At Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia (DUCM), the director of archives and special collections, Joanne Grossman, and the archivist, Barbara Williams, were of inestimable help in supplying biographical materials on women doctors from the Civil War through World War II. At the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, archivist Melissa Wiford was of great assistance in gathering World War II materials regarding women doctors in the army and in answering specific questions about the Margaret Craighill Collection. Our thanks to the Bureau of Medicine (BUMED), the U.S. Navy, for supplying materials about and pictures of navy women. In particular, we would like to thank Andre B. Sobocinski, deputy historian/ publications manager, Office of the Historian, for reading and making comments on the chapter about women doctors in the navy. This work also would not have been possible without the ongoing help of the archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., and the researchers at the Library of Congress. For help with collecting documents related to Mary Edwards Walker, we thank NARA as well as Terrance M. Prior, the curator at the Oswego Historical Society, Oswego, New York, and Terry Keenan at Syracuse University, Syracuse University Library Special Collections Department. We are also grateful to the Women In Military Service For America Memo-

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rial Foundation (WIMSA) in Arlington, Virginia for their ongoing support of this project. Specifically, we would like to thank Foundation President Brig. Gen. Wilma L. Vaught, USAF (Ret.), for allowing us the use of the memorial’s unique and underutilized archival collections, register, and outstanding oral history collection. We also extend a special thanks to Britta Granrud, curator of collections at the Women’s Memorial, for her diligent and timely help in locating many of the Korean War, Cold War, and contemporary photographs used in the book. A very special thank you is long overdue to Judith’s husband, Michael Bellafaire, who gave his formidable skills to the project, and just as important, his patience and unfailing love and encouragement. Mercedes is equally grateful to her two sons and their families for their love and support. If we have forgotten anyone, please forgive the oversight—and know that your contributions throughout this process are very much appreciated.

Women Doctors in War

INTRODUCTION

W

omen have been practicing the healing arts since the earliest times. Aboriginal peoples everywhere recognized women’s skills as healers, obstetricians, and bonesetters. Similarly, wounds sustained in battle have been treated by women throughout history. In seventeenthcentury North America, a Mrs. Allyn served as an army surgeon during King Philip’s War, receiving twenty pounds for her services. By the time of the American Revolution, however, it was more common for women to work as nurses under the authority of male physicians. Gen. George Washington recognized the need for nurses and instituted procedures by which they were to be hired and paid. Although nursing did not emerge as a profession in the United States until after the Civil War, physicians began organizing themselves as a profession in the early nineteenth century. They established schools of instruction that dispensed medical degrees to successful graduates and formed professional associations that set agreed-upon standards of care and conduct. Just as women were barred from attending the majority of colleges in the United States, they were automatically excluded from attending medical schools, until Elizabeth Blackwell broke that barrier by gaining admission to Geneva Medical College and then graduating with her MD in 1849. Twelve years later, at the start of the American Civil War, there were 250 women physicians in the United States and no professionally trained nurses. Most people still believed that women had no business being doctors and that no true lady would want to expose herself to the sights, sounds, and smells of a stranger’s sickbed. As nurturers, women were expected to nurse beloved family members, but gently bred ladies did not nurse strangers for pay. Similarly, male physicians and soldiers anticipated that women would have nothing to do with the war. Good women were expected to stay safely at home and leave the fighting to the men. Initially, even women who volunteered their services as nurses were turned away; military men believed that women were too physically and emotionally weak to withstand the brutalities of war—the horrific wounds and agonized screams of the operating tent and the grim

2

Introduction

death, filth, and disease of the hospital ward. Although desperate need eventually forced both the Union and Confederate armies to accept the services of female nurses, women physicians brave enough to actually volunteer during the Civil War were usually rejected—unless they were willing to serve as nurses. A handful of these women were so dedicated and so desirous of helping their country that they did just that. Only two exceptionally stubborn women physicians, Mary Edwards Walker and Sarah Ann Chadwick Clapp, were forceful and persistent enough to overcome the barriers and succeed in serving as army contract assistant surgeons during the war. This study explores the slow, step-by-step process through subsequent eras and wars by which women physicians, in the tradition of Walker and Clapp, battled two different male-dominated hierarchies within the medical and military professions and eventually secured their hard-won place as permanent commissioned officers in the medical corps of the armed forces of the United States. The Spanish-American War created an opportunity for nurses to prove themselves in war but did little for women physicians. Although in the thirty years since the Civil War nursing had become an accepted professional endeavor for women, the U.S. Army initially rejected the idea of using nurses to treat casualties. Army physicians believed women nurses would be useless in primitive field conditions and that medical corpsmen could easily cope with the small number of battlefield casualties expected. The Army Medical Department was totally unprepared for the enormous toll that malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever took on the troops. The department overwhelmed with casualties, Army Surgeon General George M. Sternberg asked Washington, D.C., physician Anita Newcomb McGee, whom he knew socially, to hire and place under contract professionally trained nurses for work in army hospitals. The potential contributions of women physicians other than McGee, however, were ignored. It remained difficult for women to become doctors because few medical schools would accept them and many people refused their services. In that sense, the army’s attitude toward women physicians was no different than the rest of the nation’s. So once again, in order to contribute skills that their country sorely needed, women doctors volunteered to serve as nurses. Only one other woman, Dr. Mary Elizabeth Green, a food and nutrition specialist recruited by McGee, served as a physician. Her appointment foreshadowed an important way by which women physicians would eventually break into military medicine—as medical specialists the military needed and could not find among male physicians. It was not until World War I that army officials finally realized that a need existed in the medical department that women physicians could fill. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, women doctors had moved into several medical specialties, including anesthesia and psychiatry, which were less popular among male physicians because they paid less and carried little prestige. When the army had difficulty filling positions in these specialties,

Introduction

3

the medical department contracted fifty-six women physicians to fill posts at home and abroad for which they could not find men. Contract physicians had little status; they were not officers, usually did not wear uniforms, and had little authority. A contract surgeon’s lack of supervisory authority alleviated a sensitive problem of which the army was exceedingly aware: “what army officer would want to take orders from a woman?” By placing women physicians in certain niches outside the chain of command, potential problems of this sort could be avoided. For the contract surgeons themselves, however, this type of military service could have unexpected repercussions later in life. Frances Edith Haines, MD, an anesthetist with the Presbyterian General Hospital of Chicago, served overseas with the American Expeditionary Force as a member of Base Hospital Unit No. 13. While her fellow male Presbyterian physicians were commissioned reserve officers in the Army Medical Department, Haines was initially rejected by the army and had to fight to receive an appointment as a contract surgeon. Ultimately, the army valued Haines’s services so much that she was kept under contract for six months after the war and assigned to Fort Sheridan Army Hospital near Chicago to teach anesthesia to army nurses and medical corpsmen. In 1964 eighty-one-year-old Haines asked the U.S. Congress to pass a private relief bill on her behalf compensating her for her overseas service. Her male colleagues had received veteran’s benefits for years, she explained, while she was ineligible because she had been a contract employee. Haines’s congressman, Edward R. Finnegan, introduced two bills on her behalf, but the army opposed them, arguing that any payment would be “an unjustified gratuity.” During the next generation’s worldwide armed conflict, World War II, military officials once again attempted to relegate women physicians to contract status and this time restricted them to caring for their own gender, the members of the Women’s Army Corps (WACs), the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), Coast Guard SPARs, and Women Marines, temporary military components that had been established for the duration of the war emergency only. Women physicians who wanted to make a more direct contribution to the war effort traveled to Great Britain and were commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps. By 1943, however, an overall shortage of fit-for-duty male physicians and the concerted efforts of women doctors and their supporters convinced Congress to pass the SparkmanJohnson Bill authorizing the army and navy to grant women physicians temporary commissions in the reserves of their medical corps, where they could be assigned to care for male as well as female soldiers. Although women physicians were finally official members of the armed forces, it was on a temporary basis, for the duration of the war emergency only. Before the war was over, seventy-five women physicians received commissions in the army and fifty-seven in the navy. Both services found their women doctors to be so

4

Introduction

valuable, however, that they were loathe to demobilize them at the end of the war. The army surgeon general asked Congress to let him keep his last four women physicians because they would be extremely difficult to replace, but Congress refused. The navy was less straightforward and ultimately more successful, using the landmark Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, which gave women a permanent place in military service for the first time in history, to keep its women doctors. The act was meant to provide the armed services with a tiny nucleus of female officers and enlisted women who would stand ready to train larger numbers of women in the event they were needed in the next war. Without fanfare, the navy quietly used the legislation to commission women physicians in the Women’s Naval Reserve (the women’s component of the navy) rather than in the Navy Medical Corps. Although this stratagem placed women doctors at a disadvantage because it meant they received fewer promotions than their male colleagues in the Navy Medical Corps, it did allow female physicians to serve. It would take another war before women physicians could serve on an equal, permanent basis with men. The unexpected start of the Korean War caught the U.S. Armed Forces totally by surprise. The sudden demand for combat troops and the need to care for the wounded forced military leaders to recall medical personnel and re-establish military hospitals that had recently been shut down. A physician shortage rapidly became evident, and when in 1951 army and air force leaders asked Congress to allow them to commission female doctors on a temporary basis once again, Congress concurred. The doctor shortage continued, however, and in 1953 the services requested the ability to give women physicians permanent career status in the Regular Army, Air Force, and Navy Medical Corps. Once again, Congress acquiesced. The 1953 law was a pivotal point in the history of women military physicians. Until then, they had always served outside the regular military bureaucracy, as civilians under contract or as the holders of temporary reserve commissions. Now for the first time a woman doctor could have a military career on the same basis as a man. Women were finally inside the system, and if so inclined could try to use the theoretically equal playing field to move upward on the military career ladder to positions of influence and authority. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, very small numbers of women doctors joined the military, and even fewer opted for a military career. This was a reflection of what was happening in the civilian sector, where small numbers of women enrolled in medical schools and earned degrees in medicine. More than a hundred years after Elizabeth Blackwell pushed her way into the American consciousness and proved that women were fully capable of becoming doctors, society remained skeptical and suspicious of women MDs. A medical career just didn’t fit the stereotypical life that women were expected to want—a home, husband, and family. Women who worked usually

Introduction

5

did so because family circumstances demanded it, and they did so in “women’s jobs” such as elementary school teachers, nurses, or secretaries. Women, who made up 6 percent of all physicians in 1910, totaled less than 4 percent of physicians by 1960. Given that environment, it is scarcely surprising that the air force had no women doctors between 1953 and 1960, and only one woman doctor during the 1960s, and that only a handful of women physicians served in the army and navy medical corps during those years. When the All-Volunteer Force was established in 1973, women’s presence in the armed forces began a slow but inexorable growth. Operating in a totally new recruiting environment, the military services removed outdated constraints on women’s career ladders and began training women for a wider variety of jobs. Now unable to draft doctors, military administrators looked for alternative ways to combat their physician shortage. Two programs established during the 1970s would have a significant impact on the number of women physicians in the armed services. The Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), still in existence, pays tuition, book and laboratory fees, and a stipend to medical students in exchange for an equal number of years of active duty upon graduation. Considering the cost of medical school, the HSPS is an exceptionally appealing program and has brought the vast majority of physicians into the armed forces. Of course, the HSPS would not have brought large numbers of women physicians into the military unless more young women elected to attend medical school. This sea change occurred in American society as part of the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when the concepts of “men’s” and “women’s” work were challenged in every social and economic sector—at colleges and universities; in the courts and government offices; in factories and mines, banks and business offices, and hospitals and healthcare agencies. Suddenly, there appeared to be no reason why young women shouldn’t become whatever they wanted: lawyers, judges, journalists, college professors, scientists, engineers, or doctors. In 1976 the Department of Defense created the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences (USUHS) to train medical students to become military physicians. Military medicine differs somewhat from the standard medical curricula that HPSP students learn at civilian universities: because military physicians strive to keep the whole force healthy enough to enable the commander to achieve the military mission, preventive medicine is emphasized, and the focus is always on the unit rather than the individual. Sometimes the best medical approach for an individual conflicts with the most efficient approach for the entire force, and physicians who are not trained in military medicine sometimes have a problem resolving this type of conflict. Male and female physicians who train under HPSP at civilian schools and hospitals and who serve out their active duty commitment often opt to leave

6

Introduction

the service when their commitment is over; USUHS trained physicians, on the other hand, expect to and frequently do serve full twenty-year careers in the military. USUHS accepted five women into its original class of thirty-one students in 1976 and increased that proportion each year of operation until its classes were approximately half male and half female. The military medical corps themselves are now rapidly approaching gender parity, although a few small problems remain. Throughout the services, male and female officers who enter at the same rank can expect promotions (and pay increases) at roughly the same time during the ensuing years, until the upper ranks are reached, at which point promotions become more competitive. In the medical corps, however, physicians in certain prestigious specialties (such as surgery) can receive significantly higher year-end “bonuses” than those in standard specialties such as pediatrics and psychiatry. Over the years, women doctors in the services tend to gravitate to some of the lower-bonus specialties, just as they do in the civilian sector, where pediatricians often make less money than surgeons. This phenomenon has begun to change, however, and the number of women surgeons in the armed forces is rising. Perhaps more worrisome is the fact that there are fewer women physicians than men at the higher ranks in every service. Women physicians appear more likely than their male counterparts to leave the service at the mid-level ranks of major and commander, leaving a scarcity of medical women at the senior and general officer ranks. The reasons women leave early appear to revolve around family and career conflicts. Women with small children fear deployment; juggling child-care and career demands can be difficult; frequent relocations can be hard on teenage children; and the list goes on. What if anything the services can do to alleviate this phenomenon is elusive, as the roots of the problem originate in society rather than in the armed forces. Women physicians in the military today have a long history of struggle and accomplishment behind them, a struggle that has been forgotten over time. Few physicians and few historians understand this history of immense patriotism and persistent struggle. This book is dedicated to the physicians who worked as nurses because it was the only way they could serve their country, to the contract surgeons who served in the battle theater without commissions or benefits, to the physicians who served on a temporary basis for the duration of the World War II and Korean War “emergencies,” to those who served throughout the Vietnam era, those who served in the All-Volunteer Force, and those who are even now deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. May your service not be forgotten.

Chapter One

HEN MEDICS Women Physicians in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War

E

ven before Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell approached the women who clustered at the corner, she guessed what would happen. And sadly she was right again. The ladies picked up their hems, swished their skirts in the opposite direction, and averted their gazes away from this anomaly, a woman doctor, who dared masquerade as one of them. They could neither understand nor forgive a member of their sex being proud of having a medical degree from Geneva Medical School in 1849 or her pride in being the first woman in the United States to receive such an honor. As was often the case at that time, women could be most unkind, even cruel, to members of their sex who sought satisfaction outside a woman’s sphere. In the decades that followed in the mid-nineteenth century, the few dedicated women who studied medicine fared no better with the public than Blackwell had. Bertha Van Hoosen, who later founded the American Women’s Medical Association, was the first to admit that the young women at her college were just as opposed to female doctors as the general public because they believed that “the strongest argument against women in medicine was that its study would tend to make a woman coarse and barren of all feminine charms” and not many individuals could be convinced that “the study of medicine in no way unsexes the woman doctor.” Women physicians were often referred to derisively as “hen medics” or the “third sex,” and townspeople refused to rent rooms to them. Women who dared attend coeducational institutions also faced a special trial of their own. In some places, female medical students had to duck when they marched to school, as male students spit tobacco juice, booed, and hissed. Although the women tried to accept such hazings in stride, the lectures were an ordeal for even the strongest nerves, as the males screamed and stamped their feet when the female students entered. Mindful of such outbursts, Professor William Osler of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the 1890s jokingly pointed out that “humankind might be divided into three groups—men, women, and women physicians.” Despite Blackwell’s experiences and those of a handful of other women

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Chapter 1

doctors who followed closely behind her, medical schools grew rapidly over the course of the nineteenth century. While only four medical schools existed in the United States in 1800, there were forty-two by 1850. The number of graduates also multiplied, and from 1840 to 1849, 11,828 medical degrees were awarded in the United States—all to men. Orthodox medical schools were slow to admit women, and in response, women founded five orthodox colleges and a handful of sectarian women’s medical schools between 1850 and 1900—although separate education was not the preference of many women leaders. By 1850 the Female Medical College of Philadelphia (renamed Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1867) was founded as the first regular medical school for females. Women physicians believed, however, that coeducation was a necessity because they doubted women could create separate institutions commensurate with male standards. While most of them attended all-women’s medical colleges before 1890, by 1900 most were graduating from coeducational medical schools. At the beginning of the Civil War, there were roughly 250 women physicians in the country, 2,423 in 1880, and more than 7,000 two years after the Spanish-American War ended in 1900. Such a dramatic rise in the numbers of women medical graduates reflected the efforts of middle-class white and black women to expand restrictive private spheres to encompass areas outside the home. At the same time, sex discrimination prevented even more women from entering medicine and simultaneously “obstructed the advancement of the few women who were admitted to the profession.” The first medical school in America, established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1765, started the tradition of barring women from obtaining a medical degree, and it would take the determination of Elizabeth Blackwell and other pioneers like her to turn the tide in the nineteenth century. A scant ten years after Blackwell’s graduation, women physicians would make their way to the Civil War battlefields. The story of early female physicians who volunteered in the Civil War in 1861 or the Spanish-American War in 1898 is a dramatic chapter in the history of medical women. These women were all but invisible as a group until recently, although scattered bits of evidence in government records, various archives, and brief mention or short biographical sketches in books from the period attest to their individual presences during wartime. Historian Catherine Clinton noted that “prejudice against women doctors crippled their progress.” Given the barriers that existed during the nineteenth century, women were not accepted in the military as surgeons in either the North or the South. When women doctors volunteered their services at the start of the Civil War, they served as nurses or sanitary agents distributing supplies rather than as surgeons like their male counterparts, and because accounts of their service are mixed in with that of government nurses, they are difficult to identify as physicians. By the time the Spanish-American War started, they still had to

Hen Medics: Civil War and Spanish-American War

9

volunteer as nurses, so that once again their records were mixed in with nursing accounts. The fact that women physicians seldom spoke publicly or wrote about their war experiences in postwar years contributed further to their obscurity. One female physician recalled that Chloe Annette Buckel, who signed herself “C. Annette,” served as a sanitary agent and nurse during the Civil War but “seldom mentioned this subject, as the experiences were too heart-breaking to be spoken of lightly.” Mary Frame Myers Thomas, who also served as a sanitary agent and nurse, left no written record of her Civil War Mary E. Walker is the only woman to be experiences. As her biographer awarded the Medal of Honor. During the noted, “She alone could tell it, and Civil War, she volunteered her services as a she was reluctant to talk of her contract surgeon and was also held captive for share . . . there were other women four months at Castle Thunder in Richmond, who did so much more, she said, Virginia. On 5 October 1864, she was officially her share was but a small one.” awarded a contract as acting assistant surgeon, On the other hand, Mary Edwards U.S. Army. Walker, the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor, gave lectures throughout the United States and England on her Civil War experiences, but she never wrote about them. Women physicians from the Spanish-American War (SAW) were even quieter about their experiences, but this is understandable because the war lasted less than four months, and such a short period of service failed to add any luster to their medical credentials, especially since they had served as nurses. Even Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee, who was instrumental in selecting female nurses to serve on contract for SAW, resigned herself to working as an administrator rather than a physician. The only woman to be given the title of acting assistant surgeon during the Spanish-American War, McGee did not discuss the wartime work of women physicians either, and when called upon to testify about the work of contract nurses as part of the government’s investigation into conditions in the army camps, she explained succinctly, “A few women physicians in good standing were also accepted as nurses.” Dr. Mary Eloise Walker, the only other volunteer woman physician called to

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testify, spoke solely to her experiences as a contract nurse, where her attentions were “confined to the typhoid patients.” Women who sought medical degrees in the nineteenth century were much like their male counterparts—principally white and native born, from middleclass families, and generally ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties. With the few exceptions of some well-known medical women, they were restricted to the margins of their profession. Although attendance at a medical school and a degree became increasingly important in the nineteenth century, a male physician without a degree could still become respected in his profession. The same was not true for women. By 1850 Boston women physicians began to advertise the “MD” after their names, although no males were listed as such in the Boston medical directories. This was one way, albeit somewhat feeble, that women physicians fought the stereotype of the female physician as incompetent and unqualified. Mary Edwards Walker, one of two Civil War women doctors who volunteered directly with an army regiment, always appended the MD in bold handwriting after her name. The service of women doctors in the Spanish-American War might otherwise have gone unnoticed except for one thing—their insistence on identifying themselves as medical graduates on the Personal Data (PD) cards they were required to fill out as contract nurses. One historian, Gloria Moldow, noted that important differences existed among nineteenth-century women as a result of generational gaps. The “pioneer” women doctors born before the Civil War “came to maturity during the ferment of antebellum libertarian movements.” They were devoted to causes such as abolition, universal suffrage, women’s rights, and moral reform. The “post-pioneer” women doctors born after the Civil War were shaped by a different set of experiences that left them “more concerned about their status as professionals than with their identity as women.” While such distinctions are important, they are not clear-cut when applied to the SAW women physicians. These women were a generation older than their Civil War colleagues, but few of them were born after 1861. They were still influenced by Victorian culture, even though it was weakening considerably as the twentieth century was dawning. Viewed in the nineteenth-century context, both Civil War and SAW women physicians gained entry into the hitherto masculine profession of medicine because they reinforced the Victorian notion that females possessed unique qualities that were linked with notions such as “strength of character” or “tender care.” As Victorian women, however, they had little interest in directly challenging gender norms, especially when it came to the military. Moreover, they had to forego their hard-won recognition as MDs in a man’s army where women were not wanted, female doctors were not allowed, and only nurses would be tolerated.

Hen Medics: Civil War and Spanish-American War

11

Women Doctors in the Civil War

W

omen doctors became disillusioned at one time or another as they struggled endlessly with personal and professional problems from which their male colleagues were spared. The experiences of Mary Myers Thomas in the mid-1850s illustrate the difficulties of balancing a career with family concerns. Before setting off for Penn Medical University in Philadelphia, Thomas sewed enough clothes for six months in advance for her three daughters and arranged for their care in her absence. Later she had to interrupt her attendance at medical school to care for the eldest daughter, who became ill and eventually died. Married women were not alone in having problems. While Blackwell never married, maintaining a single-minded dedication to work, she was not spared the discouragement that went along with being a woman physician. When she tried to practice medicine in New York City, she was not wanted “as doctor, colleague, neighbor, or tenant.” When Caroline Brown (later Winslow) announced her decision to study medicine, her parents objected and withdrew all financial support. She suffered severe economic hardship as a result and even “endured physical threats and verbal abuse from fellow male students and townspeople.” Both Susan Edson and Elizabeth Blackwell started training programs for nurses. After the surgeon general vetoed the idea, as male soldiers generally did the nursing for the sick and wounded, Edson started a training program in New York in 1862 with financial support from the Freemasons. Blackwell also remained in New York to train government nurses headed for Washington for the Women’s Central Relief Association (WCRA). “All that could be done in the extreme urgency of the need,” Blackwell recalled, “was to sift out the most promising women from the multitudes that applied to be sent on as nurses, put them for a month in training at the great Bellevue Hospital of New York, which consented to receive relays of volunteers, provide them with a small outfit, and send them on for distribution to Miss [Dorothea] Dix.” Blackwell did not mention that she was passed over for the position of superintendent of army nurses in favor of Dix, which one historian believed was “because most medical men were suspicious, hypercritical, or jealous of her.” It was also true that women physicians were already on a collision course with their male colleagues—although their numbers were small, they were increasing, and many men held that the profession already suffered from an oversupply. Other women physicians also trained females as nurses and doctors, and they also established hospitals and clinics for women, children, and the poor. Ann Preston, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, rallied support for the establishment of the Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the fall of 1861, while Marie Zakrzewska (often referred to as “Zak”) helped

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open the New England Hospital for Women and Children in July 1862. The following year, Clemence Lozier founded the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, and Mary Harris Thompson spearheaded the founding of the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children in 1865. When civil war swept the country, the North mobilized a large army with more than 11,000 male doctors on the payroll. Among them were 5,500 acting assistant surgeons who served on contract, held no commissions, and sometimes wore uniforms. These men were expected to be medical school graduates and to pass examinations before boards established by the army’s medical department or “departmental medical directors.” Some of these Susan Edson was a homeopathic doctor who physicians were “inferior” medical came to Washington to nurse the wounded men, having “never seen an amduring the Civil War. She was also a physician for the family of President Garfield, whom she putating knife until they received one as government issue.” attended during his terminal illness; but she In comparison to the more was only permitted to tend him as a nurse. than eleven thousand male doctors on the army payroll, only ten qualified women physicians are known to have volunteered their services during the Civil War (see table 1). Most were graduates from a chartered college of medicine or a sectarian school. Two of them, Susan Edson and Caroline Brown Winslow, were homeopathic doctors who went to Washington to nurse the wounded and remained there afterward to form the nucleus of a strong female homeopathic community. With the exception of Orianna Moon Andrews, who represented the Confederacy, the rest of the women doctors sided with the Union. These women doctors were white and from middleclass backgrounds, although Andrews came from a wealthy plantation family. The majority were born in the eastern part of the United States, but Andrews came from Virginia, and Winslow emigrated from England at the age of four. There was a wide span in ages: four women were in their twenties when they volunteered their services (C. Annette Buckel, Esther Hill Hawks, Andrews,

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TABLE  Women Physicians in the Civil War Physician

BD

Medical School

Grad. Date

Andrews, Orianna Russell* Moon

1833

Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania**

1857

Brown, Caroline Winslow

1822

Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College

1859

Buckel, C. Annette

1833

Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

1858

Clapp, Sarah Chadwick

1824

Cleveland Medical College

1855

Edson, Susan

1823

Eclectic College of Cincinnati

1853

Hawks, Esther Hill

1833

New England Female Medical College

1857

Painter, Hettie K.

1820

Penn Medical University

1860

Reid, Rachel Harris

1825

Ohio Eclectic Medical College

1857

Thomas, Mary Frame* Myers

1816

Penn Medical University

1856

Walker, Mary Edwards

1832

Syracuse Medical College

1855

*Women frequently used their mother’s maiden names before marriage. **Originally, Female Medical College of Pennsylvania and today Drexel University College of Medicine (DUCM).

and Walker); Thomas was the oldest at age forty-four when she volunteered; and Hettie Painter was about forty years old, as it was thought she was born in 1820. Civil War women physicians usually married, although Clapp and Walker divorced their spouses (the public thought Walker was a spinster). Edson and Buckel remained single all their lives, and Brown, who was single during the war, would best be known later by her married name of Winslow. All of the women received their medical degrees before 1861.

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Many of these early women physicians from the North came from households with strong abolitionist leanings. Walker’s family were ardent abolitionists. Her father’s farm in Oswego Town, about four miles from the city of Oswego, New York, later became a stop on the Underground Railroad. Since it was well located, about one mile from Lake Ontario, it was easy to smuggle runaway slaves from there to freedom in Canada. Hettie Painter was said to be the niece of John Brown, the abolitionist who advocated and practiced insurrection as a means to abolish slavery. Mary Myers Thomas’s daughter recalled that her mother grew up with a Quaker father who helped organize the first antislavery meeting in the United States in Washington, D.C. The Myers family also left their original home in Maryland because of the state’s proslavery leanings and relocated to Salem, Ohio, where many Quakers were already settled. Esther Hill Hawks’s biographer noted that she “was as strongly committed to women’s rights and to abolitionism as she was to her chosen profession.” Teaching was both respectable and accessible for women, and several pioneer doctors were teachers before they entered medical school, though they earned about one-third less than men. Esther Hill Hawks and Mary Edwards Walker engaged in teaching before entering medical school, as did Mary Myers Thomas, who firmly held that inferior salaries were one of the “wrongs” society inflicted on women. At the age of twenty, she was outraged when she was told she “must teach for less than men, because she was a woman.” For two other women, teaching was also a stepping-stone to a medical degree. Orphaned early and raised by aunts, Chloe Annette Buckel started to teach for $1.25 a week plus board when she was fourteen years old. Determined to study medicine and desperate to save money quickly, she also worked in a factory and, when she was still short of funds, borrowed money against her life insurance policy so she could enter medical school. Fidelia Rachel Harris Reid (who preferred to be called Rachel), the fourth child in a family of nine children, began teaching at age fourteen, as Buckel had done, and continued until she was twenty-seven. After a few years she earned a reputation for being able to manage unruly children. During her vacations she learned and practiced daguerreotype photography to add to her medical school fund. Although Civil War women doctors struggled to earn their medical degrees against great odds, they recognized that neither the male medical establishment nor the government were willing to let them serve as physicians alongside male military doctors. Yet what distinguished early women physicians was their distinctively feminine gift for healing and nurturance, ideals that were part of the Victorian belief system. Thus, it was not a stretch for these women to embrace the opportunity to care for wounded in whatever capacity came their way, even if it meant being a nurse—a sorry comparison for a qualified doctor since almost all the nurses who rushed to the battlefield were untrained women. Mary Edwards Walker, however, was the only

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physician who persisted in making the rounds to army officials in Washington, D.C., to seek support for her commissioning as a surgeon. Material aid, approval, and emotional support from family members eased the burden of many aspiring woman physicians. In the case of Orianna Moon Andrews, her parents were entirely supportive and extremely well-off financially. When she announced she was going to medical school like her brother, they accepted her decision—not surprising since they had already permitted her to attend Troy Seminary in New York rather than one of the finishing schools in Virginia, where the studies were consistent with the prevailing ideals of a “woman’s sphere.” This evidence suggests that some parents nurtured identical aspirations for both male and female children during the nineteenth century. Mary Edwards Walker also had the backing of middle-class parents as she marched off to Syracuse Medical College in 1855. Her father believed “girls should be educated, and encouraged to pursue professional careers.” He also maintained that tight-fitting clothing could ruin the health of his five daughters. Such beliefs had a great impact on Mary, and in her adulthood she was a strong advocate of dress reform. In medical school she started wearing a modified bloomer costume, with long tunic and trousers, and even wore this outfit at her wedding. Some women had the support of their physician spouses. When Esther Hill Hawks decided to enter the New England Female Medical College, her husband, Dr. Milton Hawks, encouraged her in this decision. Mary Myers’s husband Owen Thomas began studying medicine with a preceptor in 1852 before enrolling at Western Reserve College in Cleveland, Ohio. When Mary decided to become a physician as well in 1853, Owen supported his wife’s decision, although she was in her late thirties by this time. He even acted as her preceptor before she entered medical school. Since women physicians were determined not to be left out of the war effort, one important question remained to be answered: how could they push past gender barriers and prove their worth during wartime? The same question haunted American women military doctors in successive wars. In 1861 one solution was to take to the field with a husband, as entering the war with a spouse was a maneuver that fit the Victorian view of women’s duty and rightful place. There could be no question about the wives’ intentions (a criticism that was leveled against young single nurses who were accused of seeking soldier husbands) or concerns about improprieties in their behavior—for what could be more natural than women volunteering at their husbands’ sides? Four women volunteered in the Civil War with their physician husbands: Orianna Moon Andrews, Esther Hill Hawks, Mary Myers Thomas, and Rachel Harris Reid (whose husband had left medicine at this point, although he returned to it in postwar years). When a woman physician took to the field with her husband, she did not work constantly by his side but rather for brief periods only, as she usually had her own duties to occupy her time. Hawks

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and her husband gave medical care to colored troops when he was not conducting other business and when she was not devoting herself to church duties and teaching. Thomas and her husband were stationed together when he was a contract surgeon at the Refugee Hospital at Nashville, Tennessee. There she worked as a matron supervising other nurses because she was not permitted to do so as a doctor. The rest of the time she worked as a sanitary agent, nurse, or superintendent of nurses for Indiana, and in these various roles, she collected and delivered supplies to the military. As for the Reids, both volunteered with the U.S. Sanitary Commission for the state of Wisconsin—he as a sanitary agent and later as a chaplain, while she organized a band of nurses that came to be called the “Florence Nightingale Union.” She also wore the bloomer style of dress (something that generally has only been attributed to Mary Edwards Walker) while carrying on her various nursing assignments in Union hospitals. By June 1862, however, Rachel Reid was forced to resign as she “was broken down by taking care of the wounded from battle of Pittsburg [sic] Landing, she having more than 200 soldiers (sick and wounded) under her care at said . . . Marine Hospital.” A second opportunity available to a woman doctor was to volunteer on her own as a nurse. While Hettie Painter was married, we know nothing about her husband or their life together during this period other than the fact that the couple settled in Nebraska in postwar years. At the outbreak of war, however, Painter became a sanitary worker for the Pennsylvania Relief Association of Philadelphia. She had already acquired her medical degree from Penn Medical University in 1860, four years after Mary Thomas. She served as a hospital and field nurse at Aquia Creek, Fredericksburg, and City Point. Civil War veterans recalled, “She was one of the most efficient and humane nurses of the Army of the Potomac.” In 1887, when she applied for an army pension, the pension committee noted, “Mrs. Painter was a graduate in medicine, a circumstance which made her services doubly valuable.” The fact that her medical degree was mentioned at all suggests that toward the end of the nineteenth century the public was beginning to acknowledge the achievements of women doctors. Like Mary Thomas and her husband, Chloe Annette Buckel joined a company of nurses and surgeons that Gov. Oliver Morton of Indiana sent south with sanitary stores. Buckel was charged with selecting qualified nurses in and for the state of Indiana, and in regard to her qualifications, Morton wrote, “Having graduated at a Medical School she is admirably adapted to the labor and arrangement of Hospitals and giving attention to the distressed.” In a handwritten letter that was later submitted for a pension claim, Buckel explained her rationale for volunteering: “There were no trained nurses and no means provided anywhere for organizing or training the numerous women who volunteered. . . . I decided to . . . help organize the women so that there could become an efficient part of the U. S. Hospital Corps.”

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Mary Walker and Sarah Ann Chadwick Clapp volunteered directly with regiments as contract surgeons, and so they had no military rank or authority and no chance for promotion. If they had not ignored convention and insisted on their identity as physicians, however, there probably would be no record of the work of women who volunteered as assistant surgeons with northern regiments in the Civil War. Both women also divorced their husbands. Walker met her physician husband, Arthur Miller, in medical school but left him after a brief and unhappy marriage because of his philandering. Clapp’s husband, James Milligan, deserted her before she entered Cleveland Medical College in 1854 under the name of Mrs. Sarah Chadwick. Because she apparently chose not to reveal her real status as a deserted wife and mother of a young daughter, her classmates believed she was a widow. (She was not divorced until a year after graduation). After the war, she remarried and started using the name Clapp, which accounts for some of the confusion in identifying her in historical accounts. The actions of these two women suggest that both recognized the stigma associated with divorce, as they went to some lengths to use their maiden names rather than their married ones. At the same time, their willingness to go against the “mainstream” of society helps explain why both were able to volunteer directly with regiments in the field rather than follow the more socially acceptable course of working as a nurse. Walker did not believe that a woman’s nature anchored her to the home where her true role in life could be fulfilled. A women’s rights advocate, she spent the war years chafing against her assigned role in society because she sought the male privilege of pursuing the course she wanted. She was always unwilling to consider wartime nursing as an alternative to practicing medicine, and years later she resented any suggestion otherwise. She maintained that whatever work a man could do, a woman could do as well. When she appeared on the Civil War battlefield in a modified Union army uniform with a long tunic and pants, she tied the green surgeon’s sash around her waist so that there would be no question about her identity as a physician and not a nurse. After she was unsuccessful in securing an army commission, Walker made the rounds of several hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area hoping to find a vacancy. When she learned of an opening at the makeshift hospital housed in the United States Patent Office (later called Indiana Hospital), she decided to volunteer her services until she could convince medical authorities to give her an appointment. In January 1864, Walker was finally authorized to report to the assistant surgeon general at Chattanooga, Tennessee, for an evaluation of her medical qualifications, as was the case for other contract doctors. On 8 March 1864, she met with the Board of Medical Officers at the Department of the Cumberland—naive enough to think that this might lead to the desired commission. After meeting with Walker, the board declared her so inadequate “as to render

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it doubtful whether she has pursued the study of medicine.” The board was “of the further opinion that her practical acquaintance with diseases and the use of remedies is not greater than most housewives possess. The Board would except obstetrics, with which she seems to be more familiar. As a nurse, in a general hospital the Board believes her services may be of value and respectfully recommend her for that position.” Disheartened but as persistent as ever, Walker gained the support of Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, who ignored the board’s opinion and decided to oversee Walker’s appointment himself. She proceeded to camp as a civilian contract surgeon to the 52nd Ohio Volunteers, but on 10 April 1864, she was captured by Confederates and confined for four months to the Castle Thunder prison in Richmond, Virginia, where she lost weight and suffered permanent damage to her vision. On 5 October 1864, Walker was officially awarded a contract as acting assistant surgeon with the U.S. Army and was paid $434.66 for services rendered between the time of her assignment to the 52nd Ohio and her release from Castle Thunder. When she applied for a pension in later years, however, the pension committee clarified the nature of her wartime services—much to her satisfaction: “Had she served simply as a nurse for the length of time that she served in the higher capacity of assistant surgeon, she would . . . be entitled to a pension of $12 per month. Her services were much more valuable and meritorious, involving much more hardship and exposure, and resulted in greatly injuring her general health.” In postwar years, a pension committee would also substantiate the services of another women doctor who volunteered with the troops. Sarah Chadwick Clapp saw duty in the Cairo, Illinois, hospitals with the 7th Illinois Cavalry. Although she received a widow’s pension of $8 after her husband died, she was unpaid for her own medical services. In postwar years she filed for a separate pension and finally received back pay in a lump sum of $850 for having served as an assistant surgeon. A bill introduced in Congress on 6 January 1890, noted that Clapp served successfully as surgeon of the regiment from 15 November to 27 December 1861, and as assistant surgeon from 27 December to August 1862. Because of “the refusal of the State medical examining board to examine for this service one of her sex, she could not be commissioned or paid. The testimony that the services were faithfully and intelligently rendered under trying circumstances and resulting in the saving of valuable lives is ample.” In summarizing the service of these pioneer doctors during the Civil War, we cannot separate their experiences from the cultural forces and professional traditions that impacted them. Because society placed a high premium on rigidly defined sex roles, much resentment existed toward the “unnatural” women who chose to be doctors, and as one historian noted, “the polarized sex roles of the day made it impossible for most men to think of women as

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colleagues.” Nowhere was this resentment and hostility more obvious than in Walker’s case. Early historians, for instance, writing of the achievements of women in the Civil War, did not include Walker as one of those who should be remembered for her work with the wounded. After all, she had strayed from her appropriate gender role, rising to the post of contract surgeon without the benefit of hoops in her skirt, and donning trousers publicly for the rest of her life—even being buried in them. It is no wonder that several of these pioneer women doctors married physicians—for marriage provided them not only with a husband and protector, but a colleague who understood their struggles. As most of these women doctors made their way to the battlefield, they adhered to the Victorian ideal of womanhood despite the fact that they were not fully content with the traditional roles assigned to their gender. Most were willing to assume the inferior status associated with nursing, considered a woman’s natural calling, if it was the only way to get what they wanted. Yet their training was vastly superior, and they left an enviable record that testified to their accomplishments. One historian remarked, “Nurses sometimes broke under the strain and had to resign. . . . Practically all had to take periodic furloughs and at least one in ten suffered physical breakdowns while in the service.” These observations also apply in the case of women physicians, who showed the same devotion to duty as any regular soldier. In this small group, seven became ill, took furloughs, or had to resign. After the first Battle of Bull Run, Hettie K. Painter lost the use of her right hand because her nursing efforts had been so intense, and returned to her home in New Jersey on furlough. Chloe Annette Buckel contracted jaundice (most likely while serving on a hospital transport) and was sent home to recover. Sarah Chadwick Clapp resigned after volunteering in the regimental hospitals in Cairo, where casualties poured in continuously from some of the bloodiest confrontations of the war, and Rachel Harris Reid became so exhausted and ill after the Battle of Shiloh that she was also forced to resign. Mary E. Walker lost some of her vision due to her confinement as a prisoner of war, and Esther Hill Hawks mentioned her weariness, exhaustion, and fever several times in her diary while tending the soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. In the South, Orianna Moon Andrews worked herself into a state of complete exhaustion after setting up a hospital unit, and she required a month’s rest at home. After the war, several of these pioneer women doctors devoted themselves to issues related to social reform, women’s rights, and health issues. Mary E. Walker’s vision problems prevented her from returning to a full-time medical practice, but she remained an ardent crusader for dress reform and woman’s suffrage. Because of overwork as a nurse in the Civil War, Rachel Harris Reid was never completely well again and did not return to a full medical practice either. In Pasadena, California, she remained devoted to women’s issues, gave

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lectures, and was a leader in the temperance movement. Mary Thomas continued to practice medicine and work in public health. She was also an ardent advocate of temperance, but her chief contribution was to the cause of women’s suffrage. She was a frequent speaker at national suffrage conventions and was elected president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Buckel continued to practice medicine and spent ten years working as a resident physician at New England Hospital for Women in Boston. Afterward she studied abroad for two years and on her return relocated to California. In later years she devoted herself to children’s welfare, established a group of cottage homes for orphan girls in Oakland, and advocated for the establishment of separate units for disabled children in schools. Painter moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where she opened an infirmary to treat the chronically ill. Hawks also continued to work as a physician in postwar years, in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her practice flourished with mostly women patients and gynecological cases, her dedication to gynecology foreshadowing an important specialty that other women doctors would choose at the turn of the twentieth century. Andrews established a hospital with her physician husband in Virginia, and she had eight sons in rapid order but died in her early forties. In 1866 Sarah Chadwick married Henry Clapp, a former private in the 7th Illinois Cavalry who was widowed with four children. Differing accounts suggest that she might have practiced in her hometown after her marriage, although she was not listed in any directories. Finally, Edson was named family physician to President Garfield and “supported various GAR [Grand Army of the Republic] auxiliary projects in her remaining years,” and Winslow played a leading role in establishing several important groups in the late 1880s, including the District Woman Suffrage Association and the Washington chapter of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. Because so few women doctors participated in the Civil War, they did not leave a major impact as a group. In fact, since they mostly served as nurses, they were virtually invisible on the field except for Clapp and Walker, who made it to the regiments and ultimately received pay for having volunteered as contract surgeons in the army. Other, undocumented, women doctors probably also volunteered as nurses—or even disguised themselves as male surgeons. Historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, who conducted the definitive work on women who disguised themselves as men and enlisted in the armies of the Union and the Confederacy, noted that “in the 12th Indiana Cavalry, the assistant surgeon was a woman.” Another historian believed that a surgeon tending the wounded at Gettysburg was actually a woman in disguise. The combined efforts of these ten women physicians known to have tended Civil War wounded, however, set the stage for future wars. Women doctors were willing and able to provide medical services, and they were willing to pay the price for it—which meant exhaustion and breakdown, sickness, in-

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jury, and possibly death. Yet they might not reap the same benefits. The noted Civil War medical historian George Worthington Adams observed, “It is impossible to deny that war experience made operating surgeons out of a large number of rural physicians who had in the past referred surgical cases to city specialists. In the spread of operational surgery . . . this training with the knife was important.” Sadly, however, this experience was denied to the few women physicians who made their way into the Civil War. More than thirty years later, in 1898, it was still a matter of grave consideration if the military would be justified in accepting females in any capacity.

Women Doctors in the Spanish-American War

I

n the interval between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, numerous nursing schools sprang up across the United States, and nursing, like teaching, became an acceptable alternative for women who chose to work outside the home. But the government was still unwilling to have women on the battlefield and just as reluctant to see women nurses in army camps. When the surgeon general was finally authorized to employ nurses, both male and female, under contract at the start of the Spanish-American War, no provision was made for women doctors; men, however, were able to volunteer as military surgeons, as they had in the Civil War. If women doctors hoped their services would be valuable in another war, they were mistaken. The status quo had not changed. If women physicians wished to provide medical care, they would have to volunteer yet again as nurses, because military surgeons would not choose to gracefully work alongside a female colleague. The comments made by one male doctor of the period reflect the general feelings of the medical establishment: “Nurses are docile, submissive, and keep their proper place, while once let a woman study medicine and she thinks her opinion is as good as a man’s.” With the outbreak of war on 25 April 1898, the Army Medical Department was unprepared and understaffed, as it had been in the Civil War. The department had 520 Hospital Corps men in all degrees of training as nurses for army work, 100 hospital stewards, and 103 acting stewards—numbers that were hardly adequate for a standing army of about 25,000 men even in peacetime. In that same month, Congress authorized the surgeon general to employ nurses under contract and pay them thirty dollars a month and a daily ration. Almost immediately, the surgeon general’s office was flooded with applications, including some from women physicians. The applications kept piling up, as no one in Washington could decide what to do with them. Just when Surgeon General George M. Sternberg was getting desperate, one woman doctor, who traveled in the same Washington social circles that he did, offered her help. Anita Newcomb McGee had received her medical degree in 1892 from Columbian (later George Washington) University and

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took postgraduate courses in gynecology at Johns Hopkins University. Following this, she had a medical practice as a gynecologist, much like Esther Hill Hawks had after the Civil War. McGee, however, began to devote herself more and more to activities with scientific societies and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Gradually this work became more important to her, and she let her private practice decline. At the April 1898 meeting of the DAR, McGee presented a plan for a hospital corps composed of trained female nurses who would be ready to answer a call from the surgeon general for service in the army or navy. The group rallied behind McGee’s proposal and appointed her director of the DAR Hospital Corps. When the plan was proposed to Sternberg, he delegated this task to McGee with a sense of relief; by this time more than six thousand applications had poured into his office. Not long after, McGee was appointed acting assistant surgeon, with the task of selecting contract nurses to serve in the army camps that were riddled with typhoid. (The selection process ultimately culminated in the establishment of the first nurse corps that later became the Army Nurse Corps). Nurses had to be graduates of a recognized nursing institution, and preferably single and between the ages of thirty and fifty. Sternberg wanted these women to represent all parts of the country, while those who had been exposed to yellow fever were preferred for hospitals located in the southeastern part of the country, where the disease was rampant. From the beginning, McGee intended to work in an administrative capacity and avoid the mistakes made in 1861 when Dorothea Dix, as superintendent of nurses in the Civil War, was given unlimited power to hire and place nurses in military hospitals. In fact, Simon Cameron, secretary of war, had placed Dix in control of the entire nursing personnel and made her the receiving agency for all supplies sent by volunteer war workers during the war. “Had I tried to do as Miss Dix did,” McGee explained, “[and] go about to supervise the actual nursing, instead of sticking to the one job of selecting the best women for the work in the field and of organizing in the office—I should have fallen between two stools, and so would anyone else who tried that method.” She agreed with Sternberg that the medical officers were the best ones to direct the medical work of the hospitals and that it was his job “to select the best men he could and trust them to do their work right.” Furthermore, McGee pointed out, “it would even have been a grave fault if I had tried in those days to have a traveling supervising nurse, for that would have antagonized many an officer whose good will was essential to success.” As it turned out, chief nurses became supervising nurses under male surgeons, which was typical of the way civil hospitals were run at the time. The medical department was authorized to have a complement of 192 medical officers, while 650 contract surgeons (designated as acting assistant surgeons) were also hired. The contract surgeons had little reason to excel as they were never mustered into the army, had no tenure or possibility of pro-

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motion, and ceased to be paid if they became sick or disabled. The job of contract surgeon was not an enviable one, but it was denied to qualified women physicians because Surgeon General Sternberg, whose opinion reflected the attitude of the times, was initially opposed to women in the field. Nevertheless, at least ten women physicians that we know of volunteered as contract nurses (table 2). Like the Civil War women physicians, most of them attended medical schools in the East, but as the number of schools increased so did their locations around the United States. Irene Toland, for example, graduated from the American Medical College in St. Louis, Missouri, and Addie Haverfield from the University of Minnesota. No separate list was kept of the names of woman doctors in SAW, and they can only be determined by surveying the PD cards of contract nurses, which asked two important questions: Are you a graduate of a training school for nurses? If not, what has been your occupation? A few women listed “physician” and inserted the name of the medical school they had attended in place of the nursing institution requested. In this sense, they were much like the post-pioneer women physicians who were concerned with their professional identity. Mary Eloise Walker crossed out the first question but gave a decisive answer to the second: “Physician. Univ. of Michigan ’96.” Laura Hughes indicated she was a “regular physician” who had first graduated from the Boston City Hospital Training School (for nurses) in 1882 before going on to medical school. She also noted she was five feet nine inches in height, which was tall for a woman of that time. Toland chose to answer only the second question and noted succinctly: “Have practiced medicine continuously.” Two other women stated that they were currently enrolled as medical students. SAW women physicians came from a variety of backgrounds. Unlike women physicians in the Civil War, the women doctors in SAW were single, most likely a result of the DAR selection process, which gave preference to single women. Ellen Lawson (Dabbs), for example, was a widow who had been an early women’s-rights activist and reform writer before marriage. Only Mary Elizabeth Green, Anita Newcomb McGee, and Ellen Woodward Howell were married at the start of the Spanish-American War. While most of these women came from the East and the Midwest, Irene Toland came from Texas and Ellen Dabbs from Mississippi, although Dabbs spent most of her adult years in Texas. Both also taught school before deciding to study medicine. The women doctors ranged in age from twenty-six to fifty-four at the time they signed their contracts. Isabel Cowan was the youngest at twenty-six years of age, and Mary Green was the oldest, having turned fifty-four on 8 August 1898, a week before signing her contract . This meant that Green was about ten years older than Mary Myers Thomas had been when she volunteered at age forty-four in the Civil War. Like many women physicians past and present, SAW physicians had to balance the demands of a family with a career. For women with supportive

TABLE  Women Physicians in the Spanish–American War Physician

BD

Medical School

Grad. Date

Cowan, Isabel

1871

Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

1895

Dabbs, Ellen Lawson

1858

Col. of Physicians & Surgeons (Keokuk, Iowa)

1890

Green, Mary

1844

Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

1868

Haverfield, Addie

1857

Univ. of Minnesota Medical School

1895

Howell, Ellen Woodward

1868

New York Medical College & Hosp. for Women 1892

Hughes, Laura

1860

Tufts Medical School

1895

McGee, Anita Newcomb

1861

Columbia Univ., later George Washington Univ.

1892

Robbins, Jane E.

1860

Woman’s Medical College of New York

1897 (?)*

Toland, Irene

1857

American Medical College (St. Louis)

1894**

Walker, Mary Eloise

1869

University of Michigan Medical School

1896***

*PD card noted that she had been out of medical school one year. **Died in service. ***Not to be confused with Mary Edwards Walker from the Civil War.

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husbands, this was not a problem. John McGee was always convinced that Anita had to have an identity of her own, even as she sweltered in the August heat in Washington poring over application letters from nurses; and Green’s husband was not surprised at learning Mary’s expertise in nutrition was needed for the war effort. He told their daughter matter-of-factly, “It seems the government needs her more than we. They think she’s a very remarkable woman. But of course, you know I could have told them that!”  While all these women physicians were volunteers, as had been the case in the Civil War, McGee personally recruited Green, a re- Mary E. Green, at the time of the Spanishnowned medical authority on food American War, was one of the most noted products, to establish diet kitch- medical authorities in the nation on food ens. Her selection marks the first products. She was recruited by the Medical time a woman doctor was chosen Department for her expertise in nutrition, and to serve in a specialty area during she supervised diet kitchens in the camps. wartime, a process that would be repeated as the army sought anesthesiologists, psychiatrists, and surgeons in later wars. Back in 1898, almost no one in the country was better prepared to supervise diet kitchens than Green. At first glance, her specialty might not seem so important unless one understands something about typhoid fever, a contagious disease characterized by fever, diarrhea, abdominal pain, skin rash, prostration, and delirium. In a typhoid epidemic, victims are left terribly wasted due to loss of fluids and lack of nutrition. Since the fever also leaves people dehydrated and unable to assimilate food, special diets need to be prescribed to help restore health. Typhoid was the major killer of U.S. troops in the encampments located mostly in the southeastern part of the country. The War Department’s decision to concentrate recruits in a few national assembly camps was a mistake as it served to focus the epidemic and aid in its rapid spread. During the war, typhoid fever deaths increased rapidly from July to peak in September—the same period that contract nurses were on the scene. These women proved that careful nursing could save lives; as trained nurses they “were well versed

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in the germ theory and antisepsis and understood the importance of scrupulous cleanliness, the use of disinfectants, and the safe handling of infectious excreta.” Several women doctors in SAW worked in supervisory positions as chief nurses. Irene Toland, however, was the only one of the physicians in either the Civil War or Spanish-American War to die in service. While a chief nurse, she was struck down with typhoid while serving on the hospital ship Reine de Las Angelas. With less than six weeks’ service to her credit, Toland died on 25 September 1898. One of the physicians who worked with her recalled, “She worked hard, early to late, always ready and willing to administer to the wants of others. . . . She played her part in life well and nobly and sacrificed it that others might live. She died loved by all who knew her, for her zeal and true moral worth as well as her skill.” A handwritten note appended to her service record stated: “Not a graduate [nurse].” Laura Ann Cleophas Hughes, who also specialized in nutrition like Mary Green, noted that she had “a full invalid course” at the Boston Cooking School in addition to being trained first as a nurse and then a doctor. In August 1898 she was assigned superintendent of nurses and put in charge of diet kitchens at the Detention Hospital at Montauk Point, Long Island, New York. Camp Wikoff was started as a quarantine station and also as a place for sick soldiers to recuperate. The government recognized that with the outbreak of disease in Cuba and Puerto Rico, returning soldiers could not be immediately sent back to their homes because of communicable diseases, as well as yellow fever and malaria, they might carry with them. At first, conditions at the camp were extreme because there was a shortage of tents, laundry, supplies, and food as the convalescents arrived. Although yellow fever claimed no lives as had been feared, typhoid fever killed about one-third of all who died, with malaria and dysentery accounting for the other deaths. One contract nurse reported that many nurses became ill themselves or died. Such was the situation in which Hughes found herself, but her medical training had to have been a great asset in such surroundings. When Hughes’s contributions are considered alongside of Green’s, however, both women demonstrated how a knowledge of nutrition and cooking could be utilized on a large scale in military diet kitchens to help sick soldiers recover more quickly from typhoid fever. Two other women doctors, also chief nurses, stated one important motive for volunteering during wartime: the chance to improve one’s medical skills. Isabel Cowan, who wrote a four-page account of her experiences, explained: “Women doctors [were] not allowed in Army then only as Nurses. . . . I found this service . . . so worthwhile. . . . I always felt I had a most helpful postgraduate course in both medicine and surgery.” Mary Eloise Walker, one of the women doctors to remain the longest in the army, volunteered in October 1898 and stayed in the Nurse Corps until January 1900. She stated that she had not “had so much experience with typhoid outside. . . . That is why I came.”

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Since she was on duty during a serious epidemic at one of the army barracks, she got her wish. Later she worked in an army tuberculosis camp in Arizona. At Sternberg Hospital in Chickamauga Park, Georgia, two other women physicians also served as chief nurses. Ellen Woodward Howell worked under the most trying circumstances, eighteen-hour days in intolerable heat and surrounded by swarms of flies and mosquitoes. After her contract was annulled 19 November 1898, with no reason given, a comment on her service record noted: “Good head nurse, but not very strong.” The situation at Sternberg proved even more difficult for Jane E. Robbins, who contracted typhoid fever from the patients she was tending. “I was sent under the Red Cross,” she stated, “and was compelled to become a contract nurse in order to stay and do the work . . . I was sick when I came away.” Her illness was no surprise as many of the nurses in Chickamauga Park also became ill from fevers. In fact, the conditions in the various hospitals there were exceedingly primitive as the camp was almost always overcrowded with sick, officers in charge were frequently changing, and nurses were limited in number. In addition, medicines, hospital supplies, and furniture were lacking. One of the women working at the camp described the suffering as great while “the neglect was greater. . . . Hospital stewards were overworked, as well as nurses; orderlies were scarce and the rush of patients from the surrounding hospitals was unceasing.” Although one might conclude that a medical degree was deemed more desirable when it came to volunteering as a contract nurse during the SpanishAmerican War, women physicians were not automatically viewed as being any better at nursing because they had superior qualifications. Civil War nurses may have been perceived as “glorified housekeepers” by the male establishment, but by the time of the Spanish-American War, nurses had moved beyond this stereotype and had positioned themselves to be accepted as qualified medical workers. With the growth in nursing schools and the emphasis on training, nurses had acquired the knowledge and technical skills to be called graduate nurses, as opposed to those who assumed the title without similar training. As a result, one can assume that trained nurses viewed themselves as having more prestige than women physicians who had no nurse training. Chief nurses in SAW also conducted efficiency ratings and were influenced by a strict interpretation of what constituted a good nurse. Obviously, the first criterion was graduation from an approved training school for nurses, a requirement women physicians serving as nurses did not meet. Strangely enough, women physicians were caught in a double bind: the army did not want them as physicians, and the nurses who were graduates of approved schools viewed them skeptically, as they felt women doctors did not have the kind of training needed to nurse patients. Ellen Dabbs, for example, a practicing physician before she was posted to Camp Cuba Libre in Jacksonville, Florida, had her contract annulled for unknown reasons after six weeks. The comment appended to her PD card noted, “Lacks professional skills as nurse.

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Not a graduate nurse.” Addie Haverfield served as a nurse at Jacksonville, Florida; Savannah, Georgia; and Havana, Cuba. Her ability was ranked as “fair,” and the final comment posted on her record stated, “Graduate of a medical school— not a trained nurse.” Robbins fared worse with her rating, as her final grade read: “Excellent, but not very orderly. A doctor not a nurse.” McGee was caught in the same backlash. She, of course, was also not a graduate nurse, a matter of serious concern for some of the women who wanted a member from their own profession to represent them. When the first Nurse Corps became the permanent female Army Nurse Corps on Ellen Lawson Dabbs was not only a physician 2 February 1901, any nurse who but also a writer and early activist and suffrag- was under contract at the time auist leader in Texas. She volunteered as a contomatically became a member of tract nurse during the Spanish-American War the corps. The act also provided and served at Camp Cuba Libre, Jacksonville, that the superintendent of women Florida, where the cold and poor conditions nurses in the army should be a at the camp weakened lay nurses and sister woman who had graduated from nurses alike. a general hospital training school for nurses. This meant McGee was not eligible. McGee resigned shortly after the act became effective. She pointed out, however, that having recognition as a medical officer herself was initially a great advantage in forming the Nurse Corps, since there was great prejudice against getting nurses recognized as commissioned officers; even the surgeon general would not consider the possibility. “In fact,” Mc Gee pointed out, “when I was writing the original law of the nurse corps, I talked to him of the rank question and he absolutely refused to admit that nurses were as useful or should rank as high as the trained Hospital Sergeants, who could nurse and also do many other things which the women could not. A position as an officer was therefore not open to a nurse at all in those days, and many a time (which no one outside knew about) I gained some point for the nurses thru [sic] the recognition I had as medical officer, and in that sense, an equal.” McGee was later awarded the Spanish War medal for her services. In post-

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war years, she never lost interest in “her” nurses and used her considerable influence with Congress to get service-connected benefits for those women who had served in the Spanish-American War, including authority for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. For six years McGee served as president of the Association of Spanish-American War Nurses that she founded in the winter of 1898–99. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–5, she took a group of nine ex-army nurses to Japan for six months to train Japanese women for military nursing service. She was also given officer status in the Japanese army and was awarded the Japanese Order of the Sacred Crown, a special Japanese Red Cross decoration, and two Russo-Japanese War medals. In reviewing the services of these ten SAW physicians, they seem to have had little in common except for their medical degrees and a desire to serve their country. Lacking the privilege to serve officially as surgeons, women physicians in SAW were not able to hone their skills in the same manner and to the same degree as their male colleagues—the same problem that plagued Civil War women physicians. Although these women physicians challenged the stereotype that “a woman’s best place is in the home,” volunteering as nurses did not advance their professional status even when trained medical workers were needed in the national camps. In the postwar period, several women continued to practice medicine. Cowan returned to Rodney, Iowa, while Howell went to West Chester, Pennsylvania, to work. Walker worked at the New York State Hospital for the Insane, making her the only physician in either war to enter the field of psychiatry, a career choice that would become popular with women physicians in World War I and World War II. Hughes went on to become Boston’s first woman medical inspector in 1918, but she died two years later. McGee and Green took similar paths, both becoming lecturers after the war. McGee retired from active practice in 1906, and in 1911 she became a lecturer for the University of California and traveled throughout the United States. Her husband died in 1912; in 1916 she resigned from DAR; and three years later she moved to Southern Pines, North Carolina. She never forgot “her” SAW nurses, however, and continued to fight for their right to get government pensions even after she retired. Green entered the lecture circuit and gave talks on health and nutrition until 1908 when she moved to Seattle, Washington, where she was involved with the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association. Whether women physicians volunteered in the Civil War or the SpanishAmerican War, professional advancement was not an outcome, nor was this a goal for them—though perhaps Mary Edwards Walker was the exception, as she strove for an army commission. Sexual stereotypes continued to impact on women physicians to such an extent that unless they were willing to take up the traditional female nurturing role, there was little likelihood that they

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would be given the opportunity to care for sick and wounded in the army. One army historian, however, was quick to acknowledge that, “serious consideration of an official women’s corps was scarcely possible before the twentieth century.” As proponents of the expansion of women’s role, women physicians welcomed change, although their acceptance of nursing roles as a means to an end indicates they knew change had to be gradual. What then were their motivations for wartime service? Impressionistic evidence suggests that aside from patriotic and altruistic motives, women physicians were drawn to military medicine for some of the same reasons their colleagues in later wars would be—the chance to improve one’s skills, the opportunity to practice a specialty, and even the hope for adventure. While women doctors had very restricted roles in earlier wars, they occasionally managed to practice some aspects of medicine that satisfied them. In her “Incidents Connected with the Army” during the Civil War, Mary Edwards Walker stated, “There were times when I examined and prescribed and continued the treatment of these hundred patients” at the Patent Office Hospital. Such work was certainly consistent with part of the surgeon’s job in the field hospitals. And although she never mentioned performing surgery, soldiers sought her advice regarding their amputations—at which point she would make a careful diagnosis of each case. If she felt that amputation should not be considered, she swore the soldier to secrecy and instructed him to refuse the operation. “I did not wish to be unprofessional and say anything to any other medical officer’s patients that would seem like giving advice outside of a council,” Walker explained, “but as I had a little experience and observation regarding the inability of some of the ward surgeons to diagnose properly, and truthfully I considered that I had a higher duty than came under the head of medical etiquette.” During the Spanish-American War, a few women felt that they had enhanced their medical knowledge, and Mary Green had the satisfaction of demonstrating that skills in a specialty could be used in wartime. Finally, Isabel Cowan must have felt a measure of pride in her administrative skills when one of the army officers was moved to write: “No better selection could be made for chief nurse.” While women physicians derived some measure of job satisfaction from their wartime experiences, their careers were never without their low points. Mary Edwards Walker’s Medal of Honor was revoked on the grounds that her meritorious service in the Civil War was not combat-related. It was restored to her posthumously in 1977 when the Army Board of Corrections admitted that when consideration is given to “her total contribution; her acts of distinguished gallantry, self sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex, the award of the Medal of Honor appears to have been appropriate . . . and in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service.” Both Elizabeth

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Blackwell and Anita Newcomb McGee were passed over when it came to an appointment as superintendent for nurses in two different wars, and Susan Edson, as private physician to President Garfield, was present at his bedside in his last days but allowed only to tend him as a nurse. Esther Hawks had gone to Washington hoping to be employed as a physician or even a nurse. She was rejected by Miss Dix as neither old enough nor plain enough, and the medical department wasn’t hiring women doctors. Women doctors in the Civil War (with Walker as the exception) seemed to have been viewed more positively by their contemporaries because they went about the job of nursing unobtrusively even though they had better training than the thousands of inexperienced nurses who rushed to the battlefield. SAW nurses made gains in proving that trained nurses were a necessity in wartime, but the handful of women physicians made little headway in proving the same thing. It was also ironic that having volunteered as nurses, some were not rated highly as having the required skills of graduate nurses on their efficiency ratings. At the very least, such experiences were predictive of the kinds of struggles with rank and status that women doctors would have in later wars. In the Spanish-American War, as was true for all previous U.S. wars, “more soldiers died of disease than from enemy action.” Typhoid fever was the major killer of U.S. soldiers, and it reached epidemic proportions in the national encampments, “accounting for 86.8 percent of the total deaths from disease during the war.” While women physicians never encountered the same conditions in war as their male colleagues (although Toland died in service), they nevertheless made a valuable contribution in the treatment of typhoid fever. Two of them supervised the diet kitchens while the majority, as chief nurses, supervised the work of other nurses in the care of sick and fever-stricken patients. As the twentieth century dawned, the relatively small numbers of women doctors still limited their potential for influencing American medicine. Although the government finally allowed women to be commissioned as nurses in 1920, the same did not hold true for women physicians. By this point, however, they had established their own identity as a group, many joining the Medical Women’s National Association (later the American Medical Women’s Association in 1937), which was involved in women’s medical activism. As one historian saw it, however, their “bid for war work went unheeded whenever they failed to invoke traditional ‘feminine’ values of self-sacrifice and service.” Not until World War II would the shortage of manpower and the scarcity of male physicians create a serious reconsideration of women’s role in wartime. Even then, women’s admission into the armed forces was delayed partly because of popular opposition to military status for females. As we turn to the struggles of women doctors during World War I in the next chapter, the question was no longer whether a woman would make a good doctor in society, but whether she could serve as one in a man’s army.

Chapter Two

NECESSITY’S HANDMAIDENS The Army’s Women Contract Surgeons of World War I

W

hen the young Julia Stimson graduated from Vassar College in 1901, she thought she might like to become a doctor. Testing the waters, she took graduate courses in biology and medical drawing at Columbia University and worked part-time as a medical illustrator and slide colorist at Cornell University Medical Center. Stimson’s parents did not want her to become a physician, however, believing it was not a suitable occupation for well-bred young women. They managed to dissuade their daughter from pursuing her first choice, but in 1904 she entered nurses’ training at New York Hospital. Julia Stimson’s situation was not unique. Young women drawn to a career as a physician faced a discouraging environment from the turn of the century through 1917, the year the United States declared war on the European Central Powers. Newly instituted accreditation standards reduced the number of medical schools, and the cost of tuition rose. At the same time, the growing trend toward professionalization meant that young men and women had a greater number of career choices than ever before, and the numbers of both male and female students applying to medical schools declined significantly. For young women, the nursing profession represented an appealing alternative to the longer road to a medical degree. Nursing had come to be seen as an acceptable profession for a young woman, and the number of professionally trained nurses rose from fifteen thousand in 1880 to more than two hundred thousand by 1917. In comparison, there were only six thousand women doctors in the United States by 1910, representing approximately 6 percent of the physicians in the country. By 1917 these figures for women doctors had begun a slow and steady decline that would not reverse itself until World War II twenty-five years in the future. While nurses emerged as respected professionals, women doctors remained enigmas, treated by much of society and a significant portion of the medical profession as if they had stepped out of their assigned place. Reflecting the status of nurses in American society, the army accepted

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nurses as official, uniformed members of the service in 1901 with the establishment of the Army Nurse Corps. The Navy followed suit in 1908. When the United States declared war in 1917, both military nurse corps grew dramatically, and the services quickly sent nurses overseas. One of these was army nurse Julia Stimson. Although army and navy nurses served without benefit of commissioned rank and thus had little real authority, the military health-care system could not function without them, and their official place in their respective services was secure. At the end of the war, Julia Stimson was appointed superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps, and army nurses were granted quasi-commissions referred to as “relative rank.” There was no comparable place for women doctors, however. Although within the first few months of war the military was in desperate need of doctors, and hundreds of women physicians were anxious to volunteer their services, the army and navy refused to commission them.

Needs Will Out

A

nticipating the war in 1916, Congress passed legislation expanding the Army Medical Corps, which was comprised of commissioned physicians. At that time all military personnel, officer and enlisted, were male, a fact taken for granted by the authors of the 1916 act, who wrote, “Such citizens as upon examination prescribed by the President shall be found physically, mentally and morally qualified to hold such commissions,” could be appointed to temporary commissions in the Medical Corps. The gender of the “citizens” in question was not specified. The army Surgeon General’s Office made the same assumption when, after the United States declared war, officials sent registration forms to every physician in the country, regardless of gender, asking if he or she would be willing to serve. Women physicians who filled out the forms and returned them to Washington, however, received letters declining their services. Within months, women physicians petitioned the War Department challenging the army’s automatic rejection of their services. In response, acting Judge Advocate General S. T. Ansell stated in an August 1917 opinion that the 1916 legislation should be interpreted in light of the intent of its authors, who in using the term “citizens” had obviously meant male citizens. As precedent, he cited a decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court which said that although state laws referred to “citizens” when describing potential notaries and justices of the peace, the authors had obviously intended these appointments to go only to males, therefore women were not eligible to serve. Col. G. E. Bushnell, an officer on the staff of Surgeon General William Gorgas, expressed the prevailing view among his colleagues on female physicians and army service. Explaining why women physicians were unqualified for positions as medical examiners of new recruits, he stated:

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Such a position, in my judgment, is not befitting a woman. There are obvious reasons why it is not desirable that they should be called upon to examine large numbers of men stripped to the skin. [It] is not expedient that more or less isolated numbers of women should come into contact with large numbers of men drawn from all classes of society, many of whom would not understand the precise position of the woman and think of her only as a woman. Furthermore there are few women who are physically qualified to endure the fatigues and vicissitudes of a campaign. Because the War Department believed female physicians were unsuited to military service and refused to commission them, women doctors who wanted to contribute to the war effort were initially required to volunteer their services as civilians. Seventy-six idealistic and dedicated female physicians volunteered to serve in the war zone with organizations such as the Red Cross and the American Women’s Hospitals. The mission of these medical organizations was to treat civilian victims of the war in Europe: women and children suffering from war-related injuries and diseases, refugees, war orphans, and others. Women doctors who wanted to treat soldiers, however, had no alternative but to wait until the army was moved out of necessity to hire them as contract surgeons. The Army Surgeon General was authorized to appoint as many contract surgeons as he felt necessary to handle emergency situations. Contract surgeons were not military members but civilians who worked for the Army Medical Department and were paid a salary stipulated in their contract. The official regulation pertaining to army contract surgeons reads as follows: In emergencies the Surgeon-General of the Army, with the approval of the Secretary of War, may appoint as many contract surgeons as may be necessary, at a compensation not to exceed $150.00 a month [the same pay as a 1st lieutenant]. Contracts with private physicians are entered into only by the Surgeon-General or by his authority. A general contract obligates the contract surgeon to take station and change stations as ordered. He is furnished quarters at the military post where he is assigned, and is expected to give his entire time to public service. He receives pay as stipulated in the contract, and the travel, fuel and light allowances of a first lieutenant. A contract surgeon must be a graduate of a reputable medical college, legally authorized to confer the degree of Doctor of Medicine, who has qualified to practice in the State or Territory in which he resides. Appropriate evidence that he has so qualified should be required before the contract with him is executed.

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He must be a citizen of the United States. A professional and physical examination of the applicant is made which must conform in all respects to that of candidates for commission in the Medical Corps. Contract surgeons render personal reports similar to those made by officers of the Medical Corps. Contract surgeons served at the army’s pleasure and did not receive the military rank, pay, and benefits of commissioned officers. Like army personnel, however, individuals under contract were required to serve wherever they were ordered for as long as they were needed. The army could abolish the contract at any time. Often, contract surgeons were appointed to positions “that did not justify the expense involved by the detail of a medical officer.” Many of the 889 male physicians who served under contract during the war served in part-time or limited capacities. The army also used contract surgeons to fill gaps in coverage, hiring them when an army physician could not be found to fill an empty billet. Although officially called “surgeons,” the Army used this term interchangeably with “physician” or “doctor.” Army contract surgeons were assigned a wide variety of medical duties in laboratories and hospital wards; very few worked solely as surgeons in operating rooms. In the case of the fifty-six women physicians recruited for contract service, the army signed them on only when qualified male physicians could not be found. Often, the women who got contracts had special skills the army needed, and no male physicians with those skills were available for service. Many women physicians felt that contract work was professionally beneath them. Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee explained that for women doctors to become contract surgeons meant “sacrificing their practices, performing the same services as their brothers, but with no rank, no promotions, no standing; when discharged, no bonuses or pensions, and if injured no disability provisions for themselves or their dependents.” This was an offer, she continued, that few women could afford to accept. Fifty-six women doctors, many of whom held highly specialized skills, opted to accept appointments as army contract surgeons. They felt that if the nation needed them, women professionals should be willing to serve their country despite the inconvenience. Many, such as Dr. Elizabeth Van Cortlandt Hocker, believed that in the process of serving they would prove their abilities by example, and the military would recognize the value of women physicians and open its doors to them in future wars. This chapter will deal with the professional background and accomplishments of the World War I army women contract surgeons, female physicians with a myriad of specialties hired as civilians under contract to the army. Who were they and what were their wartime assignments and contributions? What special skills did they hold that moved the army to put them under contract,

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and why couldn’t the Army find male physicians with these medical skills? Did the nation’s need for physicians during the war increase medical opportunities for women? What impact did the women’s contract service have on their postwar medical careers? Finally, how did the World War I service of women contract surgeons influence the military’s decision to open the doors to women physicians in World War II? In the end, it wasn’t legal challenges or angry petitions by disgruntled women that led the army to hire fifty-six women as contract surgeons; it was simple need. Army officials discovered they needed physicians with certain specific skills and could not find enough male physicians with those skills. By early 1918 Army Surgeon Anita Newcomb McGee, the only woman to General Gorgas was considerbe given the title of acting assistant surgeon ing, and even discussing publicly, during the Spanish-American War, helped the possibility of commissioning select more than 1,500 nurses who served on women physicians in the Medical contract with the army. Thus, she was instruCorps Reserves, which would have mental in forming the first Nurse Corps Division, which later became the permanent Army meant giving selected women physicians temporary commissions Nurse Corps. For her services, McGee was for the duration of the war. Secrelater awarded the Spanish War Medal. tary of War Newton Baker, however, remained obdurate. His attitude toward women physicians was no different than his attitude toward any women, other than nurses, serving with the army. Although the navy and Marine Corps enlisted women for home-front duty to free sailors and marines for overseas service, and several army commanders asked Washington for permission to do the same, Baker did not believe women had any place in an army camp. He felt that women would distract men and ultimately cause commanders more problems than they solved. When Baker would not allow him to commission women physicians, Gorgas asked the chairman of the Committee on Women Physicians of the Council of National Defense, Dr. Emma Wheat Gilmore, to recommend

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women physicians for contract service. Formed to provide women doctors with a way to participate in the war effort, the Committee of Women Physicians had until this point been limited to compiling a census of women physicians and encouraging them to apply to the Volunteer Medical Services Corps, an organization comprised of male physicians over fifty-five and women physicians who were willing to volunteer their services as civilians on the home front. Initially, few women physicians found the VMSC appealing, and only a fraction sent their names forward to Gilmore. In making her recommendations to the surgeon general, however, Gilmore drew from the names she had on file, and all of the fifty-five women she recommended received appointments as army contract surgeons. The army was the only military service to put women physicians to work during the war, and neither the navy nor the marines ever considered such a step. Dr. Kate Bogel Karpeles of Washington, D.C., a 1914 graduate of Johns Hopkins Medical School, was the first woman doctor to sign a contract with the U.S. Army. Karpeles’s contract, like those of all the women after her, was no different from those signed by male contract surgeons. The women, just like the men, received the pay of an army first lieutenant for as long as the army chose to utilize their services, and they were required to serve wherever the army assigned them. Karpeles’s contract was dated 9 March 1918, only one month after she had registered with the VMSC. Karpeles was used to breaking barriers. Early in her career she had experienced great difficulty obtaining an internship in the Washington, D.C., area. She applied to Children’s Hospital and Columbia Hospital (which specialized in obstetrics and gynecology), but neither would consider a woman intern. Then Garfield Memorial Hospital, responding to pressure from the Woman’s Medical Society of the District of Columbia, decided to hold competitive examinations for internships and to open the exams to women. Kate Bogel (not yet married) was selected for one of the internships. Initially the hospital’s medical staff had opposed the idea of a woman intern “on principle,” but when Bogel arrived staff members gave her the chance to prove herself, which she proceeded to do. Based on her performance at Garfield, Bogel was then offered an internship at St. Elizabeth’s, a government facility for treating mental diseases. In 1916 she married a member of the Garfield staff, Dr. Simon R. Karpeles, and established a private practice. By the time Dr. Kate Karpeles signed her contract in 1918, the couple had a one-year-old daughter. Karpeles was assigned to an army emergency dispensary in Washington, D.C., as an assistant surgeon. In 1920 after her contract had been terminated, she gave birth to a son. She retained her private practice in the Washington, D.C., area and remained affiliated with Garfield Memorial Hospital. Although Karpeles was the first woman physician appointed as an army contract surgeon, many of the contracts immediately following hers went to

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doctors who were trained in a specific specialty—anesthesia. By 1918 this relatively new medical specialty was becoming a popular choice for specialization among women physicians. The field was relatively open because of anesthesia’s relatively low prestige and equally low pay. Many surgeons, accustomed to the assistance of female nurses in the operating room, accepted women physicians as ideal anesthetists, who served in the capacity of assistant or facilitator. A 1918 surgery textbook, for example, stated that the physician’s choice of an anesthetist should be, in order of preference, a woman nurse, a woman physician, a male assistant, and lastly a male physician. The Committee on Women Physicians’ survey of women doctors interested in wartime service indicated that anesthesia was their second most popular specialization, with gynecology being the first. Anesthesia remained a popular specialty among women doctors through World War II; between 1920 and 1948 women comprised 11 to 13 percent of professional anesthesia organizations and only 3 to 4 percent of the physician population. The idea of using women physician anesthetists as contract surgeons was first suggested by Col. Jefferson R. Kean, director general of the Department of Medical Relief of the American Red Cross. In June 1917 he wrote Rosalie Slaughter Morton (Emma Wheat Gilmore’s predecessor as chairman of the Committee on Women Physicians), “I have asked the Surgeon General to let me employ women as contract surgeons, who are specialists in anesthesia in connection with the Base Hospitals. . . . I will bring them in whenever it seems practicable.” Although the surgeon general did not immediately accept Kean’s suggestion, within months, as the need for anesthetists became more definite, eleven women physician anesthetists were placed under contract and sent to Europe. Initially the army had planned to assign women contract surgeons to army installations on the home front, where the vast majority of male contract surgeons worked. However, when the need for anesthetists overseas became critical, the army sent forward all the contract surgeons who specialized in anesthesia they could find, eleven of whom happened to be women. The first female contract surgeons to be assigned overseas were anesthetists Dr. Anne Tjomsland and Dr. Frances Edith Haines. Key members of original hospital units designated as army base hospitals during the war preparations of 1915 and 1916, both young women had years of training and practice with other unit members. As anesthetists, they were specialists who would have been very difficult to replace when the male members of the unit were given commissions and the units were ordered overseas. In each case the hospital commander believed that adjusting to a new man’s ways of operation would hamper the efficiency of the unit. They were undoubtedly correct; however, it took a strong unit commander to push the army into granting contracts to these women during the first months of 1918. The army had just accepted the idea of women contract surgeons in March, and now they were asked to send them overseas. It was a hard sell.

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Tjomsland, a 1914 graduate of Cornell Medical School, was an anesthetist on staff at New York’s Bellevue Hospital prior to the unit’s mobilization overseas. Tjomsland was used to working hard for what she wanted: she had had to fight to do her medical internship at Bellevue, but at the end of her internship she was invited to become a member of the staff. She trained with the Bellevue Base Hospital unit for years before the unit was mobilized and was shocked to learn that she could not receive a commission like her male colleagues. Bellevue, which had been reluctant to accept her as an intern, now fought to retain her as a member of their base hospital unit. When the Bellevue unit, U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 1, arrived at Vichy, France, in the spring of 1918, Tjomsland was with them as a contract surgeon. Tjomsland was the only female Army contract surgeon who was not recommended to the Surgeon General by Dr. Emma Wheat Gilmore, who probably was unaware of her existence when she sent in her list of approved candidates. Army Base Hospital No. 1 took over two large former hotels, the Carlton, which became the surgical department, and the L’Amiraute, which functioned as the medical department. Tjomsland served in the surgical department. The hospital accepted casualties in need of immediate treatment from the most famous battles of the war: Cantigny, Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and the Argonne. Within four months, the hospital grew from two to eighteen buildings. In a history of the unit Tjomsland wrote, she remembered that the patients “came in waves, rolling up day after day. No sooner had [we] read the tags and labels on one case, got him cleaned up and operated on, than another rolled in. Endless rows of clay-colored bodies under khaki army blankets lay still on stretchers in the halls.” Tjomsland remained with the Bellevue unit until it returned to the United States after the war, and she was on staff at Bellevue Hospital throughout her medical career. At the start of the war, Dr. Frances Edith Haines, a 1913 graduate of the University of Nebraska Medical Hospital, was an anesthetist at Presbyterian Hospital of Chicago and a teacher of anesthesia at Rush Medical College. When the Presbyterian Hospital formed a base hospital unit for overseas service in the event of war, Haines was its sole woman doctor. As the unit was mobilizing, administrators were told that she could not be granted a military commission like her male colleagues. The chief surgeon of the unit, Dr. (Lt. Col.) Dean DeWitt Lewis, insisted that his hospital needed the services of the anesthetist the unit had trained with. “After months of futile correspondence,” Lewis sent Haines to the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington, D.C., to apply in person for an appointment as a contract surgeon. He telegrammed the office ahead of Haines reiterating his strong personal recommendation of her. The army finally placed her under contract. When U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 13 sailed from New York Harbor on 19 May 1918, Haines was with them. The hospital unit was based at Limoges, France, and remained there until

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19 February 1919. While at Limoges, where Haines was in charge of all anesthetics at the 1,500-bed base hospital, she developed and performed a new anesthesia procedure that enabled her to use only about one-fifth of the ether usually needed. In her memoir, Haines explained that she anesthetized the patient “just to the state of insensibility to pain. This required much more skill than simply ‘putting the patient under,’ but it saved ether and was better for the patients.” Haines explained how important anesthesia could be to the outcome of an operation: One night in Limoges at 10 p.m., I began the anesthetic for the removal of the entire left lung of a soldier whose large arteries, wounded in battle, bled whenever the sterile gauze packing was even partially removed. His heart kept actively beating, right in the field of operation. Had he taken one sudden deep breath, the surgeons’ instruments could have slipped and punctured more blood vessels. I kept the patient breathing quietly and smoothly throughout the operation. The surgeons commended me. The patient recovered. Haines trained enlisted men in the administration of ether, two of whom “attained considerable skill.” When the war ended, the army opted to retain Haines’s services and assigned her to Military Hospital No. 28 at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, where she was placed in charge of anesthetics at the hospital and taught anesthesia to army nurses. Haines taught at several army hospitals in the United States and served sixteen months under contract, longer than any other female contract physician but one. In early September 1918, resigned to the fact that women physicians were needed in Europe, the army sent seven who specialized in anesthesia overseas as contract surgeons. This group, Anesthetic Unit No. 1, included Drs. Isabelle Gray, Elizabeth Van Cortlandt Hocker, Dora Horn, Esther Leonard, Martha Peebles, Edith Stir Smith, Jessie Southgate, and two male medical corps doctors, both of whom were first lieutenants. Unlike Haines and Tjomsland, the majority of the physician anesthetists in Unit No. 1 were women in their forties, at the midpoint of their careers. Three of them, Hocker, Smith, and Southgate, were graduates of the Laura Memorial Women’s Medical College of Cincinnati and possibly knew one another before embarking overseas as army contract surgeons. The idealistic Hocker was the daughter of a Cincinnati shoe manufacturer. As a young woman she had asked her priest for help in determining “God’s plan” for her. He suggested medicine, and although the idea “was a shock at first,” Hocker never regretted her decision. She graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Cincinnati in 1897 and served her internship at the

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Presbyterian Hospital in Cincinnati. Initially, she planned to devote her skills to the indigent. In 1900 she became the first physician of the Catholic Visitation Society of Cincinnati and served as the physician for charitable organizations such as the Heekin Fresh Air Farm and the Christ Child Nursery. By 1918 Hocker had established her own practice in Cincinnati and was seeing “some of the best families in the city.”  However Hocker had not yet lost all her idealism, and she felt strongly that by serving under contract, she could show the army that women physicians were just as capable as men. According to her memoir, she visited the War Department in Washington, D.C., to inquire about applying for contract service and was told to “fill out various papers, sign them, and go home and wait to be called.” She signed her contract in May 1918, and after three months of intensive training in anesthesia at U.S. Army General Hospital No. 1 at Williamsbridge, New York, received orders to go overseas with Anesthetic Unit No. 1. When Hocker and the others arrived in Cheaumont, France, in September 1918, she was assigned to a “surgical team,” which consisted of a major (the surgeon), his assistant (a captain), a lieutenant, herself (the anesthetist), a nurse, and an orderly. When fighting started in the Argonne, Hocker’s surgical team was ordered to the front. After a twelve-hour trip, they reached “the outside border of the Argonne” and that evening started operating and worked until 4 a.m. After three hours of rest, they operated until 2 a.m. the next day. The group kept up that pace through the next ten days of the battle. Hocker said, “It may have been the heroic spirit of the wounded that spurred us on. Never a complaint—always thinking of the other fellow.” Hocker’s surgical unit was then sent to an evacuation hospital near Metz, where it remained until the armistice was signed in November. After the armistice, Hocker was sent to Savenay, where she supervised two hospital wards of forty-two beds each reserved for women personnel (nurses and other women under contract) of the U.S. Army. In her memoir, Hocker emphasized that she enjoyed her overseas work and “almost regretted it” when orders arrived sending her back to the United States. Her lack of status as a contract surgeon “meant nothing,” she said. Her superior officers appreciated her work, and she would not hesitate to “enlist again, if only as a contract surgeon.” Edith Florence Stir was born into a prosperous family of farmers in 1870 near Lebanon, Ohio, and taught school for seven years before attending medical school. She graduated from the Laura Memorial Women’s Medical College in 1901 and from the Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati in 1904. After practicing briefly in West Virginia, where she married a fellow physician, Florence Stir Smith returned to Ohio and opened a practice in the town of Newark, specializing in “women’s diseases.” Unfortunately, Smith left no records detailing why she felt compelled to volunteer for contract service during World War I, when she was almost fifty years old, and records do not indicate anything about the specifics of her overseas assignment.

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The third Laura Memorial Women’s Medical College graduate to go overseas with Anesthetic Unit No. 1 was Jessie Southgate of Oklahoma City, a forty-three-year-old divorcee who had graduated in the same class as Florence Stir Smith. When she signed her contract, Southgate was on staff at Wesley Hospital in Oklahoma City, but as late as 1917 she had been at the Cincinnati General Hospital working as an anesthetist. She left no records explaining why she left her new job in Oklahoma City to accept an army contract alongside an old friend and colleague from Cincinnati. Anesthetic Unit No. 1 also included two members from St. Louis, Missouri, Drs. Isabelle Gray and Esther Leonard. Gray had been under contract since April 1918, working as an anesthetist at the army base hospital at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois. She had practiced medicine for fourteen years prior to her assignment to Camp Grant. According to a Washington Post article about Gray published in June 1918, she drew the salary of a first lieutenant but was “not allowed” to wear the insignia, and she “took a special course in military medical training” before reporting for active duty at Camp Grant. On Anesthetic Unit No. 1’s arrival in Europe, Gray was assigned to Base Hospital No. 15 and later to Mare Hospital Center until she returned home in March 1919. Esther Edna Hill Leonard was the youngest of the seven women physicians who traveled to Europe together in September 1918. She was born in Xenia, Illinois, in 1892, and when she signed her contract with the army on 21 May 1918, she was a recent graduate of the St. Louis College of Physicians and Surgeons. Leonard was also married, another factor that made her unique in the group. Leonard’s military papers tell us she was twenty-six years old, five feet three inches tall, and 145 pounds. She left her home on 31 May 1918, and arrived at U.S. Army General Hospital No. 1 in New York, where she worked as an anesthetist until leaving for France with Anesthetic Unit No. 1 on September 1. On arriving in France, Leonard reported to Base Hospital No. 15 and, like Hocker, was sent to the front with a surgical team during the battle of Argonne. Operating Team No. 158 was led by a major and included a captain, contract surgeon Leonard, and two privates, making Leonard the sole woman on the team. She remained at the front with the surgical team until November, when she was assigned first to Evacuation Hospital No. 16 and later to Mobile Hospital No. 6. After the armistice, Leonard was sent to Base Hospital No. 115 at Vichy, France, and from there to Vichy Hospital Center. On 18 January 1919, Esther Leonard requested relief from duty with the American Expeditionary Force because “my mother and father are both very old and due to the recent illness of my father my presence is needed to help them attend to their affairs as I am their main support.” Leonard was released from duty and returned to the United States in late January 1919 although her contract remained active until March. Little is known of the experiences of the last two members of Anesthetic Unit No. 1, Dora Horn of Ohio and Martha Peebles of New York City. The

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Horn family was well known in medical circles in Ohio, and Dora Horn had been instrumental in the establishment of a hospital in her hometown of Bellevue. Her brother was a veterinary surgeon in Bellevue, and both her sisters were nurses who served overseas with the Army Nurse Corps during the war, a rather remarkable family history lost to time. Dora Horn returned to Ohio in June 1919, reentered the local medical establishment, and was elected second vice president of the Ohio Homeopathic Medical Society in 1921. Prior to the war, Dr. Martha Jane Peebles of Brooklyn, New York, appears to have specialized in public health. She served as the attending physician of the Denmark Home for the Aged in Brooklyn as well as for the Brooklyn Training School and Home for Young Girls. The only non-midwesterner in Anesthetic Group No. 1, Peebles was assigned first to Base Hospital No. 15 and later to Mesvos Hospital Center. Physician anesthetists were the only women contract surgeons sent overseas by the U.S. Army in World War I. They were carefully selected for their experience in anesthesia as well as their willingness to accept overseas service. All except Esther Leonard were single and thus had no family responsibilities. Leonard’s official “Biography and Service Record,” filled out some years after the war, lists a husband and two children, but because her request to return home in early 1919 says only that her elderly parents need her and mentions no other family members, it is impossible to tell whether Leonard’s children were born before or after her overseas service. What is certain, however, is that the army’s need for these doctors overrode its hesitancy to place women, whether grandmotherly fifty-year-olds or young newlyweds, in danger, a recurring theme in the history of women’s military service. To supplement the number of skilled anesthetists available to the army at home, the surgeon general appointed as contract surgeons at least six additional women physicians who specialized in anesthesia. These physicians were assigned to general and base hospitals in the United States and instructed army officers, nurses (during World War I army nurses were not considered officers), and enlisted men in the administration of anesthetics. In addition to teaching, they also served as anesthetists themselves whenever needed in the operating room. Three contract physician anesthetists who served stateside, Mary Botsford, Dolores Pinero, and Ollie Prescott Baird, are profiled below. For information on Myra Babcock, Margaret Dassell, and Grace Mering Elmendorf, see the chart in table 3, below. California’s first professional anesthetist, Dr. Mary Botsford, was one of those who accepted a contract with the understanding that it would entail duty in the United States. Botsford graduated from the University of California at San Francisco in 1896 and within a year began to devote herself solely to the practice of anesthesia. She initially worked at the Children’s Hospital of San Francisco, a hospital founded by women physicians and where a majority of West Coast medical women graduates interned because other hospitals

Babcock, Myra Bacon, Edythe Baird, Ollie Baker, Lucy Botsford, Mary Bowers, Rose Brown, Edna Burdon, Minnie Burnett, Anne Carney, Nell Chapman, Frances Cleverdon, Ella Dassell, Margaret Donahue, Julia Elmendorf, Grace Gebhart, Florence Gilfillan, Margery Gray, Isabel Haessler, Bertha Haines, Frances Hill, Julia Hocker, Elizabeth Horn, Dora Jackson, Leila Johnstone, Mary 1897

Laura Memorial Med. Coll.

1904

1916 1892 1913

1913

Eclectic Medical College Northwestern Buffalo University

1973

1908 1892

1912 1896 1909

Graduated

U of Nebraska Med. School

U of Oregon Med School Chicago Medical School

1885

1885

Boston U. Med School University of Michigan U Cal. at San Francisco Woman’s Medical College

Medical School

1873 1888 1865 1887

Date of birth

Psychiatry Anethesia Pediatrics Anesthesia Psychiatry Anesthesia Anethesia

Anesthesia Psychiatry Anesthesia

Anesthesia Psychiatry Anesthesia Obstetrics Anesthesia Psychiatry Roenterology Obstetrics Psychiatry

Specialty

Women Contract Surgeons in World War I

TABLE 

8–18/10–18 5–18/10–18 5–18/10–18 10–1804–19 10–18/1–19 8–18/11–18 10–18/7–19 11–18/5–19 8–18/2–19 9–18/1–19 11–18/1–19 8–18/6–19 10–18/2–19 10–18/1–19 6–18/2–19 8–18/2–9 7–18/3–19 4–18/4–19 8–18/12–18 4–18/8–19 9–18/10–19 5–18/8–19 4–18/6–19 3–18/12–18 8–18/7–19

Dates of Army Contract

N N N

N

N N

Y Y D Y

Married

1

Children

Young, Anna

Karpeles, Kate Kleegman, Anna Kratz, Esther Leonard, Esther Lewison, Bella Maher, Loretta Mathewson, May McAfee, Loy McCann, Gertrude McKnight, Mary Mendenhall, Jean Morgan, Lady Peebles, Martha Pinero, Dolores Ruddock, Agnes Scott, Jessie Sherrill, Edna Smith, Charline Smith, Edith Smith, Olive Southgate, Jessie Stephens, Pearl Stephenson, Nellie Streeper, Gertrude Tjomsland, Anne Tunnicliff, Ruth Walker, Marie Weitzman, Frances Williams, Maud Wilson, Sylvia 1907

1913

Duke University

Phys. Surg. Boston

1905

1914 1903 1897

Cornell Medical School Rush Medical College

1876

Tufts Medical School

1901

Laura Memorial Med. Coll.

1877

1901

Laura Memorial Med. Coll.

1870

1889

1904 1915

Medical College of Indiana Cornell Medical School

1868 1889

1913

U of Illinois Med. School

1889

1914 1916 1916 1917

Johns Hopkins Cornell Medical School Stanford U Med. School St. Louis Coll. Phys & Surg

1893 1888 1892

Anesthesia Pathology Psychiatry

Anesthesia

Anesthesia

Anesthesia Anesthesia Bacteriology

G.P.

Medical Editor Pathology

G.P.

G.P. Obstetrics G.P. Anesthesia

9–18/4–19

7–18/11–18 10–18/11–18 9–18/12–18 10–18/2–19 10–18/6–19

3–18/6–19 5–18/6–18 9–18/12–18 5–18/3–19 9–18/3–19 8–18/24 10–18/11–18 5–18/6–21 6–18/10–19 3–19/10–19 6–18/8–18 9–18/12–18 4–18/4–18 10–18/1–19 10–18/8–19 10–18/11–18 5–18/3–19 8–18/12–18 4–18/3–19 9–18/10–18 6–18/10–18 4–18/1–19 9–18/6–19 5–18/8–18 N N

D

N

Y Y

Y

D Y

Y

Y D Y Y

2 2

1

2

1

2 2 3 2

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would not accept them. Botsford was charismatic and dynamic, and since all the interns had to rotate to anesthesia, she soon attracted a large number of women physicians into the field. In 1910 Botsford was appointed to the first faculty position in anesthesia at the University of California Medical School. Botsford’s army assignment did not take her far from home; she taught anesthesia at Letterman General Army Hospital in San Francisco. Her influence on the field was substantial; by 1920 California had eleven doctor anesthetists—three men, Botsford, and seven of Botsford’s trainees. A native of Puerto Rico, Dr. Dolores Pinero received her medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston in 1913. She had been practicing medicine in the town of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, for only a few years when the war began. In her memoir, Pinero said that when she first applied to become a contract surgeon at army headquarters in Puerto Rico, she was not accepted because the local commander, a colonel, did not think he could accept a woman applicant. Pinero then wrote to the surgeon general in Washington, D.C., and “within days received a telegram ordering me to report to Camp Las Casas at Santurce, Puerto Rico.” One reason for the surgeon general’s rapid response may have been that Pinero mentioned her experience in anesthesia. When Pinero signed her contract with the army in October 1918, she became the first Puerto Rican woman to serve in the army under contract. She was assigned to the base hospital at San Juan, working in the mornings as an anesthetist and afternoons in the laboratory with six other doctors. Pinero was also in charge of the nurses at the hospital. Six weeks after she began, she received orders to accompany four other doctors to Ponce to open a hospital of four hundred beds to care for influenza patients. After the influenza epidemic ended, Pinero and her colleagues returned to the base hospital at San Juan, where she was honorably discharged in January 1919. Dr. Ollie Prescott Baird, a graduate of Boston University Medical School, was a forty-five-year old widow when she signed her army contract. For unknown reasons, the army sent Baird to an anesthesia course at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, New York, before assigning her to Fort McClellan near Anniston, Alabama, to instruct nurses and enlisted men in how to dispense anesthesia. According to her memoir, Baird taught more than two hundred nurses and enlisted men during her time at Anniston. In addition, she was in charge of anesthesia for two operating rooms, giving anesthesia to five to seven patients each day. In congressional testimony almost twenty-five years later, Baird stated that she got along well with her patients. “The Catholic boys called me ‘Sister,’ ” she said, “and the Protestant boys called me ‘Mother.’ ” Apparently the army was dissatisfied with Dr. Baird’s performance. A note on her card in Emma Wheat Gilmore’s files on women physicians indicates that while on duty Baird wore a uniform, which her superiors believed was inappropriate. Baird’s memory on the subject was quite different. She stated that she had designed her own uniform and that other doctors and enlisted personnel on

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post kept asking her why her uniform had no insignia. She repeatedly explained to her colleagues that she had been told she was not allowed to wear insignia. She remembered feeling bad about her lack of status and added, “The commanding officer of the hospital gave me permission to wear a cord on my hat denoting ‘Lieutenant’ and that helped some.” The army ended Baird’s contract after only five months. Psychiatry, much like anesthesiology, was a fairly new specialization prior to World War I, and in general it was somewhat less prestigious than surgery or even general practice. Although it was not a primarily feminine field of specialization, it was a popular choice among women physicians, many of whom were employed in state-run institutions including hospitals, orphanages, and reform schools. According to the Committee on Women Physicians’ 1917 survey, psychiatry was the fourth most popular field of specialty for women physicians, after gynecology, anesthesia, and pediatrics. No one could have predicted the scope of the military’s need for psychiatrists at the start of this particular war, when “shell shock” became a commonly understood phrase. By the end of the war, the army had treated more than sixty thousand men for a variety of psychiatric and neurological complaints, including five thousand shell shock victims. Inevitably, army officials placed women psychiatrists under contract when local commands found themselves unable to attract adequate numbers of qualified male psychiatrists. At least seven of the fifty-six female contract physicians specialized in psychiatry. One of them was Dr. Marie Winchell Walker of Chicago, Illinois, who had been a practicing psychiatrist for more than twenty years when she signed her contract. Walker was assigned to a dispensary in Washington, D.C., and although the specifics of her assignment are not known, some insight into her philosophy may be gained by examining the titles of a series of public lectures she delivered five years later: “Emotions and Health,” “Getting What You Want,” and “Character Analysis.” Dr. Rose Bowers, also of Chicago, was assigned to the army base hospital at Camp Grant in Illinois. The thirty-one-year-old Bowers, who was married to fellow psychiatrist Paul Bowers, had graduated from the Woman’s Medical College in 1909 and had been practicing about ten years when she signed her contract. Unfortunately, Bowers arrived at Camp Grant at about the same time as the influenza epidemic, and she may have found herself swept up in the general medical emergency and unable to practice her specialty. She resigned her contract after only two months on the job. After the war, Bowers and her psychiatrist husband moved to California, where she remained in practice for more than thirty years.  Dr. Julia Hill’s contract with the army lasted more than a year, far longer than those of many of her colleagues. When the war started, Hill was the owner of Hill’s Retreat Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa. In electing to practice

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psychiatry, she was following in the footsteps of her father, Dr. Gershon Hill, who had been state superintendent of the state hospital in Independence for many years. Unfortunately, the records do not give any specifics of her army assignment. She returned to Iowa and Hill’s Retreat Hospital after the war and in 1925 was named secretary of the state Occupational Therapists Association. Sometime after that, perhaps as a result of the Depression, Hill closed her hospital and moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she took a job as assistant director at the Child Guidance Center. In 1937 she spoke at a conference on child welfare about “the duties of Child Welfare Organizations and others interested in children in taking care of these unfortunates who have no parents to guide them” and emphasized the importance of finding proper foster parents. Dr. Anne Burnett graduated from the Chicago Medical School in 1892, interned at the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, and then decided to specialize in “nervous and mental diseases.” She served a number of years as the assistant physician at the Kankakee Hospital for the Insane and then accepted a position at the Hospital for the Insane at Clarinda, Illinois. She then served as a medical missionary in China and on her return lectured publicly about the work physicians were doing there. By 1916 she was a physician in private practice in Lincoln, Nebraska. Burnett signed her contract with the army in August 1918 and remained under contract until February 1919. Although records show that she worked at Plattsburg Barracks in New York, no specifics about her job are available. After the war, she accepted a position as superintendent of the Industrial School for Girls at Geneva, Wisconsin. Dr. Julia Donohue’s army experience turned her career from general medicine to psychiatry. An 1892 graduate of Northwestern Medical College, Donohue left the United States months after receiving her degree and spent seven years as a medical missionary in Hing Hau City, Foo Chow, China, under the auspices of the Medical Missionary Board. During her first year in China, a massacre of Christians near the hospital where she worked forced her to move temporarily to safety in Foo Chow City. She returned to Hing Hau City after three months when the American consul told her it was safe to do so. Donohue was finally forced to leave China when an outbreak of bubonic plague closed the hospital where she worked. On her return home, she remained with the Medical Missionary Board as a lecturer, traveling across the country describing her experiences in China. She established a general medical practice in Burlington, Iowa, in 1909 and remained there until she heard the army was hiring women physicians. Although no information is available on Donohue’s specific assignment with the army, her experiences awakened in her an interest in psychiatry. When her contract ended she accepted the position of assistant physician at the State Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, and later moved to the State School for Epilepsy at Skillman, New Jersey. She then accepted an appointment at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.,

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before finally relocating to Massillon State Hospital in Ohio where she taught psychiatry to nurses for twenty years. Responding to need, the army continued to appoint women contract surgeons to relieve critical shortages that developed over the course of the war, using qualified women to fill positions for which qualified men were in short supply. At least one woman contract surgeon, Dr. Minnie Burdon of Anacortes, Washington, an obstetrician, was assigned work rehabilitating soldiers from the front at Fort Douglass, Utah. Women doctors provided medical care to soldiers’ dependents and worked in laboratories testing vaccines for contagious diseases, where they proved invaluable to the army during the influenza epidemic of 1918–19. Known to contemporaries as “Spanish influenza,” the epidemic killed 675,000 Americans and more than 20 million people around the world. People living in crowded areas with highly transient populations, such as ports of embarkation and army camps, were especially vulnerable. The disease progressed quickly, with many of the afflicted dying from pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs) within two to three days of their initial symptoms. Others died because the influenza turned into bacterial pneumonia, for which no antibiotics then existed. Three women contract surgeons assigned to the Attending Surgeon’s Office in Washington, D.C., experienced the flu epidemic firsthand. The Attending Surgeon’s Office staff treated soldiers and sailors on their way overseas and those returning from sea duty in addition to military dependents, including the families of veterans of previous wars. Dr. Loretta Maher of Chicago, Illinois, was the first woman assigned to the office. A graduate of the University of Illinois Medical School, she had interned at Cook County Hospital in 1913, a position the Chicago Tribune proclaimed was a “highly competitive appointment.” Maher signed her army contract in August 1918 and remained at the Attending Surgeon’s Office for several years. No other woman contract surgeon served longer than Maher, including the anesthetist Frances Edith Haines. In September, Dr. Esther Cumberland Kratz joined Maher at the Attending Surgeon’s Office. Dr. Kratz, a 1915 Stanford University Medical School graduate, was working in a hospital in Syracuse, New York, when the navy sent her husband to Washington, D.C. Kratz learned from her brother, a doctor on the War Trade Board in Washington, that the Army Attending Surgeon’s Office was in need of doctors. She applied for an army contract, was “sworn in immediately,” and was assigned as an assistant to the major in charge. According to Kratz, her superiors soon learned that she could get along well with “difficult patients, including the elderly, hysterical expectant mothers, injured children, sick babies, and soldiers whose nerves were shaken by war strain.”  Within a month, a third female contract surgeon, thirty-year-old Dr. Lucy Honora Baker of Rochester, New York, was assigned to the Attending Sur-

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Minnie Burdon (second row from the top, second from the left) graduated from the University of Oregon Medical School in 1908. An obstetrician, she practiced in Anacortes and Seattle, Washington, for many years. During World War I, Burdon served under contract to the U.S. Army at Fort Douglass, Utah. Courtesy of Anacortes Museum, Anacortes, Washington.

geon’s Office. Baker had graduated from the University of Michigan in 1912 and returned to upstate New York to practice. Prior to signing her army contract, Baker had provided prenatal care at a clinic for immigrant mothers and children, and her skills were useful in the care of military dependents.  Kratz remembered that when the flu epidemic hit, fourteen of the clinic’s

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sixteen doctors were infected, but all eventually returned to duty. She herself was hospitalized and emerged to take over another doctor’s outpatient duties, visiting the sick in a government vehicle driven by a medical orderly in an army uniform. After the armistice, work fell off, and she believed that she was no longer needed, so she rejoined her husband, who had in the interim been transferred to Akron, Ohio. Baker remained at the Attending Surgeon’s Office until her contract ended in April 1919, and Maher, who had been the first to arrive, remained at the dispensary for another two years. Women contract surgeons were also assigned to a second army-run medical dispensary in Washington, D.C., the War Emergency Dispensary, which treated female government employees. In May 1918, the young Dr. Anna Kleegman of New York City joined Washington, D.C., native Dr. Kate Karpeles (the first woman physician to receive a contract) at the dispensary. Kleegman was born in Kiev in 1893 and emigrated to the United States as a child. Somehow, her family managed to send her to Cornell University, and she graduated from the medical school there in 1916. She interned at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and remained affiliated with that hospital for the rest of her medical career. When she signed her army contract in May 1918 she was a new MD with a specialization in obstetrics and gynecology. Kleegman served under contract only through August 1918. A note in Emma Wheat Gilmore’s card file states that other staff members at the dispensary would not cooperate with Kleegman because she was a “Russian Jewess,” and she resigned from service. Interestingly, the husband of Kleegman’s colleague Kate Bogel Karpeles was from a well-respected Jewish family that had settled in Washington in the nineteenth century. Thus it may not have been simple anti-Semitism that drove Kleegman from the dispensary but a preview of the anti-immigration sentiment that swept through the United States after World War I. At least one other woman contract physician worked in the War Emergency Dispensary at the same time as Karpeles and Kleegman, Dr. Jean C. Mendenhall. Mendenhall was a married woman with more than ten years of practice behind her. A 1907 graduate of Duke University School of Medicine, she practiced in Hanover, New Hampshire, before the war, while her husband taught at Dartmouth Medical School. When the war began, Mendenhall’s husband was called to Washington, D.C., to conduct research in TNT poisoning. Mendenhall followed her husband to Washington and applied for a position as a contract surgeon at the Surgeon General’s Office. She was assigned to the War Emergency Dispensary, where the other two women were already working. Although in her memoir Mendenhall says that the three male physicians normally assigned to the dispensary had been sent overseas, she does not mention her two female colleagues. She says only that with the assistance of eight nurses, she examined, inoculated, diagnosed, and treated hundreds of women. Women who needed extra care, she stated, were kept overnight in a small ward attached to the dispensary. The most common complaints Men-

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denhall treated were heatstrokes, scarlet fever, and appendicitis. She resigned before the influenza epidemic hit Washington because of “delicate health”; her son was born a few months later. Dr. Agnes Scholl Ruddock’s contribution to army medicine during the influenza epidemic was centered in the laboratory. When Ruddock’s new husband, also a physician, received an army commission and was assigned overseas, Ruddock attended a special course for army officers at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City and was the only woman doctor in the class of fifty. The course reviewed all the diseases common in military life—typhoid, pneumonia, meningitis, and tropical diseases—and serology. When the course ended, Ruddock was assigned to the laboratory at Camp Merritt, New Jersey, which ran tests for army camps connected to the Port of New York. She worked for several weeks as a technician until her contract came through in August 1918. In her memoir, Ruddock remembered that laboratory staff tested the cooks and food handlers at all of the camps in the area in an attempt to trace outbreaks of typhoid and hookworm. Next, they tested an entire 1,100-man southern regiment. The laboratory also tested all fevers diagnosed as “cause unknown” for malaria. Sometimes this order was misinterpreted and doctors sent slides from all their fever cases, regardless of whether the cause was known or not. “During the influenza epidemic,” said Ruddock, “conditions were very serious and the lab was busy far into the night with bacteriology, serology, vaccine preparation and autopsies.” In October 1918 Ruddock received orders to report to the Port of Embarkation Laboratory in New York, the largest of its kind in the world. The attached hospital had space for four thousand patients and served as the receiving hospital for soldiers returning from overseas. The soldiers remained at the port from forty-eight to seventy-two hours before being transferred to other camps. An army colonel was in charge of the laboratory, and staff members included army officers, civilian technicians (many of them women), and enlisted men. Ruddock was in charge of a small “technical” laboratory attached to the laboratory, which tested up to two thousand individuals per day for diphtheria. The laboratory also conducted research on typhoid and intestinal parasites. On 1 January 1919, Ruddock responded to an emergency call when the hospital ship USS Northern Pacific, with two thousand wounded soldiers aboard, ran aground off Fire Island. Among those aboard was her army physician husband. After a lifeboat transferring ten patients from ship to shore capsized, Ruddock administered first aid to the wounded who were “overcome and in bad condition.” Ruddock later received a letter of commendation from the secretary of war for her actions. Like Ruddock’s, Dr. Gertrude Fisher McCann’s wartime service was based in the laboratory. McCann was the daughter of C. Irving Fisher, who was for more than forty years a faculty member of Columbia University Medical

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School and superintendent of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Gertrude Fisher married William S. McCann, whom she had met in 1916 while attending Cornell Medical School. McCann accompanied her husband, an army officer, across the country and to Panama before he was sent to Europe in the spring of 1918. She then applied to the army and was hired as a contract surgeon. Her professional credentials were impeccable; she had finished work as a fellow in pathology and bacteriology at the Rockefeller Institute and had worked as a pathologist for the New York City Board of Health. Dr. John B. Murphy of the Rockefeller Institute, then on active duty at the surgeon general’s office in Washington, recommended McCann for a position as a contract surgeon in the office’s laboratory division, a job McCann referred to in her memoir as “purely administrative.” She evaluated the credentials of individuals applying for jobs in army laboratories, camps, and hospitals; coordinated the acquisition of laboratory equipment for army hospitals; and read the papers submitted for publication by medical officers. McCann’s “purely administrative” job became extremely important as the army began fighting the influenza epidemic in mid-1918. She had to hire skilled laboratory technicians to supplement overtaxed laboratory staffs across the country as well as approve the extra equipment these laboratories needed to handle their increased task load. Pathologist Ruth Tunnicliff, a researcher with the McCormick Institute for Infectious Diseases, accepted an army contract in August 1918, the same month Ruddock did. Tunnicliff was a 1903 graduate of Rush Medical College in Chicago and had recently made significant progress developing a vaccine for measles. Although it is not certain just what her army assignment was, officials were very interested in halting the spread of measles among the troops, and in 1918 doctors at Camp Pike, Arkansas, inoculated two thousand soldiers against measles using the serum Tunnicliff had developed. The plan was to observe the group and see how many cases of measles developed among them as compared to a control group that had not received the inoculation. Unfortunately, more than half of those inoculated were suddenly transferred to Newport News, Virginia, leaving doctors unable to observe the results of their experiment. Tunnicliff may have been involved in this or a similar attempt that also did not work out. She was relieved from duty after only four months. Dr. Edna W. Brown of Gilmore City, Iowa, had a longer army contract than most because she had a specialty for which the army had a great need. The careful taking and studying of X-ray images was a detailed job many physicians believed women were especially suited for. The field, like anesthesiology and psychiatry, was fairly new, and “roenterologists” as X-ray specialists were then called, were not particularly well paid. Brown was assigned to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, for duty at U.S. War Prison Barracks No. 2. After the war, Brown was hired by Kingsport, Tennessee, officials to serve as the superintendent of the

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city hospital. Within two months, however, two male physicians purchased the Kingsport Community Hospital, and Brown moved to New Orleans to work as a roenterologist at Charity Hospital. The only woman contract surgeon assigned to a “purely administrative” task by the army was Dr. Loy McAfee, who worked at the surgeon general’s office in Washington. Although McAfee’s job kept her behind a desk, under normal circumstances it almost assuredly would have gone to a male physician. McAfee was a 1904 graduate of the Medical College of Indiana at Indianapolis and worked as a medical editor in New York City until 1918, when Ruth Tunnicliff graduated from Rush Medical she signed her contract. Her job College in 1903. A specialist in infectious disinvolved preparing the material to eases, Tunnicliff worked under contract to the be used in the U.S. Army Medical army at Camp Pike, Arkansas, during World Department’s history of the war. War I. Courtesy Rush University Medical CenHer contract was terminated on ter Archives. 30 June 1921, so she could accept a civil service position as assistant editor in chief of the Medical Department History. Although today the job of historian is held almost equally by men and women, in the first quarter of the twentieth century the historical profession was almost overwhelmingly male, like the medical profession. In McAfee’s case, the shortage of available male physicians with her specialized skills led to a position to which she otherwise could never have aspired.

Careers After the War

T

raditionally, military service boosted the careers of male physicians, helping them achieve positions of greater authority and responsibility. The military gave them supervisory experience and taught them to delegate authority, and it also gave them experience working within a large bureaucracy and handling large amounts of paperwork. When these physicians returned to their local communities after the war, they were respected for having served

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their country, and the commissions the military had awarded them were not forgotten on their return to the civilian world. Did women who served as army contract surgeons see any comparable career gains? The success and longevity of the postwar careers of women contract surgeons depended more on their age at the time of service, their marital status, and whether or not they had children than on their medical specialty. Married anesthetists were no more or less likely to give up their careers than were psychiatrists or general practitioners. The personal career-related choices former contract physicians made depended on a wide variety of nonquantifiable factors, including lifestyle choices and sheer chance, and thus form no identifiable pattern. Marriage histories are known for only twenty-four of the fifty-one female army contract surgeons: fifteen were married at some point in their lives, four of those marriages ended in divorce, and nine women remained single. Of the fifteen women who married, nine had one or more children. The first female contract surgeon, Dr. Kate Karpeles, continued to practice medicine in the Washington, D.C., area as her children grew up. On the surface, it does not appear that Karpeles’s military service had much of an impact on her later career. Forced to prove her abilities despite her gender early in her career, Karpeles spent much of her later career mentoring young women and demonstrating by example that it was possible to have both a career and a family. Karpeles served as the medical adviser to women at the University of Maryland and remained involved in the feminist American Women’s Medical Association, of which she was elected president in 1938. In 1936 she gave a lecture at the University of Maryland on how women could be both wives and mothers and work outside the home. Karpeles stressed the need for careful planning, saying that women should budget their time and energy and pay special attention to their health. She told her listeners to get eight hours of sleep a night, eat three balanced meals a day, and dismiss office worries from their minds after hours. Most women, said Karpeles, are too conscientious about their jobs. Men, she told the audience, are better at leaving the office behind than women. Karpeles also stressed the need for recreation, preferably physical, on weekends. She recommended that her listeners pick a hobby they could do with their family such as horseback riding or tennis. She and her family, she added, always went horseback riding every Sunday, and the whole family looked forward to their day in the country. Ironically, two surgeons whose contracts were terminated because of unsatisfactory performance went on to have very successful careers. Dr. Ollie Prescott Baird parlayed her military service into a prestigious civil service appointment after the war. At forty-seven Baird was at the midpoint of her career when she was appointed to the War Industries Board, directed by Bernard Baruch, as supervisor of health for the board’s 1,100 women employees.

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She opened a private practice in the Washington, D.C., area, was appointed to the staff of the National Homeopathic Hospital, and in 1934 married Christopher Bennett. The young doctor Anna Kleegman, whose contract was terminated because her colleagues would not cooperate with a “Russian Jewess,” did not immediately return home to New York City but instead taught science at Greensboro College for Women in North Carolina for one year. Back in New York she embarked on what was to become a fairly high-profile medical career. She married, had two daughters, established herself in private practice, and was a surgeon on staff at both the Hospital for Special Surgery and the New York Infirmary. A founding fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, she was also one of the earliest members of the American Society for Marriage Counselors and vice pesident of the New York Women’s Medical Association. Later in life, Kleegman (then under her married name of Daniels) served as director of the Planned Parenthood Association for the South Shore of Long Island and as president of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization. Toward the end of her career she wrote two popular self-help books, The Mature Woman and It’s Never Too Late to Love. Marriage and the arrival of children were not necessarily impediments to the medical careers of the younger contract surgeons. Dr. Dolores Pinero married a pharmacist several years after her war service and had two children. She continued to practice medicine, securing positions of increasing prestige and responsibility, serving as supervisor of a maternity hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and later as supervisor of a 1,200-bed psychiatric hospital. At the same time she held a position at the Central Office of the Department of Health in Puerto Rico and was appointed to organize the school hygiene work on the island. When her assignment with the attending surgeon in Washington, D.C., ended, Dr. Lucy Baker returned to Rochester, and accepted a staff position at Rochester General Hospital, becoming one of a few women physicians affiliated with the hospital. As a junior staff member, she initially worked in the outpatient department. By 1926 she was specializing in anesthesiology, and she remained on staff at the hospital through the 1930s, when she opened a private practice in obstetrics and gynecology in Rochester. Baker married a man by the name of Foster in 1929, when she was in her early forties, after which she appears to have used both names professionally, even after she was widowed after seven years of marriage. She continued to practice medicine until 1975, when she was eighty-seven years old, and later told a newspaper reporter that she estimated she had delivered more than one thousand babies during the course of her career. She added that during the early years of her practice she encountered prejudice from both patients and other doctors, but that she “just had to work a little harder” for acceptance. Baker, like Baird, Pinero, and Kleegman, seems to have satisfactorily balanced marriage and

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family with a medical career. Although it is impossible to state definitively that their military experience helped these women in their later careers, it definitely did not impair them, even when the army believed that their performance had been less than satisfactory. Several of the younger female army contract surgeons eventually opted out of medicine because of family-related demands. Both Loretta Maher and Esther Cumberland Kratz, who had worked at the Attending Surgeon’s Office in Washington, D.C., with Lucy Baker, left their medical careers in favor of family life. Maher was retained by the army under contract for several years, an indication that her superiors were extremely pleased with her performance. While on the job, Maher met army officer Jay L. Benedict, and the couple married in 1924. Benedict was a career army officer, retiring as a major general in 1942, and Maher apparently gave up her medical career to follow him through a series of military postings around the country. When he retired in 1942 the couple returned to Washington, where Loretta Maher Benedict (never referred to as Dr. Benedict) became involved in volunteer work for the Army Relief Society, the Red Cross, and the Republican National Committee. Dr. Esther Cumberland Kratz, who was valued by her supervisor at the Attending Surgeon’s Office because she “got along well with difficult patients,” moved with her husband to California, where they had three children. She left medicine with her children’s arrival and did not return to practice. Several women chose a middle ground between medicine and children, opting out of practice while their children were small but easing back into medicine later in life. Although they continued their medical practice, they deliberately chose less exalted careers than their early potential had indicated they might aspire to. After her contract expired in 1919, Dr. Gertrude Fisher McCann became a research fellow and instructor in pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and then was appointed an assistant instructor of pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School for six months in 1923. However, she left her position when she and her husband, Dr. William S. McCann, moved to Rochester, New York, so that he could accept a position as professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center. During this period the McCanns had two children, and Gertrude McCann did not return to the practice of medicine until 1927, when her two children were older. She then became the medical adviser to women at the University of Rochester, a position she held until 1942, when her desire to get involved in war work again led her to a job in industrial medicine at the Eastman Kodak Company. McCann published one article in a professional journal under her maiden name Fisher and four or five others under her married name. Both the McCann children, a boy and a girl, grew up to emulate their parents and become doctors, and the daughter followed her mother’s footsteps by marrying a doctor as well. Dr. Gertrude McCann died in 1956 at age sixty-seven. Dr. Jean Mendenhall gave up practicing medicine when her son was born

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and remained home until he went to preparatory school. She then began teaching a course in “Family Problems.” The talented bacteriologist Dr. Agnes Scholl Ruddock moved with her husband to Los Angeles, California, and had two children. She continued to work as a physician with the health department of the city schools. While such a position may have been “family friendly,” as we say today, it was a far cry from the specialized laboratory work that Ruddock was trained to do. Some of the women’s careers took paths that were unrelated and even contradictory to their army service. A little more than ten years after her army contract expired, anesthetist Dr. Myra Babcock of Detroit, Michigan, began to devote large amounts of her time to the operations and improvement of the Detroit Animal Shelter, which was funded by the Michigan Humane Society. In August 1931 she was appointed shelter operations manager and oversaw the renovation of the building. Within six months the shelter hosted a Christmas party for children and horses. Babcock told a newspaper reporter that the Humane Society’s educational goal was to “teach children during the formative period of their lives to be kind to and considerate of every living creature, including animals as well as human beings; to instill in every child a repugnance toward all forms of cruelty; develop a love for life in all its manifestations and to stress the application of the Golden Rule to animals as well as human beings.” Fellow anesthetist Mary Botsford of California continued her successful career after the war but rethought her wartime activities. By the time she was appointed clinical professor of anesthesiology at the University of California Medical School in 1931, Botsford had changed her mind about who should be responsible for dispensing anesthesia in the operating room. Although she had taught nurses anesthesia during World War I, she used her position as president of the Associated Anesthetists of the United States and Canada to advocate against nurses becoming anesthetists, and even suggested taking that opposition to the courts. Several women returned to their former homes and jobs after the war and carried on with their medical careers as if their military experience had not happened. Anesthetist Elizabeth Van Cortlandt Hocker, who was in her forties while with the army overseas, returned to Cincinnati after the war and served as a member of the Christ Hospital Staff for a number of years, specializing in anesthesia. She maintained a practice in partnership with her brother-in-law, also a physician in Cincinnati, until ill-health forced her to retire. Bacteriologist Ruth Tunnicliff of Chicago returned to her work developing a vaccine for measles at the McCormick Institute for Infectious Diseases after her short army contract ended. There is no evidence that Tunnicliff ’s military experience aided her career; at least one medical historian believes that Tunnicliff did not receive an appointment as a professor at a medical school because of gender discrimination. An article published in the Chicago

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Tribune indicates that as of 1935 Tunnicliff was still working on a vaccine for measles. She did publish several articles in scientific journals and obviously gained the respect of her peers, serving as president of the Chicago Society of Pathologists. In the years after World War I, a double-edged sword hampered the professional careers of women physicians and cut back their numbers. Women continued to have a hard time entering the medical profession, and once there they suffered from both gender discrimination and societal pressure to leave if they married and had children. The postwar careers of the army’s women contract surgeons reflect the difficult conditions women physicians faced as well as their limited range of options. Some like Benedict and Kratz opted to leave the medical profession when they married and had children because society expected them to and they believed trying to do otherwise would be too difficult. Others like Karpeles and Pinero pioneered the route of the modern-day career women and “had it all,” managing both a successful medical career and family. McCann and Ruddock chose a middle course and continued to practice medicine after their children were born, but at a deliberately lower level than they might otherwise have expected. Physicians such as the unmarried Tunnicliff, meanwhile, may have suffered arbitrarily curtailed careers not because they wanted to, but because the medical establishment withheld the most prestigious appointments from them because of their gender. Other unmarried physicians, such as Botsford, managed to have prestigious careers although, significantly, in medical niches where their gender was not a handicap. At the same time, fewer women were entering the profession because it was becoming increasingly hard to get started. The country wanted to return to “normalcy” as soon as possible after the war, and the actions of medical schools and hospitals toward women reflected this desire perfectly. Thirteen medical schools, including Columbia and Yale, had admitted women for the first time during the war, and many hospitals had accepted women interns because of the decline in the number of available male interns. Once the war was over, however, the hospitals that had reluctantly accepted women interns stopped accepting them at all. As of 1921, 40 out of the 482 hospitals approved for intern service accepted women. In 1925, American medical schools, acting in concert, imposed a percentage quota limiting the number of female students. As late as the mid-1930s, twelve states had no hospitals that offered internships to women, and 250 women medical school graduates each year competed for 185 available internships across the country. Meanwhile, the 4,844 male medical graduates could select from 6,154 available internships. Although the nation’s need for physicians during World War I had opened a few doors to women, the war didn’t last long enough for women to make permanent gains. By the time the United States entered World War II, only 105 out of the 712 American Medical Association–approved internship hospitals

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accepted applications from women. These restrictions limited the number of women entering the medical profession, with women physicians accounting for fewer than 4 percent of the doctors nationwide by 1940. When World War II started and women physicians again offered their services to the Army and Navy Medical Corps, the military’s initial response replicated its actions during World War I. The army reluctantly offered a small number of contracts to women physicians, but both branches of the service balked at offering them commissions. The following chapter examines how women physicians finally achieved the elusive right to a military commission, albeit on a “temporary” basis, and explores the parameters of their wartime service.

Chapter Three

FINDING A PLACE IN THE SUN Women Army Doctors in World War II

I believe in being very realistic about medicine for women. . . . The satisfaction and reward must come from within, not from without. Dr. Margaret D. Craighill, 12 January 1944, Bryn Mawr College

W

hile the period between World War I and World War II was short, many things changed for female physicians. The 1920s offered great promise for them, especially with the ratification of the woman’s suffrage amendment in 1920. By 1925 nearly 48 percent of women physicians belonged to the American Medical Association (AMA) as compared to the 8 percent of women physicians who had been members of the Medical Women’s National Association (MWNA) between 1916 and 1926. Although not enough hospitals were accepting female interns, many more internships were available, which extended to other institutional positions as well. Contrary to what had been expected in the medical field, the cause of women physicians was not advanced during the 1930s as the percentage of practicing women physicians declined to 4.4 percent of all physicians from 6 percent in 1910. In 1935 the MWNA voted to reincorporate as the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), an action that was completed in 1937. Even before the outbreak of World War II, AMWA campaigned to win commissions for women physicians in the medical reserves. In fact, MWNA passed a resolution protesting discrimination against female physicians at the annual meeting in 1932. In 1940 AMWA petitioned the AMA for support in changing the law about women and the medical reserves. When one male delegate of the AMA was asked why that organization held a different position toward women physicians than it did toward nurses who had held military rank since World War I, the answer was simply, “Nurses are well supervised.” Like World War I, however, the Second World War offered women unprecedented opportunities for work outside the home. Despite its horrors, the

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war beckoned with its enticements for service, adventure, and professional advancement. Yet even as thousands of young men rushed to volunteer in the armed forces, women across America were still dealing with society’s views regarding their physical fitness and ability to maintain the discipline those military organizations demanded. For women doctors, the War Department’s refusal to accept female physicians deepened a professional crisis that dated back to the Civil War. All along, women physicians had been optimistic to believe that full equality was possible—but still, wartime conditions offered an ideal setting for them to take their place beside their male colleagues. Women doctors were generally united in their opposition to the government’s refusal to award commissions in the United States Army and Navy to females. At issue was the fact that women physicians could not be admitted to the Medical Reserve Corps of either branch of service at a time when there was an advertised shortage of some one thousand to two thousand male physicians in the corps. By the end of 1942, there were roughly eight thousand women physicians in the United States with six thousand in active practice. When the qualifications for the army’s Medical Reserve Corps (as to age, education, and experience) were reviewed, only about three hundred women were actually eligible. At the same time, roughly six hundred to seven hundred more women interns were about to be graduated who might prove eligible—so in this small group could be found some of the “best equipped specialists” in the country. If there were concerns that integrating the Medical Reserve Corps might deprive male reservists of positions, it was clear that “women physicians could not possibly overrun the Medical Reserve Corps” as there were too few of them in number. In considering the navy’s Medical Reserve Corps at that time, membership was restricted by law to male citizens, a basic difference between the army and navy that had come to light in the early efforts to secure commissions. In the army there was apparently no ruling preventing women from being members of the medical corps, only that the person be a qualified physician and U.S. citizen. In the navy, however, there was the disqualifying word male in the 1925 ruling. Before women physicians were commissioned in April 1943, the army offered them positions as contract surgeons, but this never occurred in the navy. When it came to supporting the role of women doctors in wartime service, Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer, president of the AMWA, pointed out that “vital accomplishment and not sex should be the measuring rod.” After all, she reasoned, since women had to meet the same standards as male physicians in order to practice medicine, they should be considered equally qualified when it came to serving their country. At the same time, spokesmen for the AMA insisted that a woman’s place, if not in the home, was at least on the home front. They felt that women doctors could render their greatest service by replacing male practitioners who went on active duty. Barringer (who was also the sole female member of the AMA’s House of Delegates) was unimpressed

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with such reasoning. “The Army and Navy are the last strongholds held by men and administered by purely masculine planning,” she retorted. “It would upset this man-made scheme to have women enter into it.” Surgeon General James C. Magee of the army made his position clear when he pronounced, “Women should not belong.” Medical women continued to maintain, however, that since many of them were as well qualified as men, they should be given the privilege of making up their own minds about how and where they would serve. Furthermore, the army was sending some of its most skilled male obstetricians abroad while leaving at home some of the best women plastic surgeons. Barringer stated wryly that if there was one type of operation soldiers did not need, it was a Cesarean section. Not surprisingly, many of the most qualified women physicians in the country were disgruntled over this situation as attempts in World War I had also accomplished nothing in advancing their cause for wartime service—with the exception of the fifty-six women doctors who volunteered on contract. American women physicians also found it galling that they could not secure commissions when in Russia more than half of the army physicians at the front were females. Dr. Ruth E. Ewing, surgeon at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in New York City, elaborated that in the Russian Medical Corps the women “not only treat the wounded—they frequently have to go out on the battlefield and bring them in.” In view of the limitations on rank that existed, therefore, some medical women chose to go abroad, with a handful of women doctors sailing to England in 1941 under the auspices of the American Red Cross. “Our finest public-spirited physicians are not standing by,” one woman doctor observed, “and so instead of being in our country’s uniform they are in the British service.”

The Service of Pioneer Women Doctors in the 1940s

B

arbara Stimson was one of those spirited women who were determined to make a difference, and her older sister was just as determined to help her reach her goal. In the summer of 1941, Julia was delighted to accompany her sister Barbara on a shopping spree to buy some warm clothes for her much-anticipated trip abroad as a volunteer doctor in Great Britain. The sisters had both had the same dream about becoming doctors, but Julia (as described in the preceding chapter) had decided instead on a different course, in nursing, and served as director of the nursing service of the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. Still, she encouraged Barbara to follow her own dream some years later, and after Julia returned from overseas in 1919 to serve as dean of the Army School of Nursing and acting superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps, she supported her sister’s application to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons that same year. No one was prouder than she when Barbara finished with honors in 1923, went

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on to serve a two-year residency at Columbia in surgery, and was awarded a doctor of medical science degree in research in 1934. Barbara Stimson had tried to go to England before but failed when her application with a volunteer orthopedic group had been turned down. Fortunately, Dr. Esther Lovejoy offered to help, as she was active in compiling a registry of medical women in the United States who were qualified and willing to serve in the case of a national emergency. More than 2,500 names appeared, and of these approximately 500 expressed their willingness to accept service overseas—and Barbara was one of them. Great Britain had asked the United States for 1,000 male doctors to help care for the civilian population because so many of their medical men had already been dispatched in the war effort; but since the request came after the Selective Training and Service Act had been enacted in America in September 1940, only about 100 male doctors were available. The American Red Cross was recruiting several women doctors for the British Emergency Medical Services. Would Dr. Stimson be interested? Of course she was, and even though she was third in rank on the staff of the newly formed Fracture Service at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, she was willing to interrupt her duties as an orthopedic surgeon to take on a new challenge. Twelve women doctors went to England in 1941 to work in the Emergency Medical Services of the British Ministry of Health. Five of them subsequently returned to the United States, but seven American women doctors, brought over under the auspices of the American Red Cross in the late summer, fall, and winter of 1941, remained. Barbara Stimson convinced her friend Achsa Bean, a graduate of the University of Rochester and assistant physician in health services at Vassar College, to join her, and the two sailed at the end of August. Not long after they landed, Marion Loizeaux, Eleanor Peck, and Sarah (“Sally”) Bowditch joined them, with Mila Pierce and Josephine Stephens being the last to follow. All of these women were single when they volunteered (Bowditch had a brief marriage in 1939), which meant they had the mobility not generally available to married women. Judging by their ages, they were also experienced physicians—Stimson, Bean, Pierce, and Stephens were in their early forties, while the remaining women were in their thirties. Even as these women made their way through the intricacies of joining the Emergency Medical Services in England, however, the U.S. government continued to be unwilling to include women in its national defense plan at home. But with the attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941, the War Department found a new urgency in reappraising the role of women in the armed forces, but commissions still seemed to be a distant dream for women doctors. Yet they wanted to be in uniform—even if it could not be for their own country. As Stimson noted, “We were already three thousand miles nearer the actual fighting than we would have been had we returned home, and as the need for doctors in the British Armed Forces was very great, Dr. Bean and I de-

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cided to join the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), if they would have us.” Both physicians also believed that much could be learned from the British. “We felt, too, that when and if the time ever came when it would be necessary to organize the same kind of services in the United States, our country could benefit by the experience of the British and avoid a number of mistakes.” As of the first day of February 1942, they entered into the second phase of their transatlantic experience when they both transferred to the RAMC and were ordered to duty—Dr. Stimson as a major (since she was a specialist in orthopedics) and Dr. Bean as a lieutenant (although she was promoted to major about six weeks Achsa M. Bean was among the few American later).  At this point, the friends women to be given a commission in England’s were separated—Bean was sent to Royal Army Medical Corps during WWII. a military hospital in York, and She later applied for a commission in the U.S. Stimson to another one in Shenley Naval Reserve and was appointed assistant surgeon in 1943 and then attained the rank of outside of London. At the end of their first year in lieutenant commander. England, the American doctors faced an important decision: to stay on or leave. Bean returned home to care for her ailing mother but was later commissioned in the U.S. Naval Reserve (her service is discussed in chapter 4). Stimson chose to remain in England with the RAMC, although she was later offered a commission in the U.S. Army Medical Corps on several occasions. “Since I was doing what I had been trained to do and what I enjoyed,” she said, “I had no difficulty in refusing the offers.” In postwar years, however, she relished recounting the story about the first offer that came her way while she was treating fracture cases as an orthopedic surgeon. In April 1943 an army colonel announced that there was a position available as a gynecologist to the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). “I looked at him,” she recalled, “thinking for a minute that he was joking, but I realized that he was serious.” She continued her work abroad until the end of August 1945, and when she returned home, it was to her practice as an orthopedic surgeon. The War Department had growing concerns over the shortage of medical

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officers in theaters of war overseas by the beginning of 1943. It not only seemed prudent but essential to offer these American women working in England positions as contract surgeons with the Army of the United States (AUS) while the wheels squeaked forward slowly in getting the Sparkman-Johnson Bill approved for commissioning women physicians for the duration of the war plus six months. None of the women doctors, however, had to accept the inferior status and low pay that went along with the position of contract surgeon, if for no other reason than they had graduated from some of the best medical schools in America (table 4). With Stimson in the RAMC, the four other women decided to volunteer when the opportunity came their way, but Sally Bowditch, like Achsa Bean, opted to return to America, as she was reluctant to serve on contract. Marion Loizeaux was immediately “loaned” to the British Ministry of Health until 6 February 1943. She followed this with special training at the Medical Field Service School (American School Center) in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), and her duty assignment was special consultant to the chief surgeon on all matters pertaining to the medical care of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), ETO. On 19 September 1943 she was commissioned, and in November 1944 she was promoted from captain to major. When she was asked to comment about her work during World War II, Loizeaux remarked, “I believe that in the future women medical officers assigned to a Theater of War in a similar consultant capacity should be given an assignment covering in general terms: The welfare and medical care of all female military personnel assigned to that Theatre.” She was alluding to the fact that since prewar plans had failed to make provision for medical consultants despite their proven benefit during the First World War , there had been no position vacancies or job descriptions for them. As a result, there were no effective official channels of communication between the consultants in the Office of the Surgeon General and those in the various commands in the United States and the overseas theaters of operations. Loizeaux contended this was a huge mistake because “in every instance except the North African Theater of Operations, the surgeons had been made subordinate to other staff sections.” In 1946 she was one of ten women doctors named to Veterans Administration posts across the country, and for her outstanding service she was later awarded the Bronze Star. Like her colleague Loizeaux, Eleanor Peck was “lent-leased” as soon as she signed her contract. She served at the Ministry of Health Hospital for Sick Children in London from December 1942 to August 1943, and since she was trained as a pediatrician, this seemed an excellent match for her skills. The following year she was assigned as a contract surgeon to the Office of the Surgeon, Eighth Air Force. In this new assignment, she “advised on WAC problems and helped set up medical care for women in the Eighth Air Force . . .

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TABLE  Pioneer Women Doctors in Great Britain Name: Achsa Bean* Sarah “Sally” Bowditch Marion Loizeaux Eleanor Peck Mila Pierce Barbara Stimson** Josephine J. Stephens

Medical School: University of Rochester Medical School Johns Hopkins Cornell Columbia Rush Medical College (Chicago) Columbia University of Pittsburgh Medical School

*Commissioned USNR. **Never commissioned. Note: The others went on to become army medical officers.

visited all installations with WACs and carried out monthly physical inspections.” Even as Peck coped with a variety of administrative and routine tasks that her position demanded, friends and family were concerned that she did not have the recognition she deserved as she was still serving on contract as late as January 1944. One newspaper editor wrote, “Her brother-in-law wants to know why she is still a contract surgeon. He says she is a person who would not push herself. . . . He, of course, would feel less concern about her if he knew she was part of the Army and so entitled to certain of the benefits and protections.” Peck was finally commissioned 10 February 1944, and then only as a lieutenant. When asked about her feeling regarding the delay, she responded succinctly: “It was a bit dampening to one’s enthusiasm.” At the same time, she was outspoken about the fact that that there was no uniform policy as to how women doctors in the medical corps should be utilized: “[We] have fought for the right to be doctors and therefore to take care of both men and women. There has however been a strong force to assign us primarily for the care of women.” Peck concluded, “On the whole if one were to ask me whether I felt that I would have been more useful at home or in the Armed Forces, I should probably say at home. Despite this I would not have traded the experience that I have had. There has been the chance to show a variety of individuals that good medicine can be practiced in the Army and that it can be done even by women.”

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Mila Pierce was the only woman from this group who studied medicine in the Midwest. A pediatrician like Loizeaux, she was assigned to her specialty in December 1941 when she became part of the British Emergency Medical Services. She accepted an appointment as a contract surgeon with the U.S. Army in November 1942 and was commissioned one year later as a captain, having served as a lieutenant. “I accepted the appointment,” she explained, “but was allowed to continue with my hospital appointment, and even after receiving the commission, I was allowed to continue at the Hospital for Sick Children . . . until after D Day 1944.” In July 1944 Pierce was assigned as medical ward officer (cardiovascular service) to the 81st General Hospital in Wales, but her work was interrupted after she slipped on an icy ramp and fractured a femur in January 1945. She became a patient herself until the following July, after which she was unofficially assigned to the metallurgy project at the University of Chicago. Unlike Peck, however, she maintained that her “war experience was entirely satisfactory” as her “training as a pediatrician was well utilized at the British hospitals [which] were particularly short of trained pediatricians.” During her career, Mila Pierce served on the staffs of several major Chicago hospitals and worked at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center, where she founded and headed the pediatric hematology section. In 1983 the Illinois Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics named her “Pediatrician of the Year.” She continued her important work on leukemia for more than fifty years, “having witnessed a drastic turnaround in the mortality rate of childhood victims of the disease,” from an 80 percent death rate in 1973 to a 75 percent cure rate by 1983. Josephine M. Stephens was working at the Nottingham City Hospital in England when she too decided to sign on as a contract surgeon on 16 December 1942. She was commissioned a captain on 17 November 1943, and in December 1943 she was assigned to the general dispensary in the London area— an assignment that was considered a good match for a woman officer who liked general practice. One colleague recalled that she ran “the women’s sick call [for] not only WAC, but the Red Cross and civilian workers.” Stephens, however, identified a serious problem that other women officers encountered as more of them were commissioned—her responsibilities “exceeded the authority” that her rank conferred. Sally Bowditch adopted a “wait and see” attitude about the forthcoming commissioning of women medical officers, and she returned home and worked as assistant visiting physician in 1942–43 at Johns Hopkins. She was finally commissioned a captain in the Army Medical Corps November 1943 and was immediately appointed assistant military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in London. The job and location suited her well since she had grown to love England during the time she spent attached to the British Emergency Medical

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Services; and as she engaged in liaison work between the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington, she maintained that her assignment gave her “much freedom of action with a minimum of supervision.” When the army called her back to the United States in January 1944, she spent the first six weeks of her service as venereal disease control officer at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia. While this might have been viewed as a routine assignment, one of her colleagues thought otherwise: “Capt. Bowditch has gone to take charge of all V.D. at Ft. Ogelthorpe,” she said, “and maybe you think that didn’t take some doing to have a woman put in charge of V.D. where male patients were to be taken care.” Bowditch was promoted to major on 21 December 1944 and became a civilian medical officer at the Army Surgeon General’s Office in Washington from 1949 to 1953. In postwar years, Bowditch was awarded a master of public health degree by Harvard School of Public Health and became a diplomate of the American Board of Preventive Medicine in 1952. Later she became chief of the department of health data, division of preventive medicine, at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C. “This work,” she wrote to a colleague, “has nothing to do with statistics, believe it or not. I am concerned with turning out unclassified reports on disease incidence, medical facilities, etc., on a global-wide basis.” Like Loizeaux, she was awarded the Bronze Star for her contributions during her military service. When viewed as a whole, the experiences of these seven doctors abroad demonstrated that medical women did not want to be just volunteers, they wanted to have the opportunity afforded to male surgeons during wartime— which meant having the right to be a commissioned officer. At the same time, these women were forced to come to grips with the same issues women doctors had encountered in 1898 and again in World War I—and would continue to grapple with in World War II and later wars. These issues had to do with job satisfaction, description of duties, and the ability to practice one’s specialty or work in an area of special training provided by the army. Stimson, for example, repeatedly refused commissions in the Army Medical Corps rather than perform administrative duties or work in another capacity, such as gynecologist for the WACs. Pierce, an expert in pediatric hematology, expressed only the greatest satisfaction with her duties as she was assigned to her specialty in war-torn London even though she started out on contract. For Bowditch, job satisfaction was equated with having freedom of action with a minimum of supervision. Another crucial issue that concerned these women had to do with rank and the chain of command. In this regard, Loizeaux maintained that a job description was a priority; otherwise, women medical officers would be subject to the authority of other staff sections. Stephens agreed that unless issues with

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authority and rank were resolved, women medical officers would be at a distinct disadvantage in the army. Peck summarized their concerns best: a uniformity of policy was needed as to how medical women should be used. Bean had other considerations besides job satisfaction to consider, and she returned to the States to care for an elderly mother. Her dilemma, however, was the same one that many doctors (regardless of gender) faced—the support of dependent parents, children, or spouses. The question of dependency allowances for women on the same basis as for men in the service would have to be resolved as women doctors were commissioned in the AUS.

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t the outset, Marion Loizeaux had warned her colleagues abroad that they might be “taking a chance” to await commissions from the army or navy. But when the War Department was forced to relent on this issue, several of the women did become commissioned medical officers by 1943 after all. Elsewhere, however, other women doctors learned that their credentials and specialization did not count when they tried to volunteer early in the war. One woman was dismayed when her MD degree was ignored and an army camp classified her as a special technician. This meant she was not granted the living expenses allotted to doctors—which she had to pay out of her salary of $150 a month. Another highly respected anesthesiologist, Alice McNeal, who had received her MD from the University of Chicago, also suffered rejection. When the operating team at Chicago Presbyterian Hospital was called up for duty with U.S. Base Hospital No. 13, the medical chief naturally requested McNeal to mobilize along with the rest of the staff. Instead, she was left behind, and the army refused to commission her. Louise DeVore happened to be visiting her sister in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Before the day was over, she hurried to offer her services as an anesthetist in the army hospital where she later maintained, “It was a natural thing for me to help the men as they’d come mentally and physically wounded out of the noise, dirt, horrors, excitement and dangers of fighting.” But instead of being able to serve as a medical officer, she could only volunteer as a “United States civil service worker attached to military service.” After six weeks she replaced a ranking hospital staff officer and assumed the entire responsibility of his post. For her pay, she received the small sum that was paid to those in civil service, although her commanding officer tried unsuccessfully to get a commission for her. The experiences of women physicians during World War II were intertwined, first with the WAAC and then with the WAC. The attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941 contributed to the establishment of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, as few people had seen a need for it before this time. On 15 May 1942, however, the president signed the Rogers Bill, which became

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Public Law 554, establishing a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) to serve with the army. Just over a year later, the bill to establish a Women’s Army Corps (WAC) was passed by the Senate on 28 June and signed by the President on 1 July 1943. Between December 1942 and July 1944, sixteen women physicians stateside decided to became contract surgeons, according to official army records. Elizabeth Garber and Mary Moore were the first two women to sign on, and they were immediately assigned to duty at the lst WAAC Training Center, Des Moines, Iowa, in July 1942. The other women followed in September of that year, and the last to be appointed were named in April and July of 1944. The number sixteen, however, is inaccurate as it does not include the names of the four women who volunteered with the British Emergency Medical Services and went on to accept contracts. Most likely, the names of these doctors were overlooked because they were initially “loaned” out while abroad. Those women who accepted positions on contract, however, had low salaries, low status, and lack of both uniform and promotion. It was not until December 1942 that “they were authorized to wear uniforms similar to those worn by men with the bars of lst lieutenants on their shoulders . . . [and] they had no real authority nor were they eligible for any but the lowest positions on the different services.” In terms of assignments for the sixteen contract surgeons who volunteered, the majority wound up treating women soldiers. Eleven of them were immediately dispatched to Ft. Des Moines, Iowa, where the WAAC (later WAC) Training Center was located, and another was also sent to work with army women at the WAAC Dispensary in New York City. At first, the doctors were assigned as assistant ward officers in station hospitals, but as they became more familiar with army procedures, some moved up to ward officers while others went to the WAAC dispensaries or outpatient departments of the hospitals. “Their orientation and training though not following any formal pattern was carefully supervised by the Commanding Officer of the hospital, Colonel T. E. Harwood Jr.” It was also reported that “they were treated on an equal basis with the men and were assigned where their qualifications best suited them.” Although he was both sympathetic and helpful to the women doctors, Col. Thomas E. Harwood did not comment on the routine work that consumed much of their time. Lt. Mary Moore, who was in charge of one of the infirmaries at the training center that served some 2,500 women, noted that her day started with sick call at 7 a.m. where she treated minor complaints, such as colds, blisters, and sore feet. “We do have some interesting cases in the hospital,” she added, “and a considerable number of mental cases, odd as it may seem.” Although Moore did not elaborate on her last observation, the mental health of army women would become an important consideration for Margaret Craighill after her appointment to the medical corps as the

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first consultant for women’s health and welfare in the Office of the Surgeon General. Not all of the women contract surgeons went on to become commissioned officers in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. This was likely due to a number of reasons—they returned to a more lucrative private practice, had to care for dependents at home, grew tired of the service, and so on. At least one physician, however, fought for a commission but was unsuccessful. Dr. Nita Arnold objected to the fact that after her contract expired in the spring of 1943, she applied for a commission but did not hear until several months later that her request was denied. “The cancellation of my contract came as a shock to me since I had not been called to task by any of my superiors,” she explained. While she admitted that the commanding officer of the station hospital had asked for the cancellation of her contract (stating that she had been disloyal to him), her two immediate superiors stated that she was “doing well” in the service. Even a year later, Arnold claimed she was still suffering from the farreaching effects such a “refusal” had had on her life. “When I accepted the contract offered by the Surgeon General,” she explained, “I left a well established practice in Psychiatry, which I had built up during the nine years in Chicago. . . . So I accepted, and later found myself at a distinct disadvantage when those who did wait were accepted or rejected solely on the basis of the civilian experience.” She concluded: “Another difficulty I recently encountered is, that in applying for positions, I am asked to explain the cancellation of my contract and to name my Commanding Officer, which means that if he is asked, I may be judged by one person’s opinion of me and not at all on the nine years of accomplishment before I entered the Army.” Craighill was quick to reply that “such action must be final but does not reflect upon your personal aptitude or professional standing . . . It must be clear to you, as well as to your civilian associates, that an appointment as a contract surgeon does not necessarily mean that one would also be commissioned.” While Dr. Arnold’s plight illustrates the importance of commissions to women doctors, it highlights the problems that could occur with local commanding officers at the different facilities. Craighill admitted that such problems existed, problems that were often a sore point with women doctors: “Most of these commanding officers are regular Army medical men who have had no experience with women doctors or women personnel.”

Women Medical Officers with the WAAC/WAC

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oward the end of 1942, it had become clear that the commissioning of women medical officers was almost a certainty. The WAAC, in fact, had consented to commission a handful of women doctors recommended by the surgeon general—the only exception to its rule that all WAAC officers must

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attend Officer Candidate School. In 1943 five of the eleven contract surgeons posted at Des Moines, Iowa, became part of the WAAC for a very short time. Four of them were named second officers with the WAAC in March: Elizabeth Garber, Eleanor Gutman, Eleanor Hayden (D’Orbison), and Poe-Eng Yu. After the medical corps was opened to women the following month, all four transferred to it. Margaret Janeway, the fifth doctor attached to the WAAC, however, undoubtedly followed the most convoluted path of any of them before receiving her commission. Single and in her early forties when she volunteered in 1942, Janeway had received her medical degree from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (like Stimson and Peck) in 1927. She interned at Bellevue Hospital, New York City, engaged in general practice, and was attached to the gynecological clinic at St. Luke’s Hospital for ten years, although she had also done work in a cardiac clinic, a tuberculosis hospital, and at a nursing school. Shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed, she completed the AMA questionnaire sent to women doctors, checking “yes” to the boxes indicating she would be willing to serve with the armed forces, and preferably with the army. In September she received a telegram requesting she report for duty as a contract surgeon “at once.” As it turned out, this meant within twenty-four hours, but Janeway managed to get ten days “to wind up her practice.” She signed on as a contract surgeon 21 September 1942 and claimed her mother as a dependent. When preparations were being made to send the first WAAC unit overseas in December 1942, “it was thought advisable to send a woman physician with them.” As there were no female medical officers in the WAAC, Janeway’s contract was terminated on 16 December 1942, and the following day she was enrolled as an auxiliary (the equivalent of a buck private in the army), discharged the same day, and appointed as third officer WAAC. At the time of the first mass promotion of WAAC officers, she was promoted to the grade of second officer and as such sailed with the first WAAC contingent to North Africa on 13 January 1943. As part of her duties Janeway inspected the medical facilities of all WAAC installations in Africa and Italy, and in Algiers she learned firsthand what it was like to be in a battle zone, when the WAACs were quartered in an old French convent outside the city. “They carried all their water upstairs in their helmets, were bombed almost nightly, at first had to wear their clothes to bed to keep warm, then suffered from sunburn.” When Janeway heard that the army was finally commissioning women in June 1943, she applied immediately. She was discharged from the WAAC, received a commission in July (making her the second woman to be commissioned behind Margaret Craighill), and was promoted to major. Her many years of experience as a gynecologist held her in good stead as the army was having to dealing with the medical problems of women soldiers on a large scale. Toward the spring of 1945, she was a guest lecturer along with Craighill

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at the School for WAC Personnel Administration established at Purdue University at West Lafayette, Indiana. Janeway’s colleague, Dr. Poe-Eng Yu, also had a distinguished career with the army. Born and reared in China, she came to the United States after high school, trained as a nurse at the University of California, received a medical degree from the University of Michigan, and then completed a residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. After she became a contract surgeon 4 November 1942, she was sent to the lst WAC Training Center as a neuropsychiatrist, and in December 1943 she went overseas to the North African Theater of Operations, United States Army (NATOUSA). After she was transferred to the hospital at Camp Crowder, Missouri, in December 1944, she reported, “I like my new station very much, although I was sorry to leave Ft. Des Moines, being used to it.” She was commissioned a captain 10 October 1943, and by 1947 she was stationed at Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania, making her one of the very few women doctors to still be in service at that time.

Women Medical Officers

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fficial records kept by the Army Medical Department noted that seventy-six women doctors were commissioned in World War II. Information for only seventy-five women appears, however, on the official list Maj. Margaret Craighill kept as a consultant. About thirty other women physicians volunteered in public health, and between June 1943 and March 1945, Congress made several attempts to authorize the commissioning of women dentists. All attempts failed, most likely because the War Department felt that there was no shortage of dentists in the army. This first group of commissioned women medical officers tended to be from middle-class and well-to-do families throughout the United States. This is understandable considering the cost of a medical education—women generally needed the financial support of their parents, and they found it more difficult than men to put themselves through school. As one historian pointed out, “Medicine was the most expensive of the professions to enter . . . as well-to-do families were only rarely willing to finance a daughter’s medical training.” Statistics regarding marital status were available for sixty physicians (including Craighill) at the time of appointment. Forty-one women were single, twelve were married, five were divorced, and two were widowed. Three married and two divorced women claimed dependent children, and twelve indicated dependent parents. While seventeen women with dependents would not seem to be a lot, they constitute about twenty percent of the total number of commissioned women—a sizeable group to consider when dependency allowances were not automatically granted early in the war. The preferred age for women doctors in the army was between thirty-five

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and forty-five. Women accepted over the age of forty-five usually had specialized qualifications; for instance, a radiologist had to be a fellow of the American College of Radiologists. At the time of their appointments, these seventy-five doctors ranged in age from twenty-four to fifty-three. Seventeen women were in their twenties, twenty-seven in their thirties, twenty-nine in their forties, and two in their fifties. The youngest physician was Dr. Jean L. Dunham, twenty-four, and the two oldest were Dr. Mary J. Walters, fifty, and Dr. Catherine Gordon McGregor, fifty-three. Thus, the majority of women commissioned were in their thirties and forties. Since very few commissioned women doctors were over fifty years of age, practically all of them had attended school between the world wars, when it was difficult to enter medical school and even more difficult to find internships. While there were few medical schools that had not opened their doors to women by the 1920s, coeducational medical schools had a quota system that grudgingly rationed a few places in each class. Between the two world wars, quotas for women medical students averaged 5 percent, but the existence of these few women in most medical classes was used to demonstrate the “absence of sexual discrimination.” As for internships, 92 percent of the hospitals did not train women doctors. In 1914 Harper’s Weekly pointed out that even female graduates from such top medical colleges as Cornell Medical School had problems finding good internships. This meant that no matter how excellent a woman’s medical school record, she would still find it extremely difficult to secure a good internship. Women doctors who decided later to enter the Army Medical Corps in 1943 had to be some of the best-qualified doctors in the country given the obstacles they had overcome in terms of being admitted to medical school in the first place and then having to compete for the few internships that were available to them. Clara Raven, for example, encountered the kind of institutional discrimination that many women students were familiar with before World War II. She was the only female in her freshman class at Duke University Medical School. When she decided to transfer to Northwestern University Medical School as a sophomore, she entered under a quota system that allowed only four female students each year. In spite of financial difficulties, “she carried on research work in the Department of Bacteriology both at the school and at Cook County Hospital and graduated with a very respectable grade point average” in 1938. The first group of women doctors were commissioned from lst lieutenant (referred to here as lieutenant since there were no 2nd lieutenants among the women doctors) through major, depending on age and qualifications. Women straight from internships or with little experience were commissioned lieutenants while older and more experienced women might be awarded the rank of captain. When the latter did not happen, this was a cause for consternation with specialists who had practiced many years in their field, because pay

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was dependent on the commissioned rank. Dr. Margaret D. Craighill was the first medical woman commissioned 28 May 1943. Although she was the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania at the start of the war, she applied for a leave to join the war effort. She was given the rank of major and promptly assigned to the Office of the Surgeon General (SGO) as consultant for women’s health and welfare. In July 1943 she was also serving as liaison officer for the surgeon general to the Women’s Army Corps, and by November 1944 she had several clearly defined functions: She was “to Maj. (Dr.) Clara Raven, Army Medical Corps, develop policies and coordinate was one of the first five women doctors comunder the Chief of Operations Sermissioned in the U.S. Army during World vice all activities within the SurWar II, entering active duty service in July geon General’s Office relating to 1943. She was assigned to the 239th General the medical care and welfare of Hospital in France as a specialist in infectious women in or connected with the hepatitis and later served in Korea and Japan Army; to consult with all services during the Korean War. In 1961 Dr. Raven bein the Surgeon General’s Office on came the first female physician to be promoted such matters”; to serve as liaison in to the rank of colonel in the Army Medical all matters that concerned the SGO Corps. Courtesy Women in Military Service with the Women’s Army Corps for America Memorial Foundation Inc. and the Army Service Forces “relating to the health and welfare of women”; to act in the capacity of a chief of division “in so far as signing letters, attendance at staff conferences, receiving circulated documents and listing in directories is concerned.” She was also expected to make recommendations concerning the health of 160,000 WACs and 30,000 nurses in the army, which included visiting them at stations both in the United States and overseas. This required her to circulate “published standards for proper gynecological and psychiatric screening of applicants and for other medical problems.” Craighill was also expected to help recruit women doctors, although she stressed that she was not always consulted about the admission of women doctors. In all, the army women doctors represented forty-three medical schools in the United States and ten foreign schools. Craighill commented, however, on

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the “apparent frequent occurrences of women of foreign birth among those being commissioned.” Dr. Machteld Elisabeth Sano, for example, was a native of Antwerp, Belgium, who was well known for perfecting a new technique in skin grafting that hastened the healing process. Neuropsychiatrist Dr. Poe-Eng Yu and Dr. Theresa T. Woo (who would go on to serve in the Korean War) were both born in China. Further hints as to the women’s birthplaces might be found by determining where they studied for their medical degrees. For example, Alice Rost studied in Breslau, Germany, and Elizabeth Khayat in Toulouse, France. In considering the American medical schools the women attended, Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins produced the largest number of women medical graduates. Both were known for maintaining high standards and were the only two schools as early as 1895 to require work in the physiology laboratory. Considering the fact that thirteen women graduated from these two schools alone, it is clear that women army doctors held some of the best credentials in the country—and that was without considering women graduates from other outstanding medical schools. Eight women from WMCP composed the largest group commissioned in the medical corps (table 5). While they were drawn to the service for a variety of reasons, women doctors saw the army as an opportunity to gain more experience or engage in specialty areas—although, as it turned out, this did not prove to be a reality often enough for the entire group of medical officers. In Jane Leibfried’s case, however, the army gave her what she wanted, probably because she was one of the youngest medical officers at age twenty-nine and had just completed her internship in obstetrics and gynecology (1942–43) TABLE  Women Army Doctors from WMCP in World War II Name: Delores Amar Angie Connor Martha E. Howe Zdenka Alda Hurianek (Moore) Adele Kempker Jane Marshall Leibfried Anna Patton Margaret Elva Shirlock

Rank When Commissioned: Lieutenant Lieutenant Captain Captain Captain Lieutenant Lieutenant Captain

*Biographical materials provided by Drexel University School of Medicine (DUCM), Archives and Special Collections, formerly WMCP.

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at Johns Hopkins. Commissioned as a lieutenant in May 1944, she reported happily, “Since arriving at the Oakland Reg. Hospital, I’ve been able to do obs. and gyn. exclusively. In spite of long hours, nightwork etc., I’ve gained excellent experience and training.” As further evidence of such opportunities, Martha E. Howe was commissioned a captain in 1943, and her medical training included postgraduate work in Vienna. She also held various prewar hospital appointments in New York that capitalized on her skills in radiology, oncology, and surgery. Once in the army, she was assigned as a radiologist, and she served overseas twice—an opportunity that many other women doctors also desired but never achieved. Johns Hopkins was right behind WMCP with the highest number of graduates. By 1921 officials there had also decided to limit the size of the freshman class so that admission was even more competitive for females at the time. Still, five army women doctors could claim Hopkins as their alma mater, although a few other graduates would join the navy, making their numbers in the armed forces even higher (table 6). These women’s commissions were linked to age and years of medical practice. Craighill was made a major at age forty-five; Elizabeth Bryan, captain at age forty-six; Sally Bowditch, captain at age thirty-eight; Isabel Harrison, lieutenant at age thirty; and Marjorie Hayes, lieutenant at age twenty-seven. Four other medical schools were equally proud of their representation in the army. The University of Wisconsin was next behind Hopkins with four graduates, and another four women graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Three women graduated from the University of Michigan (where there would be no women graduates at all in 1956); three came from the medical school at the University of Texas; and another three hailed from the Long Island College of Medicine. Smaller numbers of women represented various medical schools around the country. Two women doctors each graduated from the University of Indiana, the University of Pennsylvania, Tufts Medical School (where in 1955 only

TABLE  Women Army Doctors from Johns Hopkins in World War II Name: Margaret Craighill Sarah “Sally” Bowditch Elizabeth Bryan Marjorie Hayes Isabel Harrison

Rank When Commissioned: Major Captain Captain Lieutenant Lieutenant

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1 percent of the graduates were female), Vanderbilt University, University of Chicago, and Middlesex Medical College. Other women came singly from medical schools that included Yale, Temple University, Rush Medical College, the University of Kansas, Northwestern University, and schools located as far west as California and Colorado, and as far south as Louisiana and South Carolina. A training program for women medical officers was begun on 1 October 1943 at Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta. The course lasted four weeks and was similar to the basic one given to men, except for training in combat work. It also consisted of lectures on military courtesy and customs of the service. Lectures and instruction provided information on regulations as to the wearing of the uniform and administrative procedures related to army regulations, company reports, military correspondence, medical reports, sanitation, and so forth. A modified course of physical training was also included. When the women were not attending lectures, they worked on the wards as assistant ward officers. At the completion of the course, the women remained in the medical department replacement pool until assigned to a permanent post. By June 1944, however, Craighill questioned whether or not separate training from men had been necessary “since both [groups] subsequently worked together on identical jobs.” She concluded that in the future “men and women be given the same training together in all courses which lead to similar assignments . . . [and] that they be trained separately only in those branches in which one or the other does not normally participate.” The women were authorized to wear the same uniform as the officers of the Women’s Army Corps, with two exceptions. They could wear the overseas cap or the hat that had been authorized for women medical officers, and they could use any sort of military design brown handbag, either with or without the strap. Caps had to be purchased by the women and could be ordered from “Knox the Hatter, Fifth Avenue, New York, for $7.50.” If the strap were used, it was to be suspended from the left shoulder. The shoulder strap had originally been worn on the right shoulder so that it crossed the body diagonally, leaving the handbag to rest on the left hip. This idea was abandoned in the WAAC days because the diagonal strap wrinkled the shirt and was awkward to put on and off. Also, “when worn by women of heavier build, it cut beneath the bust line to produce an undesirable profile.” Wearing the shoulder strap on the left, however, proved to be an even worse idea, as “most women did not have large enough shoulder muscles to prevent it from slipping off, so that many handbags were lost and police reported an epidemic of handbag-snatching.” Furthermore, “tailors reported that the women hunched the left shoulder to keep the strap on, and were rapidly becoming deformed.” The good news was that officers under the rank of major received an initial uniform allowance of $250. Just as women became eligible for commissions, a hotly debated topic arose

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as to the government’s treatment of women medical students. Although “up to 80 percent of the male medical students in some war years had their expenses entirely financed by the government through such plans as the Navy’s V-12 program, women received no such incentives.” Men, subject to selective service, were inducted and trained under an accelerated program because of an inadequate supply of physicians for military needs. The period of premedical preparation was shortened “from 3 or 4 academic years to a total of 15 months.” One concerned father who had a daughter finishing medical school objected to this kind of differential treatment: “It is the writer’s opinion that until the Army and Navy treat all medical students, including both men and women, on the same basis, you will have very few enlistments by the women doctors in the country.” He pointed out that “the government is paying male students in colleges of the United States $50.00 a month, tuition, uniforms and everything else, while the girls have to pay their own way, including tuition along with the men.” Proponents of the incentive plan for males, however, rationalized that there were distinct benefits for the women, as they would not have to cut short their premedical education and their postgraduate training. As a result, women would be the only ones who could maintain “the old standards of medical education” that had proved to be of great merit for society. The problem of differential treatment continued beyond graduation and internship as women continued to be discriminated against when it came to finding residencies. Nowhere was this more blatant than with surgical practice. In this regard, Craighill observed, “Except for certain fields, they have been, until the War, extremely hard for women to get, and some, such as surgical residences have been well nigh impossible. That is the reason there are so few women surgeons.” While it was true that few women made it in surgery, other specialists in medical practices were sometimes loath to accept commissions because of such reasons as job satisfaction or the loss of income from volunteering and so on. The Medical Department was also reluctant to attract women doctors with “important” jobs. When Dr. Priscilla While inquired about volunteering, the chief of medical personnel said, “In my opinion, an expert in diabetes, age 43, should or rather would contribute more to the civilian community than to military hospitals, even when the total experience in clinical medicine is considered.” Craighill explained the reasoning behind this: “The Army does not deal in diabetes and whereas she could replace a man in a general hospital, in a medical service, there are too few persons with her specialized medical skill to allow her to be sidetracked.” She also added her private opinion: “Personally, I should love to see her in the Army because I am anxious to get some of the better type women into the service.” For some women doctors who did volunteer, however, the service consti-

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tuted a special hardship. Up to September 1944, women medical officers did not receive allowances for dependents. Maj. Margaret Janeway, for instance, claimed a dependent mother for whom she received an allotment, and she cited “dependency” as the reason for relief from active duty as of 6 November 1945. Although she was satisfied with her various assignments overall, she reported that living conditions were “at times very poor” depending on the location. For Lt. Anna C. Besick (single and age forty-five at time of appointment), being in the service caused an “undue hardship on aged, ailing parents,” particularly as she was not receiving an allowance for them. She requested relief from active duty 28 June 1945, having spent six months in the Atlanta Ordnance Depot conducting civil service physical examinations and another six months as the dispensary medical officer at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia. In her final remarks, she asserted, “I feel that I wasted my time.” At one station, a female medical officer became so concerned about another doctor’s plight that she felt compelled to write to Craighill personally about the problem. “Lt. Luella Liebert, from Louisville, Ky . . . has a dependent mother,” she wrote, “and though she said little I know the dependency problem was a shock to her and she has been missing meals, perhaps to save some money, as she is sending practically her whole check home.” And from Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, Capt. Machteld E. Sano, a foreign-born officer, wrote Craighill, “Today I received news through the Red Cross of my father’s illness and the loss of their home in Belgium. A few days ago I sent you a letter asking, if possible, for overseas duty in the European theater. Now, of course, I am more than ever anxious to be sent there so that I may help them as much as possible. Has anything happened yet regarding payment of women doctors for their dependents?” For women doctors with children, the problem of balancing motherhood with a military career created additional strains. Capt. Zdenka Hurianek (Moore) acknowledged that even though her three-year-old son was not considered her dependent, she was still feeling a “hardship to family.” Capt. Ida R. Holzberg complained that she had disclosed having an eleven-year-old son before being commissioned and again after she was sent to Lawson General Hospital on assignment. “When my first check arrived,” she reported, “I thought it was sent in error as it made no provision for a dependent. After making enquiries I found that because I was a woman my child was not considered a dependent . . . Under these conditions, should my child become sick I apparently would be obliged to have him treated elsewhere and not at an Army hospital as he is not considered a dependent.” On top of this, she felt her specialty in obstetrics and gynecology was not utilized adequately during her nineteen months in the army as she spent fifteen months in the medical wards for women with malaria and then served as an instructor in surgery. Even as early as the 1940s, some freethinking women were concerned about the issue of dependent husbands. Capt. Gladys Osborne believed that this

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issue was related to “the whole problem of not giving dependency allowances to women on the same basis as to men—only this is in reverse.” She maintained that men in the service were not questioned as to whether their wives were actually dependent on them financially, and they were only penalized if the wife happened to be in the service. “On the other hand,” she pointed out, “women may have dependent husbands, by reason of mental or physical capacity, and are not given allowances for them in any eventuality, although legally they would be responsible for their husband’s debts.” She concluded, “This is, of course, grossly unfair.” Major Craighill was inclined to agree with the captain. She replied, “I must acknowledge that I am feeling discouraged over any progress that I can make in regard to establishing better conditions for the women doctors. There is such a deep rooted prejudice which arises in such unexpected places, it leaves me completely baffled sometimes—this happens to be one of those times.” One male medical officer became so disgruntled over the problems with women physicians and their dependents that he wrote to the United States Senate: The matter which I wish to call to your attention deals with the fact that women doctors admitted to the Army Medical Corps are discriminated against in that they are not allowed allowances for dependents. I have personal knowledge of two women doctors in the European Theater who were taken into the Medical Corps, were told there was no sex discrimination and would be paid according to men officers and, as they were supporting their mothers they rightfully claimed this dependency. Four months later they were told that the Comptroller of the Treasury had ruled against this and, therefore, they had to pay back some $400 or $500, which is a tremendous personal hardship to women who were supporting their mothers and had given up a valuable practice to serve their country. It seems to me that this is class discrimination in that it is sex discrimination in the present instance. WAC officers and nurse officers are allowed dependents. The discrimination is entirely against medical officers who happen to be women. When the Pay Readjustment Act of 1942 was amended on 7 September 1944, women medical officers scored a small victory when the following paragraph was added: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any female member of any of the services mentioned in the title of this Act, or the reserve components thereof, shall be entitled to all allowances, and benefits authorized in this Act on account of dependents but only in the case of a husband, a

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child or children, or a parent or parents in fact dependent upon her for their chief support.”

Duty Assignments and Conditions in the Army

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ven as women doctors struggled with issues related to pay, a bigger stumbling block had to be overcome—the fact that army assignments were not always given according to professional ability. In actuality, there was a strong tendency to assign them as women, rather than as doctors. Craighill could only advise in the assignment of women medical officers, she recommended that the women be assigned to duties in keeping with their professional qualifications regardless of their gender. Even in March 1944, almost a year after the Sparkman-Johnson Bill was authorized, Major Craighill stated, “The position of women doctors in the Medical Corps of the Army is not good.” She was referring, in part, to the problem of assignments, as many women were sent to WAC installations or to other army facilities where their medical skills were not always used to the best advantage or where their specialty training might be ignored. Another difficulty with assignments was related to the army’s decentralization of command. Assignments were “made on the service command level, that is out in the field, not in Washington,” Craighill said. Once an officer had her indoctrination and was given an initial assignment from the pool, therefore, she belonged to the service command in which she worked. There was “no overall planning or assignment according to individual training, but a person [was] used to fill the job at hand.” Consequently, a woman doctor could have training in some specialty for which there was no need at a particular hospital. This was the case for Lt. Bernice Joan Harte, age twenty-eight, who had special army training as a neuropsychiatrist. She admitted frankly, “After my transfer to Ft. Des Moines, my special training was of no use.”  There was also keen competition among the women for overseas duty assignments, and selection or lack of also contributed to overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the service. At first, only a limited number of women medical officers were required for overseas duty, and these were chosen from those volunteers known to be desirous of overseas service. Capt. Marjorie Hayes, age twenty-seven, a graduate of Johns Hopkins, noted, “On the whole, my Army experience has been satisfying and pleasant. My only complaint would be that it took me a year and a half to persuade anyone to send me overseas.” Delores B. Amar, however, did not get to go abroad, much to her disappointment. “I have been at Fort Knox seven months,” she said. “I sometimes feel that although the Army has taken women doctors into the Medical Corps, it has also assigned them to a Post and then has forgotten about them. . . . I have seen many doctors of my own age, and many nurses go over-

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seas and daily I hope that I will get my orders . . . I joined the Army primarily to go overseas.” Even though the women had their preferences, by June 1943 the Medical Corps did not think it “practicable” that women doctors be attached to WAAC units going overseas. One important consideration was the “insufficient number of potential women medical officers” available to cover existing WAAC medical needs in both the United States and abroad. The Army Medical Department held, “They should, therefore, be distributed where they can be used for the largest number or where conditions demand a specialized type of service.” There were always exceptions, however, for as early as July 1943 Margaret Janeway had the distinction of being the first to be assigned overseas with the WAC in the North African theater of operations. Early on, women medical officers learned that their situation never remained static with the army. With the shortage of medical officers and the heavy demands for replacements and reinforcements overseas in 1944, the Army was forced to send more women doctors to overseas theaters. In the winter of 1943–44, three other women medical officers were sent to join Janeway—all assigned to the care of the WACs. These medical officers, like many others, were sometimes moved from one theater of operations to another and from one country to another. One officer named ten different locations in a two-year period, and another listed nine. In spite of the officially stated policy to the contrary, the majority of women doctors were serving with the WAC as of March 1944 and found themselves following the WACs to the European theater in England, France, and later Germany. Four women were stationed with the 239th General Hospital in England and then in France in the fall and winter of 1944–45. Jessie Read, the only married woman in this group, was the first to arrive in October 1944. With qualifications in obstetrics and gynecology, she was immediately assigned as chief of general surgery. The three other medical officers arrived in January 1945: Clara Raven, pathologist, was appointed chief of laboratory service; Bronislava Resnick was assigned to her specialty in otolaryngology; and Elvira Seno, a recent medical graduate from Wisconsin who had no specialty, was assigned to general ward duty. Of her wartime work, Seno later wrote, “My service in the Army to date has been one of the most worthwhile experiences of my adult life.” Through 1944–45, several medical officers were sent to Germany on various assignments, including Genia Ida Sakin, a plastic surgeon, and Gladys Osborne, a graduate of Vanderbilt Medical School who studied the effects of wartime nutrition as it affected the “health of civil populations.” Belle Shedrovitch, a graduate from Scotland, conducted laboratory work, and Martha E. Howe, a graduate of the class of 1929 from WMCP with a specialty in radiology, went as a consultant. In 1960 she described her war work as an “interlude of Army service” with “very complicated assignments.”

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Other women doctors were sent to the Pacific area to treat the wounded. Angie Connor, one of the WMCP graduates, “served on a hospital ship off Corregidor, went into Manila . . . and started work under adverse circumstances.” Other medical officers were assigned as ward surgeons at the general hospitals in Okinawa, Honolulu, and Manila in the Philippines. Capt. Marjorie Hayes, who had received special army training in neuropsychiatry, landed first in Manila and then at the 118th General Hospital in Leyte. It was at Leyte, however, where Unit 118—composed of Johns Hopkins doctors and nurses who volunteered and served together for more than three years in World War II—was established. One of several university-affiliated hospital units to serve during wartime, Hopkins had been launched in World War I at the government’s request and called up again for the last time in World War II. What a pleasure it must have been for Hayes to serve side by side with these nurses and doctors, being a graduate of Hopkins herself. Later, she would report that she served as ward officer with “Johns Hopkins Unit, my civilian hospital.” A change in policy occurred in March 1945 when it was decided that women medical officers “would not be asked whether they wished to volunteer for service overseas.” Instead, applications made on an officer’s “own initiative” were to be forwarded to Army Medical Services, and if such applicants were suitable they would be posted overseas “in preference to those officers who had not volunteered.” In the end, at least twenty-five women doctors made it overseas, which constituted one-third of the commissioned women officers. Of the seventy-five women commissioned in the Medical Corps by June 1945, four were sent to Veterans Administration Facilities (VAF). Only Capt. Ida Holzberg, who worked “in pool” on gynecology and surgical wards at two different stations, had no complaints—but she was the only woman who requested a transfer to the VAF. The remaining three officers did not consider this a satisfactory assignment for best utilizing their skills. Capt. Catherine Gordon McGregor, assigned to the VAF in Minnesota, stated that there was “a deliberate effort to prevent me from using my medical skill and training.” She noted, “I have asked repeatedly for the course in Military Psychiatry but so far have been refused.” At another facility in North Carolina, Capt. Celia E. Ragus had become disgruntled enough to write, “I have been in the Army assigned to the Veterans Administration since 16 August 1944 and have been most unhappy about this assignment.” She reported that her orders read, “As there is no suitable vacancy for you in any Army installation, you have been assigned to the Veterans Administration.” The fourth officer, Capt. Grace Fern Thomas, was a neuropsychiatrist who was assigned to two VA hospitals in California. She asked to be transferred from the first facility for a number of reasons, but primarily because her specialty in insulin and electroshock therapy was ignored, and she was placed instead in charge of a small group of female patients. At the same time she remarked, “A male medical officer who under-ranked me was assigned to shock

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therapy in a charge capacity without any adequate previous experience.” At the second location, her specialty was again ignored, and she “was placed in charge of the Acute Male Service with a multitude of other routine duties to which about half of the electro-shock therapy work was finally added.” Furthermore, morale was generally poor, and two other women officers became ill and were confined to hospitals for care. She concluded: “I am presently on Sick Leave and also confined to Pasadena Regional Hospital for the treatment of acute physical exhaustion.” Other women doctors provided medical services for female dependents and civil service workers at the various dispensaries throughout the country. At the station hospital at Ft. Devens, Massachusetts, where the 4th WAC Training Center had been activated, one medical officer reported that she “took care of all female personnel and civilian dependents on this post. The duties . . . consisted of holding sick call for the WAC, attending prenatal and postpartum clinics, gynecology clinic, general medicine and pediatrics clinics. Only the obstetrical patients came in on regular days, and the rest of the patients were seen as they came.” At the Atlanta Ordnance Depot, the doctor assigned as dispensary officer reported she conducted civil service physical examinations as a big part of her assignment. Gladys Osborne did not object to the fact that her work increased constantly since she was assigned chief of outpatient services, and she liked “it all except the neurotic female dependants I have to see!” It cannot be emphasized enough that most women medical officers found themselves caring for WACs at different times. Dr. Eleanor Peck had been one of the first to admit that there was a strong tendency to assign female doctors primarily for the care of women—although this was not true for neuropsychiatrists who treated predominantly or exclusively male patients at some hospitals, or even for the pathologists who exercised a different array of skills (such as reviewing autopsy and surgical materials) that did not involve direct patient contact at some assignments. On the other hand, since medical officers served at multiple locations, almost all of them had the opportunity to treat both male and female patients (civilians included) for some part of their service. The case of Capt. Marjorie Hayes is a good example of this. She served as ward officer for the women’s ward at Tilton General Hospital in New Jersey and ward officer for enlisted men with the 118th General Hospital (Johns Hopkins unit), Leyte; and at Ft. Knox Station Hospital, she served on “Colored Wac sick call.” Those women with special training in obstetrics and gynecology, however, were particularly needed, as examining physicians were of the opposite sex until the army ceased to be exclusively male in composition. In addition, hospitals had not been set up originally to care for female patients. Major Craighill was of the opinion that efficient gynecological care “was largely nonexistent in Army hospitals.” Still, providing medical care for 160,000 WACs was

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an enormous task, just considering the time needed to give every woman the required entrance physical examination alone. Moreover, once accepted into the service, WACs encountered the medical department at the monthly physical inspection required for all army personnel. Physicians of both genders conducted these examinations, so it cannot be said that women spent more time engaged in this work or on the many routine and administrative tasks that did not necessarily expand a practitioner’s medical skills. One difference between the groups, however, was that the women doctors were all volunteers. In this sense, some of them may have experienced more personal disappointments, as their reason for joining had been to make a real difference to the war effort. At Schick General Hospital in Georgia, one female medical officer noted, “As a medical officer on this post, a large part of my working time has been consumed in monthly physical inspections.” Mary E. Mulloy, who was assigned at Lawson General Hospital in Georgia, reported that in addition to the monthly physicals, she was responsible for the WAC daily sick call and pregnancy discharges. She said tersely, “Over a year in a dispensary is medically unsatisfactory.” Zdenka Hurianek (Moore), who had received special training in neuropsychiatry in the army, conducted WAC physical examinations for six months. Based on the three months alone, she estimated an “average of 425 women per month . . . [and] many times there has been more work than could be capably and efficiently done by one person.” Women doctors who had been accustomed to tough competition in their civilian medical careers were not afraid to point out the problems they encountered with having to complete so many routine tasks. Much of the work “was paper work that easily could be done . . . by an intern with no special training.” One woman officer resigned herself to the fact that she was a “mere employee” who did “primarily administrative” assignments. However, Trinidad M. Ramos summed up the situation matter-of-factly: “Complaints those of all medical officers—most of work is paper work that could be done by administrative men with practically no actual medical work.” At various times women doctors also commented on being assigned unrelated medical duties, such as Officer of the Day (O.D.). At Wakeman General Hospital, Capt. Jean Henderson, thirty-eight, wanted to know if she had a “legitimate” concern over this issue. We have just been told that women doctors are to take O.D. duty with the WAC companies with the WAC officers—that is take our turn at it with them. This, as I understand it, is a purely disciplinary duty including supervision of bed check, behavior with “dates,” etc. and is not remotely medical. I have never rebelled at taking hospital O.D. but I do resent being made a WAC line officer. . . . The men doctors claim exemption on the ground that they are male and have to have a female escort when entering barracks.

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Poe-Eng Yu, who took O.D. duties and slept in the regular O.D. room where as a rule only men O.D.s slept, talked about a humorous incident that occurred at one of her stations: “The first night I was O.D. some line officer from the camp called up and said he wanted to speak to the medical officer of the day, so the phone was switched over to me, he asked me twice if I were the medical O.D. and I answered him twice that I was, then there was a silence of unbelief, I guess, for his next question was ‘Are you an M.D.?’ After I reassured him that I was, he told me his problem.” Frequent moves and poor housing conditions also affected the women doctors. When Margaret Janeway served as assistant in the Women’s Health & Welfare Unit, she felt that “one of the disadvantages we women physicians have in the Army is that we have to ‘sell’ ourselves each time we move and no matter how good our recommendations may be, we have to prove ourselves before we are accepted.” Anna M. Patton confided that when she was at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia, the camp did not have “adequate quarters for women officer personnel.” Another doctor only encountered poor conditions when she was “at WAC School where our table was next to the swill pails used by WAC privates and officers alike.” It was also a common practice to house women doctors in the nurses’ barracks. While the doctors did not object to this situation per se, problems associated with the arrangement sometimes arose. As one medical officer elaborated, “the female officers are too few to have separate quarters and they are sometimes housed with the nurses. If the Chief of Nurses had a personal liking for the female medical officer, things were just about satisfactory. If the contrary was true, living conditions were most unsatisfactory.” In contrast to such difficulties with housing, one officer stated that she was “given a 3-room house on the post for quarters” and another doctor reported receiving “Quarters’ allowance” at her current location. Another complaint that women medical officers voiced had to do with rank and promotions. Capt. Jean Henderson, age thirty-eight, a graduate of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, reported “the usual gripes of not being promoted and of not being used to best capacity.” Lt. Josephine Bremner, age thirty-four, a graduate of Ohio State University Medical School, maintained that with nine years of civilian experience as a psychiatrist she “should have been a Captain.” Capt. Elizabeth Bryan, age forty-six, a graduate of Johns Hopkins who was assigned later to army training for neuropsychiatric service, observed, “There is prejudice against women physicians in some quarters still. We did not as a rule get either the rank or responsibility our experience entitled us to.” She concluded: “I feel that being merely a Capt. has harmed me professionally and I feel that many other women in the Medical Corps have been tricked below their deserts [sic].” Capt. Josephine M. Stephens, age forty-one, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, also held that “insufficient rank was the cause of any difficulties or unpleasantness that I met in the Army. It was very evident

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that in this respect I was at a disadvantage with women officers in the WAC and ANC with whom I worked and lived.” “I’m sure,” she went on, “that our associations would have been more pleasant for all concerned had there been comparable rank in our respective services . . . It gave me no satisfaction although I appreciated the implied accomplishment that the post I left in London to move to Paris was filled by two officers, one of superior rank and at a time when work there had slackened.” Dr. Elizabeth Khayat, age thirty-five, started as a lieutenant and was later promoted to captain. She also believed that one’s accomplishments should have been taken into consideration. As the only female medical officer at one of her stations where she was a pathologist, she had to contend with “many difficulties” and “humiliations,” but she especially disliked being “called a WAC laboratory technician.” Other women doctors maintained that they had been treated on an equal basis with the men. “I have been treated everywhere primarily as a physician, secondarily as a woman,” one officer stated, “and have had assignments involving for the most part greater responsibility than that accorded my male colleagues with equivalent training.” Another officer maintained, “At no time have I been discriminated against professionally because of sex.” Clara Raven, assigned to her specialty in pathology, offered this observation: “Conditions for women physicians in the Army not much different from civilian life. Prejudices, etc. are more or less the same.” Occasionally women doctors had very specific reasons for being dissatisfied in the service. When Anna C. Besick was assigned to the dispensary at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, she wrote an unofficial letter to Craighill outlining her problems. “While I am still willing to serve my country,” she wrote, “[I] would prefer to be in a more healthful climate. I cannot seem to adjust myself to all these insects, especially ants and roaches, in the south and together with too many months of hot weather, have been very uncomfortable. Inasmuch as I am not getting younger,” she continued, “being 45 years old, am wondering if there may be a possibility of getting a discharge, as I feel that I can be of more use in civilian practice. If a discharge is out of the question at this time, would it be at all possible to be transferred?”

Utilizing Women Doctors in Specialty Areas

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he practice of utilizing women doctors for specialty areas in medicine continued to be very important in World War II. In addition to assigning doctors with experience in general medicine and obstetrics and gynecology, special assignments were made in five other areas: psychiatry/neuropsychiatry, anesthesia, pathology, radiology, and tropical medicine. The first four specialties had been recognized in World War I when the first fifty-six women contract surgeons were employed, but tropical medicine was not deemed important at that time given the location and concentration of ground forces in

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Europe. On the other hand, there had been a growing awareness of the impact of trauma and stress on the combat soldier, and psychiatry had taken a foothold in military medicine as the first “shell shock” cases arrived in base hospitals in World War I. It was not until after the United States entered the hostilities in 1941, however, that a separate branch for neuropsychiatry was established in the Surgeon General’s Office in February 1942. Another year would pass until a male officer was assigned to the neuropsychiatry division to develop a program of preventive psychiatry, and before the war ended, fourteen women neuropsychiatrists had seen duty in the army. While the change in numbers—from five in World War I to fourteen in World War II, or from about 8 percent to 18 percent—did not indicate a large increase in women specializing in psychiatry in the military, the need for such specialists foreshadowed the problems that would be seen in World War II veterans. These conditions would be variously labeled “traumatic war neurosis,” “combat exhaustion,” and “operational fatigue”; Vietnam veterans’ combat-related psychiatric symptoms would be called posttraumatic stress disorder. The army had no difficulty in finding assignments for those specializing in neuropsychiatry. Craighill admitted that “the psychiatrists have been, perhaps, the most fortunate in receiving assignments suited to their training; the anesthetists next, the others, except in a few individual instances, have not fared so well.” This was probably the case because, as had been true in the First World War, women doctors in these two specialties continued to be sought for wartime service. Women who were assigned to their specialty areas usually expressed the most satisfaction with their work. When Dr. Mary J. Walters, a fifty-year-old captain and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, inquired about a commission as early as the fall of 1943, Major Craighill replied, “The Army is particularly anxious to have trained psychiatrists such as you in the service. I hope you will decide to come in and can be freed from your present appointment.” She did volunteer, and after eighteen months of service, Walters reported, “I have been pleased to be assigned to psychiatry, my specialty. . . . My work has been almost exclusively with men patients. . . . Have had almost no embarrassing situations.” Walters’s comment underscores the fact that while the majority of women doctors served at WAC installations, they still treated both female and male patients at various times. Neuropsychiatrists, however, treated more male patients, which would probably be expected, as women were not in combat situations. As examples, Lt. Elizabeth Bremner, thirty-four, and Capt. Adele C. Kempker, forty, indicated they dealt predominately with men patients, as did forty-two-year-old Capt. Clyde Adams from Texas, who was assigned as ward officer for three different neuropsychiatric wards. She explained her last assignment consisted “mostly of consultation work with psychoneurotic .

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patients.” Alcinda D’Aguiar (lieutenant, age forty-five), Poe-Eng Yu (captain, thirty-five), and Hilda Koppel (lieutenant, thirty-three) reported they dealt “exclusively” with male patients at different facilities. D’Aguiar further elaborated that she worked “mostly in open wards with severe psychoneuroses, men coming from overseas. Gave psychotherapy and in most instances narcosynthesis” [helping the patient recall repressed memories and emotional traumas]. Her comments are also significant in relation to treatment issues, particularly therapy, because the military opened the doors for psychologists as therapists during World War II. This trend would become particularly important in the work of clinical psychologists as therapists in the VA hospitals in postwar years. The few doctors assigned in tropical medicine seemed to have fared reasonably well, according to their own accounts. Theresa T. Woo (lieutenant, thirty-three, promoted to captain) and Agnes Hoeger (captain, thirty-three) had both been sent to the Army Medical School for a two-month course in this specialty, and they reported satisfactory work assignments that matched their training. Hoeger stated, “I was particularly happy . . . here in Peru because it was based largely on my previous experience of 7 years as medical missionary in the Territory of New Guinea—that of dealing largely with tropical diseases.” Anna M. Patton (lieutenant, twenty-six), a graduate of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, served as a ward officer and instructor at five locations in the South; at the last facility, Camp Sibert, Alabama, she was the instructor of the Tropical Disease Section. All in all, she was satisfied with most of her duty assignments. There was a continued need for doctors in anesthesia in World War II just as there had been in the previous war. Among the officers who served in this specialty, most women found their assignments worthwhile, although they made observations about other troubling matters. Jean L. Dunham (lieutenant, twenty-six), who was sent to Bellevue Hospital for army training in anesthesiology, had no complaints because at all four sites where she was assigned, she worked only in her specialty. While Gwendolyn E. Taylor (lieutenant, thirty-five) “derived a great deal of satisfaction” from her work overall, she resented being “treated as a little less than the male medical officers.” She explained: “There is a tendency to give to us the work nobody else wants and a failure to give due recognition to our work. In this respect my experience in the Army has been disappointing.” Audrey Bill (lieutenant, twenty-seven) was also satisfied when she served in her specialty at some locations, but at other places she felt she experienced difficulties that “were peculiar to the Army.” Like Taylor, she was given tasks that nobody else wanted, such as having to set up a central supply for the hospital and keep track of the “operating room property.” She felt such work had “considerable nuisance value at times.” There were few women doctors in pathology and radiology or X-ray work in the Medical Corps, but this situation was related to gender issues and role

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expectations that existed in the civilian world prior to the war. Women demonstrated a higher interest in obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics, and later psychiatry—areas that were equated with female interests. Although such notions had begun to change by the end of the nineteenth century, specialization for women doctors in these areas “long remained a matter of unofficial concentration, because most of the national specialty societies refused to admit women as members until well after the creation of the specialty boards during the 1930s.” The assignment of female doctors to pathology and radiology in the army, however, was evidence of the growing range of specialty choices for women. Army pathologist Elizabeth Khayat summarized the general state of medicine in both the military and civilian world during World War II this way: “Female officers, in general, and owing to the prevailing prejudice in the medical profession have not been fully utilized in their particular field.” The few army pathologists were older women with many years’ experience, and they enjoyed the challenges associated with pathology, which encompassed a wide array of tasks related to training, laboratory work, and research and statistics. Joyce Morris (captain, thirty-nine) served at the Army Institute of Pathology, where she reviewed “autopsy and surgical material from all Army hospitals.” As chief of laboratory services, Clara Raven (captain, thirty-eight) supervised “two junior sanitary corps officers and 20 enlisted laboratory technicians,” although most of her work was related to “pathology (surgical and morbid).” Machteld E. Sano (captain, forty) reported that she carried out “postmortems on military personnel . . . whose deaths were violent or where there was suspicion of foul play.” Proud to be a chief pathologist, she still maintained that the army could have made better use of her “qualifications in research in the field of surgery and medicine. Especially in war surgery.” She pointed out, “My past work has been widely made use of by the English Army and Navy and by some American surgeons . . . [with] nerve grafting and lesions of the spinal cord.” Army officials found it disconcerting, however, when one of the youngest pathologists, Cornelia Wyckoff (lieutenant, twenty-eight), asked for reassignment to training in X-ray. Her request was denied, and Maj. Margaret Janeway (then medical corps assistant, Women’s Health and Welfare Unit) explained to her, “The Classification Division went into an uproar when I told them what you were doing, said they were tearing their hair for well trained pathologists and they certainly would not let you take a course in X-ray. What they propose to do is to transfer you to a hospital where a good pathologist is needed.” Like the pathologists, women serving as radiologists in the Medical Corps tended to be older and more experienced. Also, in order to qualify for such a position, the doctor had to be a fellow of the American College of Radiologists. Melson Barfield Carter (major, forty-eight) was the third woman to be commissioned behind Craighill and Janeway. A graduate of Tulane University,

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she served at the Dante Annex of the Letterman General Hospital in charge of the X-ray department. Dr. Martha E. Howe (captain, forty-one), however, was not restricted to being a radiologist. After serving for more than a year as chief of therapy in the radiology section at one of the U.S. general hospitals, she was sent overseas to Germany and assigned to surgical service. Although it is not clear why she was moved from radiology, in civilian life she was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons in addition to being certified by the American Board of Radiology in Radiation Therapy.

Conclusion

T

he original ranks for these seventy-five women doctors at the time of their commissions were: three majors, thirty-two captains, and forty first lieutenants. Thirteen received promotions: two advanced from the rank of captain to major, and eleven first lieutenants were promoted to captain. “More than half of the women had more than 20 months’ service, and these women were the first to hold full commissioned rank in the Army of the United States, antedating not only the nurses, dietitians, and physical therapists (by more than a year), but the officers in the Women’s Army Corps, who attained that status a few months later (1 July 1943).” Since the women had also entered the war so late, not only were there too few of them, but also there was too little time to influence the Medical Department’s attitude toward female doctors in war. Overall, a stint in the army did not advance the careers of the majority of women on their return to civilian life, although it could have enhanced some of the medical skills the doctors already possessed. Illustrations of this can be seen in three specific instances: Alcinda D’Aguiar, who had been a psychiatrist before the war, was able to gain the kind of experience she would never have had in civilian practice—treating returning soldiers from overseas with severe neuroses. In postwar years she used these skills to become a prominent psychotherapist in Boston. Clara Raven conducted extensive research studies for the army as a pathologist; in postwar years she continued to devote her life to other research interests, but her greatest challenge was investigating sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Lastly, Jane Marshall Leibfried, who had volunteered straight out of her internship to treat women dependents and civilians in the army, used her experiences to launch her teaching career as associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at WMCP. Women doctors were also able to expand their skills into different areas because of training they received in army schools and hospitals for certain specialties, especially in anesthesiology, psychiatry, and tropical medicine. Jean Dunham, for example, had been among the first to train in anesthesiology at Bellevue Hospital before being sent to England, and Katherine Jackson was

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assigned to Walter Reed Hospital for further training in anesthesiology as well. At Mason General Hospital, Margaret Shirlock and Theresa McNeal received training in psychiatry. Miriam Mills learned that the army could also provide doctors with experiences they never dreamed of in civilian life. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, she entered the service directly from an internship at age twenty-five speaking French and German. In the beginning of August 1945 she was placed with a team for the “Study of Fatigue Influencing the Effectiveness of WAC Personnel.” Her duties involved “traveling to more than 30 WAC installations, interviewing the Medical and Company Officers and 5000 enlisted women.” She also liked to boast that she was an expert shot, as her hobby was shooting with rifles or pistols. Some women doctors chose to stay connected with the army after the war. While it was impossible for them to have a permanent career in the army in the 1940s, a few of them accepted postwar assignments with the Veterans Administration for varying periods. In 1945 Margaret Craighill was the first to be named, and she wrote to one of the women doctors, “At present I am starting on a two months’ inspection trip of hospitals for the Veterans Administration to give some suggestions on the care of women patients. It is not a very exciting job but one which I feel I should do.” In 1946 nine other women doctors were named to VA posts across the country, with two graduates from WMCP, Jane M. Leibfried and Angie Connor, among them. Their mission at the time was “to see that medical care for women veterans in VA hospitals and homes over the country [was] kept at the highest possible standard at all times.”  The army also influenced the careers of some women doctors. Margaret Craighill’s interest in psychiatry, for instance, was sparked by her wartime service. Trained in gynecology and obstetrics, she entered the Menninger School in Topeka, Kansas, for training in psychiatry in September 1946. In 1951 she was on the staff of the Menninger Clinic, and she served as chief of the psychosomatic section at the Winter VA Hospital from 1948 to 1951. Continuing her pursuit of psychiatry, she graduated from the New York Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1952 and entered private practice in medicine and psychoanalysis from 1951 through July 1960 in New Haven, Connecticut. She continued to feel connected with women-and-army issues, however, judging by the title of a paper she delivered at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting: “History of Psychiatric Aspects of Women Serving in the Army.” Sally Bowditch, one of the women doctors who went to England under the Red Cross, was also influenced by her assignment in the Venereal Disease Control Office at Ft. Oglethorpe, Georgia, during the war. She returned to school and was awarded a master of public health degree by Harvard School of Public Health in 1948, and in the 1950s she became assistant director of the division of venereal diseases for the Massachusetts State Department of Health.

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While being in the Army Medical Corps was not necessarily a defining moment in the lives of these female medical officers, it was an experience they would not forget. All of these women were volunteers who hoped to make a difference in the war effort, but not all of them had the kind of experiences they hoped for. Others found the medical work less challenging than they bargained for, and quite a few of them longed to return to their civilian practices, where military protocol did not dominate their days. Still, at war’s end, all of them could return home with pride—not just because they had been pioneers in a man’s army, but also because none of them would be denied the right to choose their own destiny. And in spite of any personal or professional disappointments encountered in the service, most of these doctors would have agreed with the statement made by one of them: “I do not regret having had the opportunity to serve my country.”

Chapter Four

JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD Women Navy Doctors in World War II

Women doctors will be accepted in the Navy Medical Corps with the same status as male doctors. —New York Times, 11 August 1943

W

omen served unofficially or in connection with the navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but not until the twentieth century did they play a significant role. The early story of women in the navy includes their service in the Navy Nurse Corps, established in 1908, and the yeomen (F) program in 1917. The Naval Appropriations Act of 1916 had conspicuously omitted mention of gender as a condition for service, leading to the enlistment of women beginning in mid-March 1917. Yeomen (F), or “Yeomanettes” as they were popularly known, served mostly in clerical positions to free men to serve at sea. Some of these women, however, were translators, draftsmen, fingerprint experts, and even camouflage designers. While the women’s jobs appeared routine, they still faced some risks. As the virulent influenza epidemic of 1918–19 raged, one woman recollected that the navy dispensed a jigger of whiskey each morning to ward off the deadly virus. At war’s end, fifty-seven yeomen and two marine reservists (F) had died from influenza or its complications, and the remaining women were released from active duty by the end of July 1919 when their services were no longer needed. Yeomen (F) were continued on inactive reserve status until the end of their four-year enlistments, at which time all women except navy nurses disappeared from the navy until 1942. With the outbreak of World War II, uniformed women clearly became a wartime necessity again, and the U.S. Navy, which had set the World War I precedent of employing more than eleven thousand women as yeomen (F), once again turned to the women of the country. But new legislation was essential to accept a large number of enlisted women, as the naval reserve legislation of 1925 specifically limited service to men. Many individuals in and out of the navy, however, questioned the prospect of having women in service,

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as they believed it “would tend to break up American homes and would be a step backward in the progress of civilization.” Nevertheless, on 30 July 1942, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law an authorization establishing a Women’s Reserve in the U.S. Navy whereby women would serve in and not with the naval service—unlike the WAAC, an auxiliary organization serving “with” the army, not in it. Thus, after a twenty-three-year absence, women returned to general navy service. The WAVES were established in August 1942. An acronym for “Women Accepted in Volunteer Emergency Service,” the name suggested that women would only be around during the wartime “emergency.” At the start, the WAVES were an official part of the navy, and its women held the same rank and ratings as male personnel, received the same pay, and were subject to military discipline. WAVES were restricted to duty in the continental United States but late in the war they were authorized to serve in certain overseas U.S. possessions, although that never materialized. Hawaii, not one of the fifty states at the time, was the only “overseas” post staffed with WAVES on permanent assignment. Before the Sparkman Johnson Act of 1943 made it legal for women physicians to be attached to the navy medical corps, they were admitted to the naval reserve as officers of the women’s reserve; and while awaiting assignment to the medical corps, their rank was restricted to junior grade lieutenant (jg), a rank below lieutenant and above ensign. While the term WAVES was used to refer to members in the women’s reserve, it was not interchangeable when it came to the officer class. For example, female enlisted sailors in World War II were WAVES but physicians were not. Female physicians, like other women, did not have a permanent place in the regular and reserve navy, army, marine corps, and air force until the hard-won legislation of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948. Because of early rank limitations, women doctors had to consider the price they were willing to pay for leaving their current positions for the navy. Hulda E. Thelander, for example, expected to “sign up” after war was declared, but she recalled: “This idea was not met with any great enthusiasm among my friends.” In fact, she was discouraged from volunteering; the recruiting officer for the navy (a highly respected male physician and friend) remarked “that when women doctors got the same rank as men with equal experience” he would let her join, “but not until then.” When Lucy D. Ozarin declared her intention to enter the war effort, the superintendent of the state hospital in New York where she was employed as a psychiatrist refused permission because he considered her job essential. Ozarin recalled, “I said, thank you and I resigned. I was going into the Navy.” Women physicians wore the same chic uniform designed expressly for the WAVES. The famous fashion designer Mainbocher created the uniforms for the reservists—an attractive navy blue (white for summer) with a semi-

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fitted jacket, six-gored skirt, brass buttons, and light blue braid. The officer’s hat was similar to that worn by the eighteenth-century naval hero John Paul Jones, and the enlisted hat had a snap-brim that was turned up in the back and was later replaced by a garrison cap. Besides the difference in hats, a sure way to recognize a woman doctor was by the insignia on her sleeves—a gold oak leaf instead of an anchor. Two navy doctors could never forget their eagerness to wear a uniform during the war. Marcelle Thomasine Bernard recalled that she went to Saks 5th Avenue and opened a charge account even though she had no money as she had just completed an unpaid internship. She left the store with two uniforms because “Saks figured if she couldn’t pay for the uniforms the Navy would.” Hulda Thelander confided, “It was a strange feeling to don a uniform and walk down the streets of your home town and be saluted. . . . I rather liked my uniform—it was so easy to get ‘dressed-up’ and be properly dressed for all occasions. I thought civilians looked so tacky in all their bizarre clothes and when I was discharged and had to get back into civilian clothes again, I had quite a time finding anything I thought fit to wear.” The requirements for women physicians in the navy were identical to those established for male candidates, except women physicians could “not be married to an officer or enlisted man in the Navy.” As had been true in the Civil War with women doctors, however, a few chose to marry physicians—and sometimes they were military surgeons as well. Mary Rehm, an obstetrician at Palo Alto, California, was the wife of Lt. Robert Rehm, an army flight surgeon. Two other women also married army medical officers. Ellen W. Feder, a graduate of George Washington University Medical School in 1940, married her husband during her internship, and Cornelia Jane Gaskill was wed to Lt. William Sternberg in September 1942. Dr. Laura E. Weber, the widow of a navy doctor, went on active duty at the Brooklyn Naval Hospital in 1944, carrying on in the footsteps of her late husband, Lt. Jacques C. Saphier, a medical officer who lost his life on Guadalcanal and was awarded the Silver Star Medal posthumously for conspicuous gallantry in action. Women physicians in the navy medical corps could “not have children under 18 years of age.” While this restriction curtailed the enlistment of many women doctors, it did not affect an occasional older and more mature woman physician. Mildred M. Healy, who was married shortly after World War I, had a twenty-one-year-old daughter in college. After being commissioned a lieutenant, Healy was placed in charge of radiology at one of the large naval dispensaries in southern California. This assignment was in her specialization, as she had been a resident physician in radiology at the Los Angeles General Hospital. In addition to being a mother and highly respected professional, she was married to Steven Healy, the noted newspaperman and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for news reporting.

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Grade and rank were determined by the woman candidate’s professional qualifications, academic seniority, and age. The professional requirements for appointment in the naval reserve medical corps for women included: certificate of graduation from a class “A” medical school (classes were determined by the American Medical Association); membership in a state or local medical society, except for appointments as lieutenant (jg); certificate of license to practice medicine; proof of type and duration of internship; if applicable, proof of hospital service or special educational or professional advantages other than internship; evidence of qualification in specialty or a statement of time spent in general practice (minimum one year). An exception was made for women who applied for commissions as general medical officers immediately on completion of medical school, when internship, license, and membership stipulations could be waived. Applicants for specialist commissions needed at least three years’ recent practical experience in a particular field. The age requirement for general medical officers was twenty-one to thirty-five; for specialist medical officers, twenty-seven to fifty. Following appointment, a training period was in order. Women physicians received indoctrination into navy life during the basic training course at the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, and they expected to be used in whatever capacity they were needed. At the end of the training period they received orders for their duties, which were usually assignments to some medical installation for active practice. Sometimes the women might be chosen for further instruction in some specialty such as X-ray, anesthesia, pathology, or other areas in which the woman either had some experience or desired some training. And like the army, “Neuropsychiatry, anesthesia and clinical pathology” were fields in which there was the greatest need. Medical duties were conducted in a variety of settings including the procurement office, where preliminary physical examinations were done, and the training schools, where new recruits were housed. At the close of 1943, there were roughly forty-two navy hospitals scattered around the United States where women physicians were assigned to treat navy personnel and their dependents as well as provide emergency care for civilian employees of these facilities. In addition, women doctors were needed at the naval and naval yard dispensaries (located in the district headquarters such as Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, and so on.). As a result, women navy doctors were really providing “industrial medicine for the entire personnel, civilian and service” and with the ever-increasing number of women employees in the yards, this meant a similar need for physicians of the same gender. Furthermore, women physicians could be assigned to the marines because the navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery was responsible for maintaining the health of the navy and the U.S. Marine Corps. In some cases, women doctors were even sent to naval air stations.

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Characteristics and Background of Women Navy Doctors

A

s was the case for female army physicians, navy women tended to be in their thirties and forties, and they came from white middle-class families. Most women graduated from medical school between the world wars. Two women, however, graduated much earlier: Dr. Frances Beatrice Richman graduated from the New York Medical College in 1915, and Dr. Edith Michael Buyer graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1918. Again, as had been true with the army, the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) produced the most graduates, seven in all (table 7). The University of Michigan turned out four women, and the University of Minnesota, New York Medical College, and Johns Hopkins each claimed three graduates. Other women came in twos or singly from various medical schools throughout the country, and one woman came from Canada.

Answering the First Call

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mong the first physicians to enter the medical corps through the women’s reserve in 1942 were Dr. Cornelia Jane Gaskill and Dr. Achsa Bean— both as lieutenants (jg). The two women had attended medical schools in New York state and specialized in gynecology and obstetrics before being commissioned. Bean, whose service in England with the Royal Army Medical Corps was discussed briefly in the preceding chapter, deserves special mention as her career demonstrates the lengths a woman physician would go to in order to volunteer as a military surgeon abroad and in the United States. Born on 3 June 1900 in Detroit, Maine, her name Achsa was taken from the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament. Early on she maintained that her philosophy of life was “subject to frequent changes as she learns more about it.” In order to save money for college, she taught high school, ran a town library, and for seven summers she was head counselor in private girls’ camps in New Hampshire. She received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Maine (1922, 1925) and was dean of women at the same institution for six years. Later she would recall that she always wanted “to become a physician,” which was her reason for leaving Maine and enrolling at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, from which she received her MD in 1936. The following year she interned in obstetrics and gynecology. Loyalty was one of the traits that guided Bean’s actions in her relationships with family, friends, and country. When years of education exhausted her savings, she opted for a position at Vassar College as an assistant physician from 1938 to 1941. One of the most important reasons she sought the security of a university position, Bean said, was that she “had a mother and grandmother to support.” In fact, after serving her stint with the Emergency Medical Services in England for one year, where it was said she was “frequently under

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TABLE  Women Navy Doctors from WMCP and Johns Hopkins in WWII WMCP* Harriet Josephine Davis Sylvia Ruby Gioconda Rita Saraniero Louise Wetherill Slack Elizabeth Alice Stone Bernice Gertrude Rosenthal (Walters) Pauline Kathryn Wenner

Johns Hopkins Edith Michael Buyer Agnes Conrad Orra Almira Phelps

*Materials provided by DUCM.

fire,” she returned to the United States to take care of her mother once more in 1942. Not only was she a devoted daughter and granddaughter, but she was also a loyal friend; it was while working at Vassar that she met Dr. Barbara Stimson, who became a lifelong friend. Their friendship was further cemented by their stint together overseas, and they later shared a permanent residence in postwar years with Bean’s mother. By the fall of 1942, Bean grew restless. Even though her return to work at Vassar was rewarding, it lacked the urgency she had learned to experience in the RAMC. In one interview, she said she would like “to hear any logical reasons why, if I am good enough to serve in the British army, I am not good enough to serve in the armed forces of my own country.” When it looked like commissions in the U.S. Naval Reserve were finally forthcoming, she decided to volunteer one more time as her loyalty to her country made her want to play on the “home team” for a change. She applied for a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve in November 1942 and was appointed 9 January 1943. Almost immediately, Bean, like other military women, learned that the Navy had its rules and regulations. After her physical examination, she was advised that she needed a waiver for a physical defect—she was 25 pounds over standard weight for her height of 66 ½ inches. If she had any concerns about the conditions for acceptance, the navy explained that the waiver “provides that persons with other than organic physical defects may be appointed in the U.S. Naval Reserve, but shall not be eligible for retirement benefits by reason of the disability for which waiver was required, or by reason of any aggravation of such disability.” Almost a year after applying for her commission she was transferred to the medical corps, but still as a lieutenant. In a letter to the chief of the Bureau of

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Personnel, Bean wrote, “I feel that my age and professional qualifications entitle me to higher rank than Lt. (jg).” She described her prewar background and experiences as well as her duty abroad as a major (with the classification of medical specialist) in the RAMC, and concluded: “I am forty-three years old . . . requirements in the 3rd Naval District lead me to believe that I could enter the Naval Medical Corps Reserve at this time with the rank of Lieut. Comdr.” It was not until 14 January 1944 that she was finally appointed lieutenant commander, and when the Navy no longer needed the services of its women physicians, she returned to Vassar in January 1946 to resume her duties at the college once again until her retirement in 1963. By official count, some fifty-seven women physicians were commissioned in the Navy by 1945. This tally rises somewhat depending on the date the list was gathered. There were also more women doctors in the navy during the war years than has been estimated, if those who were not commissioned are included. One newspaper article, for instance, indicated that in addition to Bean, six other “Wave doctors” were in the process of completing an eight-week intensive indoctrination course at the National Naval Medical Center in Washington, D.C., while waiting for the president’s signature on the bill to commission women doctors in April 1943. Only two of the women mentioned, however, appear to have been commissioned. These were Hazel M. Grainger and Marion Josephi. The names of at least five other women also did not appear on the list of those commissioned. One of these doctors, Marcelle Thomasine Bernard, was in medical school at New York Medical College at Valhalla at the time of Pearl Harbor. She related that there were one hundred students in the class and that ten of them, including her, were women. She referred to her classmates as “three year wonders” because the college crammed four years of study into three and graduated them all a year early. She was assigned to Chelsea Navy Hospital outside Boston, where she felt she was treated professionally at all times. In fact, all navy doctors were addressed as “Doctor” rather than “Ensign” or “Lieutenant”—which made it easier for her because she “did not know the difference between the various ranks.” In his book of Famous First Facts, Joseph Nathan Kane noted that Dr. Hulda E. Thelander was the first female doctor in the navy, but this was not the case. According to her personnel records, she did in fact apply for “commission or warrant” in the naval reserve on 22 November 1943, but she was not commissioned until 29 March 1944 (with the rank of lieutenant commander), almost a year after Bean. She had specialized in pediatrics and contagious diseases before her enlistment, and in postwar years she became a national authority on birth defects. Like many of her colleagues, Thelander was a patriot. When asked her reason for choosing the navy, she replied that she wished “to serve wherever or

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however to help with the war.” The navy took her at her word, and as Thelander recalled, “when I received my orders, I was very surprised to find I was to report to the Marine Corp in San Francisco.” During her tour of duty, she traveled to all the marine bases on the West Coast, where she talked about the “Birds, Bees, and Wolves” since too many girls were being discharged for pregnancy. After these session some of the servicewomen confided, “Their boy friends complained because they did not get some lectures like that, all they got was instruction on venereal diseases.” Thelander was honorably discharged 5 December 1945, and she continued to work with veteran hospitals throughout the country. In 1946 she was named one of ten outstanding women doctors appointed as consultants to women veterans, but in July 1953 she asked to be transferred to the retired reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve. The chief of naval personnel wrote, “During your career you have witnessed the growth of our Navy into the world’s mightiest. You have contributed materially to that tremendous growth. I regret your retirement from the service and take this occasion to extend to you my congratulations and appreciation for your faithful service to our Nation.”

Navy Women from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania

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survey conducted at the start of World War II indicated that every member of the faculty at WMCP was willing to volunteer with the armed forces. This sense of patriotism was also evident in the school’s graduates. As noted previously, seven women graduates from the WMCP were commissioned as navy doctors during the war (table 8). When this number is combined with the eight other women army doctors who also graduated from there, WMCP produced the most uniformed women doctors from any one medical school during World War II. Not all of them will be discussed here, but brief sketches about three of them will illustrate how their experiences in navy medicine were typical of those of other women doctors during wartime. Like their male colleagues, women physicians welcomed the professional opportunities the navy offered. Orra A. Phelps, for instance, a graduate of Johns Hopkins, was a country school doctor with a modest salary. She confided that she felt lucky to leave a job without a future at a time when it was patriotic to do so. The war, however, held a special attraction for many women doctors beyond its patriotic appeal because it served potentially as a unique training ground in medicine, surgery, and research. If the women had hoped for full equality in military medicine, however, they were disappointed much as the women army doctors were. The combat theaters had been testing grounds for medical evacuation procedures, the use of blood substitutes, advanced surgical techniques, and new miracle drugs. Because women were not

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TABLE  Specialties Listed for 57 Women Navy Doctors in WWII Pediatrics General Practice Psychiatry Internal Medicine Radiology/X-ray Pathology OB-GYN Anesthesia Ophthalmology None listed

13 11 7 4 3 3 2 2 1 11*

Note: Occasionally a woman listed two areas, in which case the first one was deemed the main area. *Specialty areas were frequently omitted by recent graduates.

allowed in combat, however, they did not gain these kinds of experiences. It was also just as hard to work overseas as it had been in World War I. Once in the navy, women doctors frequently carried on the kind of work they had in civilian life. One important task, for example, was the medical care of the dependents of servicemen. When she was commissioned at the age of thirty-nine, Elizabeth Alice Stone was listed as being in industrial medicine in the navy. Because she had been a general practitioner before enlisting, this posting was a good match for her skills. Nevertheless, treating civilians was not the kind of experience to enhance a woman physician’s prestige or advance her professional skills in postwar years. Family tradition prompted many to join the navy rather than the army. Gioconda Rita Saraniero, whose navy service spanned two decades, has been credited with being the first woman captain in the navy medical corps. “A little 12-year-old Brooklyn girl who thrilled to tales her Italian uncle told about his experiences as a ship’s doctor,” she longed to follow in his footsteps. This desire grew even stronger as her younger twin brothers enlisted in the navy and a third brother became a pharmacist’s mate in the same branch of the service. Saraniero contended, “I can best serve my country as a physician in the Navy. I believe my special training in Hematology might be of some help to the Navy at the present time.” When she volunteered in April 1943 at the age of thirty-two, she was not reticent about her reason for enlisting. As one newspaper account recorded, “she hoped the law will be changed, so that she might serve overseas or on a hospital ship.” More of her life and career are discussed in a later chapter.

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Specialties in the Navy

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ender issues played a role in the choices women and men physicians made in the twentieth century. Specialization was increasingly characteristic of the careers of all doctors, but women had a narrower range of choices. The choice of a specialty is related to several factors, such as competition for positions, length of training involved, skills demanded, amount of in-hospital time required, and the general flexibility of the training program. Another factor is “the general image of the specialty and its acceptance of women.” As late as the 1960s, three fields claimed “over 50 per cent of all women physicians receiving certification” by special boards—pediatrics, psychiatry, and internal medicine. Pediatrics, however, was the most popular choice, and physicians, regardless of gender, agreed that surgery was a “man’s field.” Fifty-seven women doctors commissioned in the navy listed their area of expertise before the war (table 8). Not one claimed surgery as a specialty area. Thirteen women, however, listed pediatrics, and seven claimed psychiatry. This meant that almost one-third of the navy women claimed specialties in keeping with the practice patterns of women physicians receiving certification by specialty boards throughout the country. Three women indicated they practiced radiology/X-ray. While this figure seems low, it is proportionate to the 6 percent of women in the general population. Only one woman listed ophthalmology as her main area, but this should not be surprising. Women were “scarcely represented in certain specialties,” and ophthalmology along with orthopedic, thoracic, plastic, and neurological surgery contained few women physicians certified by the boards up to 1966. In contrast, eleven women doctors indicated that they were in general practice before the war, and an equal number listed no particular area in medicine—but these were usually recent graduates from medical school. Since medical officers trained in anesthesiology and psychiatry continued to be in short supply during World War II, women with these specialties were highly valued by the military—yet only two navy doctors claimed anesthesia as their main specialty. Bernice Gertrude Rosenthal Walters (fondly called Burma by her friends) was one of the early women physicians to sign up with the navy. She recalled: “They didn’t even know how to process me. I almost wound up as an apprentice seaman.” Later she earned the distinction of being the first woman doctor ever assigned to a navy ship. (Her Korean service is discussed more fully in a later chapter). The navy had more luck in attracting psychiatrists. Although women had been drawn to psychiatry in the nineteenth century, specialization in this area did not increase significantly until the twentieth century. Many women found asylum work attractive because it offered an opportunity to treat a variety of physical and mental ailments, provided economic security in the form of room and board, and even made the transition to private practice easier. By

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1941 war provided doctors with a new set of opportunities in psychiatry as soldiers exhibited symptoms of “battle fatigue” and other combat-related mental disorders not seen in civilian practice. Female psychiatrists likely felt that they would have more opportunities to broaden their skills during wartime. In all, seven women claimed psychiatry as their primary area of expertise, but only two of the most well known are discussed here—Lucy Dorothy Ozarin and Frances Lois Willoughby. In Ozarin’s case, she had always enjoyed challenges. Born 18 August 1914 in Brooklyn, she attended New York Medical College, where the first challenge she took on was to be one of six women in a class of one hundred. She completed a two-year internship at Harlem Hospital from 1937 to 1939 in pediatrics and recalled that “the most exciting part of the internship” was the five months she spent riding an ambulance. When war broke out, Ozarin’s brother joined the navy, and she, the youngest of four children, was determined to follow the same course. By the time she was commissioned as a lieutenant 12 August 1943, she had spent four years in psychiatry. Ozarin recalled that the navy needed doctors desperately, particularly psychiatrists. “What the Navy was doing was taking general practitioners or internists and giving them 90 days’ instruction and they became psychiatrists,” she explained. These were—we called them the 90-day wonders. When the war was over, a lot of them went into psychiatric residency.” At the start of Ozarin’s service, however, the navy did not utilize her skills appropriately. After her indoctrination at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, she was detailed to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a military base that housed about thirty thousand men and three thousand women marines at the time. Although an experienced psychiatrist, she was assigned to “doing physicals on the laborers they employed” there. Worse than the routine work, however, was dealing with the commanding officer, whose attitude made it clear that he was “against women . . . [and] psychiatry.” Fortunately, Ozarin had the good sense to write to one of the navy doctors she knew at Bethesda inquiring about changes in duty, and she was subsequently reassigned to the WAVE training station in the Bronx where the navy had taken over Hunter College. Although she was “dying to go overseas,” she was detailed to an infirmary where “it was mostly sick calls.” Not long after, Dr. Catherine Louise McCorry, a psychiatrist who had graduated from Loyola School of Medicine in Chicago in 1930, arrived at Hunter for a short tour of duty, and the two women became lifelong friends. Edith Michael Buyer, a graduate of Johns Hopkins, was also sent there. Buyer’s family recalled that she served at the WAVES training center where among her many duties she supervised nurses who conducted the physical exams for incoming WAVES. The staff saw over 250 recruits a day, so that the assembly-line approach was referred to as the daisy chain. In February 1945, Ozarin finally caught a break when it came to practicing her specialty: she was ordered back to Bethesda to become ward medi-

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cal officer of the psychiatric ward, where she was the only woman psychiatrist for a time. During that year, Ozarin took and passed the American boards in psychiatry—a move that held her in good stead in terms of her chosen field. For the next eleven years, she worked with the VA in the central office as assistant chief of hospital psychiatry (and then head of psychiatry) while spending ten of those years with the reserves. As she pointed out, she “had gone into the Navy with one and a half stripes” and got promoted to “three stripes” during reserve duty. She was one of the few women physicians whose caEdith Michael Buyer was a graduate of Johns reer was advanced by being part of Hopkins University and commissioned as the navy. a lieutenant in the naval reserve in October When Ozarin became inter1943. She was promoted to lieutenant comested in public health service, she mander during the war. Photo courtesty of the Buyer family. decided to switch careers. She resigned from the reserves as a commissioned officer in 1957, and three years later attended the Harvard School of Public Health, where she got a degree in that specialty. She contended that this was a wonderful experience as it provided her with many different kind of opportunities including spending three weeks in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) in the 1970s and representing the World Health Organization in India. Ozarin retired in 1981, and while she was never an outspoken feminist, she held that women should have equal opportunities. Frances Willloughby also held that women should have the same opportunities as men, but she met many obstacles along the way that many of her male colleagues were spared. She was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1 July 1905, and after graduating from college in 1927, she was eager to study medicine. Lacking enough money to pay the tuition for her medical studies, she did what many other women doctors did—she taught school for a few years. It was 1938 before she earned her medical degree from the University of Arkansas, and by the time she completed her internship, she was deep in debt but still determined to complete a residency. Those were hard for women to come by, however, and in order to enter a specialty at this time, female doctors had to win the approval of the head of the residency program. This was especially

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true in the surgical specialties, “where the popularity and high demand for these places puts the bargaining power in the hands of the department heads.” Undaunted, Willoughby continued to hunt until she found a psychiatric residency at the Travis City State Hospital, a mental institution in Michigan. She admitted that psychiatry was not her first choice, but the other institutions to which she applied “explained in so many words that they had no openings for women. Travis did not quibble about a matter of gender.” When World War II broke out, Willoughby decided to enlist because of the shortage of doctors. She was commissioned a lieutenant and stationed at Bethesda. It was here that she began treating female patients from the auxiliary branches of the armed services, and she helped to administer the first electric shock treatment ever given at Bethesda. Later she conducted neuropsychiatric examinations to navy veterans in Washington, D.C., thus expanding her practice to male patients. In 1948 under the new Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, she was the only physician among seven women sworn into the regular navy. This not only made her the “first female doctor in the regular Navy’s Medical Corps, but also the only woman doctor in the U.S. Armed Forces.” In 1950 she became the first woman with the permanent rank of commander, and she took the position of staff psychiatrist at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where she served for another fourteen years. But honors were still in store for this navy doctor. While at the naval hospital, Willoughby received another promotion, which she described in her note to a friend at Christmas1961: “I am still at the U.S. Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I am a captain in the Medical Corps, U.S. Navy. I am a psychiatrist there and although the work is strenuous it is most interesting and challenging.” After Willoughby retired from the navy in 1964, she established a private practice in Pitman, New Jersey, and served on the staff of the local hospital. She continued to be active in the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Women’s Association, and in 1981 she received the Benjamin Rush Award, the country’s most prestigious award in psychiatry. In addition to psychiatry, radiology/X-ray technology was another specialization that was highly valued in the navy medical corps. In fact, the need was so great that both the army and navy trained thousands of servicemen as radiology technicians. Yet only three women were listed as having such skills in this area, and all came from highly ranked schools: Evelyn Blanche Ellms (Tufts University, class of 1932, radiology), Meldon Ada Everett (University of Michigan, 1939, radiology), and Mildred Miller Templeton Healy (University of Buffalo, 1941, X-ray). In the last instance, Healy had received special concession to take her pre-medical training at night, as her professors believed she had “the makings of an excellent doctor.” Three women doctors from schools around the country made their way to the navy as pathologists. Ellen W. Feder was a product of George Washing-

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ton University(1940); Christie Ellen McLeod graduated from the University of Vermont (1934); and Eleanor Winthrop Townsend made her way from the Medical College of South Carolina (1929). These women were not only experienced physicians but highly trained in their field, as the typical residency for pathology was four years. Of this group, Townsend was the only woman to be given the rank of lieutenant commander after she volunteered in June 1944. Feder was only twenty-seven years old when she was commissioned in March 1944, but she had already shown great promise in her medical studies. Before her enlistment, she had been awarded two scholarships, one in medicine and another in obstetrics. Another way to view women doctors in the navy is to determine how many of them concentrated in work aligned with women and children’s health care. Altogether, twenty-seven women specialized in obstetrics and gynecology (2), pediatrics (13), and general practice (11). These three fields accounted for roughly 45 percent of the total number of women navy doctors commissioned. This might be expected given that these constituted the main areas of interest for women doctors in general. There was a great need in the navy, however, to care for female enlisted, dependents of servicemen at the various installations and navy yard dispensaries, and for the ever-increasing number of civilian women employees working at these sites. Navy women doctors who specialized in pediatrics were graduates of some of the most prestigious medical schools in the country, and they had been highly visible in civilian practice before the war. Margaret Stebbins, for example, was a graduate of Tufts Medical College (1938), and Marion Josephi was a Cornell graduate (1926). Commissioned a lieutenant (jg) 24 December 1942, Josephi believed that the scope of women physicians in navy installations had “no limitations,” although there was no guarantee women would be employed in their own field. When asked what it was like in the navy, she did not sugarcoat her answer: “Your life will be regulated entirely by the needs and customs of the service, and you must at all times abide by its regulations. . . . We are at war, and we are in the service to fill the needs of the service no matter what they may be.” While many women doctors had been medical professors at women’s schools before the twentieth century, they found it increasingly hard to get teaching jobs at coeducational institutions as the women’s schools closed. The University of Michigan Medical School had been known for treating women medical students on an equal basis as men, and Anna Hays, a graduate from this school in1926, taught pediatrics at Michigan for three years. She was commissioned a lieutenant commander 3 August 1944 and had the distinction of being the only woman doctor at the naval hospital at Norman, Oklahoma, during World War II. Hays traveled in Europe to observe child clinics there, and her conclusion at the time was that American medical methods and hospitals were far superior to those in Europe. After the war, she returned to her

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medical practice in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was a very successful pediatrician there. Norma Catherine Furtos, another pediatrician, claimed a second expertise in tuberculosis. She was one of the few doctors of either gender during the war to hold both a doctorate and a medical degree. Born in 1904 in Cleveland, Ohio, she received a doctorate from Ohio State University at Columbus in 1932 and her MD from Case Western Reserve’s School of Medicine in 1938, and following her residency she held a series of appointments in New York and Colorado. After being commissioned a lieutenant 31 January 1944, Furtos was assigned to duty stations in California from 1944 through 1949, and she served aboard the USS Consolation (discussed in a following chapter) a few years later.

Comparisons between Army and Navy Women Doctors

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hether women doctors joined the army or the navy, there were a number of commonalities between them. They represented recognized medical schools, even prestigious ones in many cases. As we have seen, their medical degrees came from Johns Hopkins, Cornell, New York Medical College, Tufts, University of California, and Rush Medical College—to name but a few. The vast majority of these women were seasoned professionals mostly in their thirties and forties, although those who volunteered right from medical school or after internship were younger. Women physicians had to be willing to serve when and where they were needed, and frequently this meant being sent to duty stations where they performed routine medical services that might not be in keeping with their training or interests—a particularly sore point for specialists assigned outside their field. On the other hand, women physicians in the army eventually served overseas with the WACs in World War II, but navy women were denied such an experience abroad. Because there was a high demand for women doctors in both branches to treat female enlisted, civilian employees, and the dependents of servicemen, many of them were drawn from practices with a “female” orientation such as pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, and general practice. In whatever branch of service they volunteered, however, women doctors had to deal with two male-dominated establishments—medicine and the military. Women physicians who opted to serve their country during World War II learned that the military did not provide equal opportunities for females. No women doctors lost their lives in combat, although they were vocal in wanting to have the same duties as any male doctor, no matter how perilous. In fact, few of them were satisfied with assuming the traditional role of being a “replacing sister” for a male colleague who went off to war. And although most women doctors left the service to resume their civilian practices, some might

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have stayed on if they had had a future in the military. Navy doctor Cmdr. Lucy D. Ozarin, for instance, stated that when the war ended she never considered staying on. “At that time,” she said, “I don’t think the Navy particularly wanted us. This was ’46. Everybody wanted out. I had no job. I had applied for a child psychiatry fellowship, but I wasn’t getting any further.” Dr. Craighill, who had made an outstanding contribution to the army’s war effort, became disillusioned enough to change her career path after returning to civilian practice. Resuming her position as dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) in 1946, she soon resigned in disgust after she tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a merger with Jefferson Medical College in an effort to introduce coeducation at her all-female medical school. For Craighill, the handwriting on the wall was clear: Judging by the women specialists who were wanted in the army and navy, war had accelerated the trend toward specialization in medicine. Wartime experiences also helped the careers of male military physicians as more and more of them occupied faculty and administrative positions in postwar years, while only a small percentage of women around the country held similar positions. Craighill realized that in the professional world of modern medicine, progress demanded changes in attitude, especially if women wanted to make their way in a man’s world. WMCP did not become coeducational until 1970, finally yielding its place as the last woman’s medical institution in the United States. As for Craighill, she embraced change and took retraining in psychiatry. An optimistic Marion Josephi said, “When this war is over I believe that we of the services shall face the post-war world with greater understanding and wider vision for having shared in the struggle.” For those women doctors who hoped to find a permanent place in the military, the struggle was going to continue after 1946 and into the 1950s and beyond. Nowhere was this more evident than in the experiences of women doctors who went on to Korea.

Chapter Five

OUT OF PLACE Women Military Doctors in Cold War America

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ith the end of World War II, Americans were eager to return to peacetime, and although they hoped for economic prosperity, they feared another depression. Now that the wartime emergency was over, women were encouraged to return to their homes so that men could find jobs and support their families. As the armed forces demobilized, former servicewomen were expected to get married and start families. The vast majority of uniformed women physicians were automatically and arbitrarily discharged at the end of the war, even though the demobilization process created a severe postwar physician shortage for both the Army and Navy Medical Corps. Within a few short years, the armed forces found themselves fighting a war in Korea, and so critical was the need for physicians that military officials eventually asked Congress to pass legislation authorizing them to grant permanent commissions to women physicians. Due to cultural expectations and the roles of women in the United States during the 1950s and 60s, however, the number of women physicians in the army, navy, and air force remained tiny well into the 1970s. This chapter explores the careers of women physicians in the armed services from the period immediately following World War II to the creation of the All Volunteer Force in 1973.

Second Choice

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he armed forces’ attitudes toward and limited utilization of women physicians from the end of World War II through the wars in Korea and Vietnam reflected the position of women doctors in American society, which was highly tentative. During these years, many people believed that men made the best physicians and often refused to accord women physicians the status and respect automatically granted to their male counterparts. Women doctors were assumed to be second choice, useful only when male doctors were unavailable. When World War II ended, for example, women physicians working in civilian hospitals were frequently fired to make room on staff for male doc-

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tors returning from war. Once male physicians were available again, supervisors frequently viewed women doctors as problematic employees compared to their male colleagues. According to a poll of one hundred hospital chiefs of staff conducted during the late 1940s, the chiefs believed women physicians were often “emotionally unstable” and frequently “talked too much.” If a woman doctor was married, said the chiefs, chances were that she would become pregnant and “unreliable.” If she was not married, they assumed she was “frustrated.” During the immediate postwar years, the dismissal rate for women physicians was 75 percent higher than that of male doctors on staff at the same institutions. In August 1945, a report by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor indicated that women had made “permanent inroads” into practically every business and profession during the war “except as doctors.” The number of women who elected to become doctors “remained fairly static” during the war. In 1941 there were 1,146 women students in approved medical schools, and in 1944 there were 1,176. The report suggested that the reason women continued to shy away from medicine was that while the cost of a medical education continued to climb, women physicians on average earned significantly less than men. The average yearly income of all physicians in 1941 was $5,179; during the war the average salary of women physicians was $3,000. The reason for this discrepancy, according to the report, was the difference in medical specialties between male and female physicians. Women tended to specialize in children’s diseases and psychiatry because it was easier for a woman to obtain proper training in these fields than in higher-paying specialties such as surgery and orthopedics. Within three years, a significant change occurred in the number of women entering medical school, as women who were still in college at the end of the war entered medical school while male veteran G.I. Bill students were still undergraduates. Graduation rates for women medical students peaked between 1948 and 1951 when women comprised from 7.1 to 12.1 percent of all medical school graduates, the highest number since 1900. Unfortunately, the “glut” of newly graduated women physicians further decreased their value in the eyes of employers. As soon as the number of applicants to medical schools began to exceed the prewar level, some institutions returned to strict gender-based admission quotas similar to those used prior to the war, thus limiting the number of women students who could be accepted. Once again, schools were reverting to the idea that women were somehow “second choice,” to be selected only in the absence of men. Women entering the medical field in the years after World War II were guided into certain specialties that society as a whole and the medical profession itself assumed were the most suitable for them. The twenty-one women doctors graduating among the class of 1950 at New York University, for ex-

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ample, were told they stood the best chance for professional success in psychiatry, followed by pediatrics and obstetrics. The specialties allotted to women paid less and carried less prestige than those inhabited by their male colleagues. But they were also, the theory went, less demanding; women physicians would not have to sacrifice their family life to their career. Psychiatrists, for example, could maintain regular nine-to-five office hours, so a woman could devote her evenings and weekends to her family. As for earnings, few women were the sole support of their families, so the fact that psychiatrists made less money than surgeons was not supposed to matter. In effect, women physicians in the immediate postwar era were expected to occupy “feminine niches.” They were members of the profession, but they were not considered professionally equal within the medical field. At about the same time, however, social forces sparked by post–World War II prosperity created an environment favorable to all physicians. The economic upturn provided the average American family with more disposable income than ever before, and many chose to invest their money in health care. The number of medical jobs burgeoned, and although opportunities available to female physicians were fewer and usually less prestigious than those open to their male colleagues, physicians of both sexes found places without much difficulty. In 1953 Dr. Hulda Thelander, who had served in the navy during World War II, published a study she and a colleague had done on the status of women physicians. Thelander surveyed 230 women physicians, 156 of whom were married. The results indicated that as a whole, women physicians remained active in the profession even after marrying and having children. However, Thelander noted that married women doctors had to deal with a set of problems that neither men nor unmarried women doctors faced. Married women physicians, she stressed, really had two jobs—one as a doctor and one as a homemaker. According to Thelander, if the doctor was also a mother, her primary job “must and should be” in the home. “The bearing of a child and the nurturing of it,” wrote Thelander, “is not only time consuming, but also demands enormous reserves of energy, making it difficult to be a physician.” Thelander also added that women physicians frequently made career sacrifices such as relocating or refusing a potential appointment in favor of their husband’s careers. The age-old problems Thelander identified were not new and would remain in place throughout the twentieth century. Some would argue that these circumstances remain a challenge for women physicians today. Women physicians faced cultural expectations during the 1950s and 1960s that were less quantifiable and yet possibly more insidious than family expectations. In a 1963 newspaper article entitled “Why Do Brilliant Women Run Into So Much Resentment?” author George Crane, himself a physician, warned his readers, “Girls, think twice before you tackle masculine professions.” Crane

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used “Dr. Helen G., aged 27,” as an example of some of the problems women physicians faced. Dr. G., wrote Crane, complained that her male colleagues were far more successful than she was, although in medical school she had vastly outperformed them. She wondered why this was happening. Crane explained to his readers, “In general, men resent having women enter what they consider to be masculine professions, such as dentistry, medicine and law. Likewise, the average woman does not have adequate respect for a woman dentist or doctor. Women may feel that a male doctor is ‘more knowing’ and Hulda E. Thelander was commissioned in will not visit a woman. They prefer March 1944 with the rank of lieutenant commale experts because they credit mander in the navy. Before her enlistment, them with more assurance. . . . It she specialized in pediatrics and contagious usually takes a large city to be able diseases, and in postwar years she became a to furnish a woman physician with national authority on birth defects. enough patients to keep her out of bankruptcy.” He ended his advice by saying, “So if you women want to pick a career where the going is not too difficult, be cautious about entering professions that are regarded as male specialties.” Throughout the 1950s and 1960s women physicians continued to enter those medical specialties to which they were expected to gravitate, if only because they believed those offered them the highest chance of carving out a career in medicine. In 1968 an article in the Los Angeles Times titled “More Women Emerging on Medical Scene in America” indicated that popular attitudes toward women physicians remained unchanged. When the author asked one man what he thought about women doctors, he responded, “Women were created to be wives.” Another man said, “Women MDs irk me.” A third said, “I’m glad my daughter isn’t neurotic enough to want to become a doctor.” The author’s survey of women physicians indicated that contrary to the popular idea that women doctors were frustrated spinsters, 57 percent were married, and they averaged 1.8 children. Half of those married were married to doctors. Interestingly, the survey indicated that Crane’s 1963 advice to women physicians was correct; women doctors usually practiced in larger cities and

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“shunned” small towns. The most popular fields of specialization for women doctors were pediatrics, psychiatry, internal medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, anesthesia, and public health. And what of the armed forces? After demobilizing all its women physicians at the end of World War II, the U.S. military was again forced to ask Congress for permission to commission women doctors at the start of the Korean War. During this war the services had such difficulty recruiting doctors of either gender that they resorted to drafting male physicians. The services continued to draft male physicians as needed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and the war in Vietnam exacerbated that need. In 1967 the American Medical Association sent a report to the presidential commission that was reviewing the draft law, recommending that women physicians be drafted as well. The report stated that women comprised on average 7 percent (or 500) of medical school graduates each year and implied there was no reason the services shouldn’t take advantage of this additional supply of doctors. The government did not act on the AMA’s suggestion but continued to draft male physicians until the establishment of the All Volunteer Force in 1973. Many of the small number of women physicians who joined the military during these years specialized in psychiatry and pediatrics, just as their civilian cohorts did. These were also the specialties the armed forces expected women physicians to have, and often the services assigned them accordingly. Meanwhile, a new social phenomenon called “the women’s movement” began to create an impetus for change in American society as some longheld social assumptions about women’s aptitudes, abilities, and aspirations were challenged. Slowly, the number of women interested in medicine and the number of women applying to and attending medical schools began to increase. In 1970 the Women’s Equity Action League filed suit with the U.S. Department of Labor charging all medical schools in the United States with sex discrimination. By that year 7.4 percent of doctors in the country were women, and 10.5 percent of all first-year medical students were women. According to medical historian Ellen More, the passage in 1971 and 1972 of the “equal opportunity” amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act proved to be the catalyst women needed to increase their representation in many professional fields, including medicine. U.S. Rep. Edith Green shepherded the passage of Title IX of the Higher Education Act, banning discriminatory policies, such as in admissions and salaries, of any school receiving federal funds. This coupled with the feminist movement combined to triple the number of women’s applications to medical school, and schools accepted greater numbers of them. Women residents continued to specialize in pediatrics, internal medicine, psychiatry, family practice, and ob-gyn. The following sections will examine the medical and military careers of individual women physicians who served during that time in American history referred to as the cold war: the late 1940s, the Korean War, the mid-1950s

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through the 1960s, and the Vietnam War. Both the number of these women and their individual careers were affected by societal attitudes and the resulting institutional treatment of women throughout the cold war era.

Interim Ambivalence: The Armed Forces’ Utilization of Women Physicians Between World War II and the Korean War

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n late 1945 the army sent three women physicians to the Far East. Captains Mae Josephine O’Donnell, a cardiovascular specialist, and psychiatrist Hilde J. Koppel were assigned to the 307th General Hospital in Osaka, Japan, to care for soldiers in the Army of Occupation. Capt. Pauline Garber, a pathologist, was assigned to the 71st Station Hospital in Korea as the chief of laboratory services. Within eighteen months, all three were recalled to the States and relieved from duty as part of the postwar drawdown of servicewomen. By the time the World War II wartime emergency bill authorizing the army and navy to commission women physicians in the reserves was automatically repealed in 1947, there were only four women doctors in the army. Lt. Col. Eleanor Hamilton was chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Letterman General Hospital in California. Maj. Genia Ida Sakin, a plastic surgeon, was stationed in Berlin; psychiatrist Maj. Poe-Eng Yu was at Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania; and Lt. Col. Clara Raven was chief of laboratory service at Tripler General Hospital in Hawaii. Well aware that these skilled and experienced senior officers would be difficult to replace, Army Surgeon General Raymond Bliss looked for a loophole in military regulations that would allow him to retain them. He reviewed the provisions of the Army-Navy Nurse Act of 1947, which provided military nurses and medical specialists with permanent regular commissioned ranks in the armed forces for the first time in history, and asked Congress to allow the army to place the four physicians in the Women’s Medical Specialist Corps, which housed dietitians and physical and occupational therapists. Congress, however, denied his request. Reluctantly, the Army Medical Corps released its last four women physicians in 1948. Said obstetrician Hamilton about her stint in the army, “I would not care for a permanent rank in the Army, but I have been very glad for the experience I have had. In 17 months of service I have been treated as an equal with male officers. I felt no discrimination either for or against me as a woman MD and have been allowed to pull equal duty with the men.” Psychiatrist Poe-Eng Yu, who had a much longer career in the army than Hamilton did, had a somewhat different perspective on opportunities for women physicians. Yu had been one of the first women doctors to volunteer to serve with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps when it was established in 1942. Because this was before women physicians could be commissioned, Yu initially served as a civilian physician under contract to the army. She was even-

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tually sent to North Africa with a unit of WAAC and was finally commissioned in 1943 with the passage of the Sparkman-Johnson Bill. Yu’s early service represented a significant sacrifice; her duties as a general physician meant that she practiced little psychiatry. On her return to the States, Yu was assigned to Camp Crowder, Missouri, where although she was the only woman doctor at the hospital she was finally given the opportunity to practice her chosen specialty. She saw men patients exclusively and was “given the same privileges and responsibilities as male doctors.” The male patients from overseas, she wrote Capt. (Dr.) Pauline (Garber) Clark, Army Maj. Margaret Craighill, were imMedical Corps, March 1944–September 1946. pressed by her overseas experience The army sent Clark, a pathologist, to serve as and tended to feel that she underchief of laboratory services at the 71st station stood them. Too quickly, howhospital in Korea. Courtesy Women in Military ever, Poe-Eng Yu was sent to Camp Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc. Carson, Colorado, where she wrote Craighill that she hoped to see her soon so that they could discuss “a few problems concerning women doctors in service.”  We have no way of knowing what problems Yu was referring to, or whether the conversation ever took place; however, she was eventually assigned to Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania and assigned again to her specialty before she was finally discharged in 1948. Yu’s army service did not hamper her postwar career in psychiatry; she quickly obtained a post as senior psychiatric physician at the Connecticut State Hospital. Lt. Col. Clara Raven was luckier than Yu; she was assigned in her medical specialty, pathology, throughout her army career (see chapter 3). Raven was serving at Tripler General Hospital in Hawaii as chief of laboratory services when she was demobilized. She then went to work for the Veterans Administration but remained in the reserve just in case the army needed her again. Initially, Genia Sakin’s military experience was not as satisfactory as Raven’s, undoubtedly because her medical specialty, plastic surgery, was viewed as a male province. The army eventually recognized her specialized skills and assigned her to positions where she could be productive, but not before submitting her to several incompatible assignments and at least one poor eval-

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uation. Although Sakin had years of experience in reconstructive surgery when she volunteered her services during World War II, the army, uncomfortable with the idea of a woman surgeon, assigned her to a Red Cross blood donor unit. There she was given a poor rating by a male civilian supervisor who resented her, possibly (in the words of one observer) “because she was a woman.” Only after she threatened to resign from the service was Sakin assigned to Northington General Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, as plastic surgeon ward officer. Just as she was settling in, overjoyed to be working in her specialty again, army officials attempted to send her to the WAC dispensary at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where her responsibilities would have entailed examining women who reported to sick call. Col. Margaret Craighill of the Surgeon General’s Office intervened, and Sakin remained at Northington. After the war the army appears to have finally recognized Sakin’s talent. She was assigned to Percy Jones Hospital at Battle Creek, Michigan, the army’s plastic surgery center in the United States, and promoted to major. Months later, she was sent to Germany as the chief of plastic surgery of the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt. Later, Sakin served as chief of surgery and chief of plastic surgery in the 279th Station Hospital in Berlin. When her army career ended, Sakin established a plastic surgery practice in New York but closed it periodically to travel to areas of the world where her skills were urgently needed by poor refugees displaced by war. Sakin provided her medical services for free, returning to her New York practice only to earn money to make another trip. She continued in this vein until her death in 1960. By 1948, just as Surgeon General Bliss was forced to drop his valued four women physicians from his roster of doctors, the nation was becoming increasingly involved in a war against the expansion of Communism—what would come to be known as the Cold War—and the size of the armed forces began to expand once again. Military leaders asked Congress to reinstitute the draft, which they did. At the same time, Congress finally passed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which for the first time allowed the army, navy, marine corps, and air force to keep nonmedical servicewomen permanently in the regulars and reserves. Thus, nurses and women medical specialists (dietitians and physical and occupational therapists) could be commissioned under the 1947 Army-Navy Nurses Act, and nonmedical women could be enlisted and commissioned under the 1948 act, but women physicians, as the army surgeon general had discovered, did not fit into any of these categories. With the increased troop level, the military was having difficulty recruiting enough doctors to care for soldiers at home and abroad. When the military asked Congress for the right to draft doctors, however, Congress refused. At this point, even women doctors began to look good to the services, but legally they could not be commissioned in the Army and Navy Medical Corps. In 1949, less than a year after the army surgeon general had been forced to

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let his women doctors go, desperate need finally drove army and air force officials to ask Congress for permission to commission women doctors. But although the House of Representatives passed a bill allowing the services to grant women doctors regular commissions in the Army, Navy, and Air Force Medical Corps (as opposed to the reserve commissions women had held during World War II) , the Senate refused to consider it. Congress was merely reflecting common societal attitudes when it rejected the idea of women physicians in uniform with regular career status in the armed forces. The postwar military was by no means part of the “Mommy track,” as were the supposedly “family friendly” jobs in pediatrics and psychology that Americans assumed women doctors wanted and needed. At least one branch of the military, however, devised its own “Mommy track” for female physicians, but without congressional knowledge or consent. With the passage of the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, the navy began quietly commissioning women doctors into the Naval Women’s Reserve (commonly known as the WAVES) as opposed to the medical corps, where in theory doctors were supposed to be commissioned. Lt. Cmdr. Frances Willoughby, MD, was one of the first eight women sworn into the Naval Women’s Reserve in 1948. The navy also made plans to place twenty-five women doctors as interns in navy hospitals and to commission others who had completed internships in navy-approved civilian hospitals. In August 1949, the navy commissioned three women medical school graduates as lieutenants (jg) in the WAVES and assigned them as interns in navy hospitals. Suzanne W. Brown, a graduate of the Medical College of Virginia, was assigned to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, while Hannah H. Pendergast of Boise, Idaho, went to the naval hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and Mary W. Tilden of Jamestown, North Carolina, went to the naval hospital in Great Lakes, Illinois. The navy also accepted an additional seventeen female MDs into its civilian intern-training program, and by early June 1950, only weeks prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, commissioned the graduates of the program and assigned them to navy hospitals around the country. Serving as commissioned officers in the WAVES as opposed to the Navy Medical Corps meant that women physicians faced a very different military career pattern than their male counterparts. According to the career ladder established by the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, women officers were promoted at a slower pace and were automatically retired at a younger age than male officers. Thus a two-tier system was established in which women physicians in the navy were, in effect, second-class to male physicians, who were commissioned officers in the Navy Medical Corps. Although the navy’s actions may have been technically within the law, they undoubtedly did not comply with congressional intent. The 1948 act made no specific provision for the commissioning of women doctors in the services; it simply

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did not expressly forbid it, probably because Congress had not considered the possibility.

Serving during the Korean War

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hen the Korean War started, there were three women physicians in the regular navy and twenty in the naval reserve. The army and air force, both of which had adhered to the letter of the law, had none. The three services quickly became desperate for doctors, and a month into the war the army and air force petitioned Congress for the authority to commission women physicians into the reserves of their medical corps. The navy did not want to be included in such a bill and insisted that its women doctors were happy in the WAVES. “The Navy’s women doctors are satisfied with the system,” said Cmdr. Francis Blouin, “and we want to keep it.”  The pressing need for doctors finally convinced Congress of the legitimacy of the military’s request, and lawmakers passed the legislation allowing the services to commission women physicians into the reserves of the army, navy, and air force, regardless of the navy’s stand on the matter. At the same time, in August 1950, Congress also consented to a draft for male physicians, a draft that remained in place throughout the Korean War until it was replaced in 1954 with the Berry Plan.  Additionally, the services began special residency programs to aid the recruitment and retention of physicians, instituted an involuntary recall of physician reservists, and forced the retention of those physicians eligible to retire. As soon as the enabling legislation was passed, the army recalled three reserve women physicians to active duty: Clara Raven, the pathologist whom the army surgeon general had fought to keep; psychiatrist Alcinde De Aguiar of Boston; and public health specialist Therersa T. Woo. The army sent Aguiar and Raven to Japan, where physicians were needed to treat soldiers from the Korean battlefields. Aguiar was assigned to a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she worked with soldiers with battle fatigue. She was so successful in restoring psychotic soldiers back to combat readiness that her male colleagues teased her that she was performing “hocus pocus” on her patients. Meanwhile, Raven was stationed in hospitals in Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima, where she analyzed infectious hepatitis, in which she had become an expert during World War II, and hemorrhagic fever, a similar pathogen being contracted by U.S. soldiers in Korea at an alarming rate. Maj. Theresa T. Woo of Washington, D.C., was a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School and had done graduate work at Harvard Medical School and at the Children’s Medical Center in Boston. A specialist in both public health and pediatrics, Woo was employed by the District of Columbia’s Department of Health when she was recalled to active duty.

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In January 1951 the Army Medical Corps commissioned another woman MD who specialized in public health. For more than twenty years, public health had been an area of medicine that attracted numerous women physicians, who worked at both the county and state levels to aid maternal health and prevent the spread of childhood diseases through programs that emphasized education and inoculation. Ruth E. Church, MD, of Walworth, Wisconsin, was commissioned as a major in the army reserve and assigned to the Army Surgeon General’s Office in Washington, D.C. Church was a specialist in preventive medicine who had been employed by the Illinois Department of Public Health as a district health superintendent prior to reporting to active duty. A former nurse who had specialized in maternal and child health, Church was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Medical School and held a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University. The next woman doctor to be commissioned in the army reserve was a psychiatrist, Ruth Miller of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Miller was commissioned as a captain and assigned to Camp Atterbury, Indiana. Prior to volunteering, she had been in private practice in Avon Park, Florida. The army’s initial choices reflected its preference for women physicians with medical specialties within traditional feminine niches such as public health, psychiatry, and pathology. Within eighteen months, the army had sixteen women doctors in the medical corps reserve, eight of whom were serving overseas. By the end of the Korean War, twenty-three women doctors had served in the army medical corps. On June 24, 1952, President Truman signed into law a bill authorizing the army, air force, and navy to commission women physicians in the regular services instead of just the reserves. In theory, this meant that women physicians could now serve in the armed forces on a career basis, rather than be called up to serve short stints as needed. Shortly thereafter, the army accepted three women medical school graduates into the army intern program. After serving their internships at army hospitals, the three would be commissioned in the regular army medical corps and be poised for careers in the service. All three women had prior military experience. Mona Sheller, a new graduate of the University of Oregon Medical School at Portland, was a former WAC laboratory technician who attended medical school on the G.I. Bill. Sheller was assigned to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, Colorado. Christine Haycock, a graduate of the University of New York College of Medicine at Brooklyn, was selected to intern at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Haycock, a former nurse, held a commission in the Army Nurse Corps Reserve, which was automatically terminated when she accepted her internship. The third new intern was Eileen McAvoy of Baylor University College of Medicine at Houston, Texas, who was assigned to Murphy Army Hospital at Waltham, Massachusetts. McEvoy had been an army nurse during World War II, serving in the European Command.  In February 1953, 1st Lt. Fae M. Adams became the first woman physician

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to hold a regular army commission. She was followed four months later by Eileen McEvoy, who joined Adams as a resident at Walter Reed Army Hospital in late 1953. Nineteen other women physicians were in the army reserve by 1953; the army’s limited campaign to acquire the services of women physicians was off to a slow but steady start. The navy, which had originally wanted to keep its women physicians in the WAVES rather than the medical corps, was forced to reconsider its position when Public Law 408 was passed in 1952. Previously, the navy had commissioned all its women physicians as WAVES under Public Law 625, referred to as the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948. As mentioned before, these women faced a more limited career ladder (less chance of promotion and earlier retirement) than those who would be commissioned under the new law. Women commissioned under the earlier law, however, would compete for promotion only with other women, whereas those commissioned in the navy medical corps would compete with all medical officers for promotion. In the end, the navy decided to give women physicians a choice as to which law they would like to be commissioned under. Internal memoranda indicate that the navy intended to appoint only a limited number of women into the medical corps because they could not be assigned to certain billets overseas and afloat where female quarters were limited. If too many women physicians were commissioned, male doctors would have to accept longer assignments afloat, and the navy worried that faced with too many assignments to areas where they could not take their families, they would leave the service. Perhaps the navy should have considered assigning women physicians to floating billets, as Bernice Rosenthal Walters had already demonstrated that these assignments were not beyond women’s capabilities. Rosenthal, a specialist in anesthesia, had served in the navy medical corps reserve during World War II. After the war, Rosenthal worked in Veterans Administration hospitals in Louisiana and Texas. She returned to active duty (as an officer in the WAVES) in 1948 and was assigned to the Naval Hospital at Pensacola, Florida, where she met and married navy Lt. Herbert Walters. After less than two years of marriage, Lieutenant Walters died in a freak training accident while serving aboard the navy carrier USS Wright. That August, within four months of her husband’s death and one month after the start of the war in Korea, Bernice Walters was assigned to the hospital ship USS Consolation as head of anesthesia. Walters was the first woman physician assigned to a hospital ship during wartime. Did Walters request her new assignment, and was her assignment feasible because she was an anesthetist, a medical specialty traditionally difficult for the services to find? The records do not provide the answers, but both suppositions appear to be very likely. Back in the United States at the end of her overseas assignment, Walters told a news reporter, “The Army and Navy need doctors, and a doctor is a

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doctor, whether a man or woman.” When asked whether she believed women doctors should serve aboard ship, Walters responded, “What is the difference between a nurse and a doctor? A female is a female. Besides, you make your own problems.” Walters told the reporter she had slept in the nurses’ quarters but ate in the doctor’s wardroom, a simple solution to what many had assumed would be a tricky problem. She stated that she had had no experience in treating battle casualties before her sojourn aboard the ship, but neither did some of the other doctors. The ship’s thirty doctors and twenty-nine nurses worked day Bernice Gertrude Rosenthal Walters was and night when casualties came fondly called “Burma” by her friends and was in, everyone taking their turn reone of the early women physicians to sign up gardless of gender. with the navy. She earned the distinction of Walters’ navy personnel file being the first woman doctor ever assigned to contains an official citation coma Navy ship. mending Lt. Cmdr. Bernice Walters for meritorious achievement while performing outstanding services in the Korean theater of operations aboard the USS Consolation from August 18, 1950, to April 30, 1951. “During periods when the ship received heavy casualties,” reads the citation, Walters “worked long hours, ignoring fatigue and loss of sleep and was instrumental in saving many lives.” When the Consolation returned to the States, Walters was assigned to the Naval Hospital at Oakland, California, and in 1955 she retired from the service to enter private practice. Although the navy had twenty women physicians assigned to its reserve at the start of the Korean War, very few appear to have been called to active duty. The navy’s few women doctors realized they were an anomaly and quickly developed a variety of coping mechanisms. Lt. (jg) Patricia Pear’s normal duty station was the children’s division of St. Alban’s Naval Hospital. One day each month, however, she was on duty at the hospital admission room, giving physical exams to sailors reporting for duty or having their regular checkup. Pear, a Chinese American, told a newspaper reporter, “When the sailors first see me, most of them ask me where the doctor is.” As soon as she identified herself to them, many men “looked like they wanted to run for the

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nearest exit.” Asked what it was like being a woman doctor in the navy, Pear explained, “It’s no different than competing with men in any other profession. You can’t be too much of a regular fellow, but you can’t be a wide-eyed gazelle either. You just learn to tread a middle ground.”  The air force, alongside the army, had actively petitioned Congress at the start of the Korean War for the right to commission women physicians but commissioned only one female doctor during the war, Dorothy Armstrong Elias, a 1946 graduate of Duke University Medical School. After serving a medical internship at Mallory Institute in Boston, Armstrong had married surgeon William E. Elias of Washington, D.C., in 1947. She was commissioned as a captain in the air force medical corps in Washington, D.C., in March 1951 and assigned to Sampson Air Force Base, Utica, New York as an obstetrician gynecologist running outpatient services in prenatal and postnatal care for dependents. Elias’s stature as the sole woman air force doctor caused a flurry of press interest, forcing her to agree to several interviews. She was one of five obstetricians at Sampson and quickly became very sensitive about the recognition accorded her. “I’m just another doctor, not a curio,” she told one reporter, “just a woman doctor and I can’t comprehend all the fuss.” When reporters commented on the couple’s long-distance marriage and asked Elias what her surgeon husband thought of her career, she responded, “He’s perfectly happy that I am happy—and I am very happy in my work here.” Unfortunately, Captain Elias did not remain long with the air force. A November 3, 1952, letter to her from Brig. Gen. Edward Kendricks, director of medical staffing and education in the air force Office of the Surgeon General, reads, “It is with regret that we learn of your personal problems, and trust that your presence at your aunt’s home will furnish some relief. Having completed over one year of active duty, you are under no further obligation to the Air Force and so we have issued separation instructions. We hope that your Air Force service has been pleasant as well as professionally profitable. You were our first woman physician to volunteer for active duty and the only one. We have had favorable reports of your activities and if at some future date you are again interested in active duty please be assured that your services would be most welcome.” The letter contains no hint of the nature of the “personal problems” that necessitated Elias’s absence from the air force, but it seems obvious that had she enjoyed her service and wanted to remain in the air force she could have requested a leave of absence, resolved the family problem, and returned to duty, a choice she did not make. After the Korean War, the United States, for the first time in peacetime, maintained a large, active-duty military force through conscription and allocated significant resources to build and maintain a worldwide military presence. The medical departments of the army, navy, and air force participated in this expansion and relied on conscription. During this time over 90 percent

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Dorothy Elias was the first woman physician to be commissioned in the air force medical service. She was sworn in at the rank of captain by Brig. Gen. Edward J. Kendricks, director of staffing and education for the U.S. Air Force medical service. Courtesy Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc.

of all graduating physicians and dentists served on active duty for an average of two years under the Armed Forces Physicians’ Appointment and Residency Consideration Program, commonly referred to as the Berry Plan. The Berry Plan, established in 1954, was named for Frank B. Berry, MD, who instituted the program while serving as assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. The Berry Plan allowed physicians to be deferred from military service while they acquired training in civilian institutions in specialties in which they would fulfill their two-year military obligation. Women physicians, who were not eligible for the draft, were of course not included in the Berry Plan. Between 1954 and 1973, when the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force ended the draft and with it the Berry Plan, only a very small number of women were commissioned in the armed forces medical corps. The majority of women physicians who joined up left within a couple of years; however, a handful of exceptionally tolerant, persistent, and unflappable female doctors succeeded in carving out careers for themselves in the service.

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Surviving in the Service: Cold War Careerists

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ae Adams, the army’s first regular woman physician, had a twenty-year career in the army. Adams first enlisted during World War II after she left college because of a decline in her family’s finances. The army trained Adams as a physical therapist, commissioned her, and sent her overseas. After the war, Adams used the G.I. Bill to attend the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. By the time Adams had completed her internship, the nation was again at war, and the army was again in need of physicians, regardless of gender. Adams rejoined the army as a reservist in 1952, this time as a physician, and was commissioned as a 1st lieutenant in the medical corps reserve. Adams was assigned as a general medical officer at Camp Crowder, Missouri, a separation center for soldiers returning home from Korea. She and her four male colleagues spent much of their time conducting physical exams on men leaving the service. On her first day, Adams was told, “Fae, you take care of everything above the waist and we will take care of the rest!” She responded “Oh, no, you don’t!” and proceeded to do full examinations on each soldier she saw. Like Elias of the air force, Adams was not interested in being treated as a female doctor; she wanted to be a military doctor, nothing more and nothing less. And like the navy’s Pear, Adams strove to tread a middle ground and quickly learned to handle the surprise of the young soldiers she examined. Adams hoped to do her residency at an army hospital and in order to do that, transferred into the regular army in 1953. Adams remained at Crowder until the middle of that year, when she went to Walter Reed Army Hospital to do her residency in obstetrics and gynecology. She was the first woman to do her residency at Walter Reed and the only woman physician there at the time. She had the feeling that she was being watched very carefully, especially in surgery, but she felt that the nurses were very supportive of her. She was a fairly small woman, about 5′4″ and 128 pounds, and her white doctor’s coat was much too large for her. The chief nurse noticed the problem and got on the phone, and the next day Adams had a white coat that fit. Adams was promoted to captain on May 6, 1954, and was at Walter Reed for four years. In 1957 she was assigned to Tokyo Army Hospital in Japan to care for army soldiers and their dependents, embassy staff and their dependents, and army civilian employees. For the two years of her assignment there, she was the only woman doctor. She was assigned to her specialty, obstetrics, and did not remember being treated any differently than the male doctors on staff. She took her turn at night duty just like her colleagues, even though she sometimes felt nervous because she lived quite a distance from the hospital grounds. Captain Adams’s next assignment was to Ft. McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, where the WAC Training Center was located. There she was responsible

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for the dependent wives and children of the staff members as well as those at the Army Chemical School nearby. Although she was theoretically the “chief ” of her department, the only other staff member was a doctor who had not yet finished his residency. This meant that she was on call seven days a week, twentyfour hours a day. Although the McClellan assignment might have been termed “exploitative,” Captain Adams was happy with her career in the army. Leaving was not yet an option, however, as she was required to pay the army back year by year for her residency. After two years at Anniston, Adams was sent to Fort Devens, Fae M. Adams was accepted as the first woman Massachusetts, where she was chief physician in the regular Army Medical Corps of the ob-gyn department and was in 1953, after having served for several years once again exceptionally busy. By in the Women’s Army Corps and then the 1960 she had fulfilled her commitarmy reserves. She continued active duty serment to the army and decided to vice until 1960, when she transferred back to resign from the regular army to the reserves until her retirement in 1978 at the try for a faculty appointment, as rank of colonel. Courtesy Women in Military she had always enjoyed teaching Service for America Memorial Foundation, Inc. new doctors, nurses, and corpsmen. She visited a former professor at the Woman’s Medical College, Mary Pettit, to discuss career possibilities. Pettit advised Adams to get several years of private practice under her belt before accepting a teaching position. Following Pettit’s advice, Adams established a practice in Groton, Massachusetts. She also maintained her ties to the army by joining the reserve. As the only female ob-gyn in the Groton area, Adams was extremely busy. After eight years in private practice, and by then a colonel in the army reserve, she retired from the service and accepted a position at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia. Adams believed she had every reason to be satisfied with her medical career in the army. Without the opportunities the army provided, she may not have become a doctor. Throughout her career, the army assigned her to her chosen medical specialty and provided her with assignments that entailed increasing responsibilities. She left the army only because she aspired to a teach-

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ing position, not because she was in any way dissatisfied with the way the she had been treated.  By 1960, when Fae Adams left active duty, there were fewer than ten women physicians in the regular army and the reserve. Women physicians who joined the army during the Korean War and remained in the service throughout their medical careers included Mary Steinheimer and Christine Haycock. Steinheimer, a specialist in pediatrics, joined the Army Medical Corps Reserve in late 1951, fresh from a three-year stint as a medical missionary in China, where she had been fulfilling a childhood dream. She left China only because in 1951 the U.S. State Department asked all Americans there to leave the country due to increasing tensions with Communist China as a result of the Korean War. When Steinheimer arrived home, somewhat at loose ends, her sister, who had served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, suggested that she apply to the army. She was commissioned as a captain “almost before I knew it” and assigned as a pediatrician at Fort Meade, Maryland, where she cared for dependents. It is not at all surprising that the army quickly put Steinheimer in uniform. At this point in the war the army was chronically short of physicians, and Steinheimer’s specialty, pediatrics, fit in well with what the army expected of a woman physician. This was not the first time Steinheimer had applied to the army. During World War II, when she was a student at Syracuse University Medical School, Steinheimer had noticed that male medical students were receiving their medical education courtesy of the army or the navy, in return for a service commitment. Steinheimer tried to get accepted into the army program, but even though the army was commissioning women physicians into the medical corps reserve at the time, officials were not interested in paying for female medical students’ educations. Women physicians were serving in the armed forces only for the duration of the war emergency, the services assumed. Neither Steinheimer nor the army could have predicted that she would eventually have a twenty-year career as an army physician. Although Steinheimer was almost always the only woman doctor at the army hospitals where she worked, she felt that she was not treated differently because of her gender. “I was treated just like the fellows,” she said. “There was no discrimination. I wasn’t given anything lesser to do because I was a woman, and I certainly had plenty of [career building] opportunities.” Captain Steinheimer was at Fort Meade for three years, transferring into the regular army as soon as the option became available. After her experience in China, she appreciated the opportunity to work in a modern facility with upto-date equipment and fully enjoyed her job and its attendant responsibilities. Her next assignment took her to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver for three years as the assistant chief for pediatrics, followed by a tour of duty as chief of pediatrics at Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu, where she was pro-

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moted to major. She was promoted on time and consistently received assignments with increasing responsibilities. Steinheimer’s next assignment was as chief of the hospital clinic at Fort Jay, New York, and from there she went to the 2nd General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, first as chief of pediatrics and later as pediatric consultant to the surgeon general of the U.S. Army in Europe. While at Landstuhl she met another army doctor, a widower, and the two decided to get married and retire. The army obligingly sent them both to their final assignments at William Beaumont Hospital in El Paso, Texas, where Mary Steinheimer Collins retired as a full colonel after twenty years of service.  Steinheimer, like Adams, was very positive about her career in the army. Both women believed that there was little overt sexism directed at them, and both overcame the relatively minor comments and setbacks they encountered with quiet persistence and humor. The experience of Christine Haycock, however, was measurably different. Haycock encountered persistent negative harassment that she believes ultimately had an adverse impact on her military career. Christine Haycock became a cadet nurse during World War II because her family could not afford to send her to nursing school. Haycock got a three-year nursing degree from Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey; by the time she graduated, the war was over, but she applied for a commission in the army reserve as a way of honoring her obligation to the government. Her commission in the Army Nurse Corps Reserve came through in 1948. Meanwhile, she had started taking premed courses at the University of Chicago on a scholarship based on her academic records. She worked as a private duty nurse at night and fulfilled her reserve responsibilities at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. Haycock began applying to medical schools as soon as she finished at the University of Chicago, and like all other aspiring medical students she sent in numerous applications. She was accepted at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia but could not afford to go. She also interviewed at the University of Illinois, and the doctor who interviewed her said, “You know, Miss Haycock, you have all the qualities that we like to see in our women students, but we’ve filled our quota of women this year.” Luckily, she was accepted at the Long Island College of Medicine, a school that also made a practice of taking only a quota of women students—usually 10 percent. Haycock decided to attend the Long Island College of Medicine because her aunt and uncle lived in Brooklyn and she could save money by living with them and commuting via the subway. She continued to work as a nurse throughout medical school. Haycock graduated from medical school in 1952 and was accepted as the first woman medical intern at Walter Reed Army Hospital. The army accepted two other women as interns at the same time and sent each to a different army hospital. (Fae Adams, who arrived at Walter

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Reed after Haycock had left, was the first woman resident at Walter Reed.) Haycock transferred from the Army Nurse Corps to the Army Medical Corps as soon as the internship came through. According to Haycock, the nurses at Walter Reed, whom she hoped might help her, were actually jealous and made her life very difficult. She was billeted with the nurses, because the intern quarters were all male. Unfortunately, her arrival forced the chief nurse, a major, to change rooms, and this nurse was angry and resentful because she, a major, was being forced to move for a mere lieutenant. Her attitude influenced the other nurses, who referred to Hay- Col. Christine E. Haycock served in the U.S. cock as “that female intern.” Hay- Cadet Nurse Corps of the U.S. Army durcock later lived off post, and when ing World War II. She later became the first a new chief nurse eventually ar- woman intern at Walter Reed Medical Center and also the first woman to transfer directly rived, the atmosphere improved. In an interview many years later, from the U.S. Army Nurse Corps to the U.S. Haycock provided an example of Army Medical Corps. She served in Japan how the nurses’ attitudes created from 1953 to 1954. Courtesy Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc. difficulties for her. One day when she was busy in the laboratory a nurse told her that she was needed right away on the women’s ward. She recounted, “I raced over there, all the way across the hospital, out of breath, and was told a woman patient was having chest pains. But when I went into the room, the patient was sitting up in bed talking to a visitor. She told me that she had ‘terrible gas pains.’ ” Haycock became angry at the ward nurse and lost her temper. She told the nurse that she should have simply given the patient some peppermint. She scolded, “For God’s sake, what is the matter with you?” The nurse said, “Don’t you swear at me!” Haycock responded, “Well, you are so stupid, don’t you know the difference between possible cardiac problems and gas pains?” A colonel’s wife standing nearby reported Haycock, and she got “reamed” by her commander, who said, “Ladies don’t swear,” and knocked her efficiency report down from an excellent to an “O,” which was the bare minimum necessary for survival. According to Haycock, that efficiency report hurt her later in her career.

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Haycock’s battle with the nurses is extremely interesting given Fae Adams’s statement that the nurses were extremely supportive of her. Haycock had been an army nurse; Adams had been an army medical specialist (physical therapist). Although Haycock was not unduly young to be an intern (she was about three years behind cohorts who moved directly from a four-year bachelor’s degree to medical school), she was somewhat younger than Adams, whose stature as a resident not an intern may have given her more authority and entitled her to more respect. Also, it was Haycock who initially broke the ground at Walter Reed as the first woman MD. As the pathbreaker, she may have taken the brunt of the surprise, shock, and resentment of the doctors and nurses at Walter Reed. Haycock’s personality and attitude toward subordinates appears to have been very much like that of the stereotypical male doctor: impatient, irritable, and blustering. Perhaps it was this very attitude that the nurses resented; after all, she was not a man and had actually only recently been one of them. They may have expected her to be much more sympathetic to them and were upset when this was not the case. Haycock, meanwhile, had many of the same characteristics, preferences, and even hobbies as her male colleagues. She enjoyed participating in and watching sports, such as baseball and fencing, for example, and aspired to be a surgeon. Haycock’s first assignment as an intern was in urology, and she believed this was deliberate. “If my gender was going to be a handicap,” she explained, “it would be demonstrated immediately in urology, and in that case the school wanted me to wash out quickly.” However the chief of urology was a good supervisor. His daughter was a WAC, and he was supportive. Another supervisor was not so accommodating. On Haycock’s first day in thoracic surgery, the supervising doctor initially refused to accept her as an intern in his department. He would not have a woman as an intern, he insisted. Haycock returned to the supervisor who had given her the assignment, and he told her to tell the thoracic chief that he would either have Haycock for an intern or he would have no intern. The department chief was forced to accept her but ordered her to “stay out of his sight!” This chief made it very difficult for Haycock throughout her rotation with him. For example, Haycock had to use the nurses’ dressing room to change in and out of operating scrubs. Often, while she was doing this, the chief would tell the other team members where they would be meeting to discuss the operation and make other assignments. Haycock, not knowing where the designated meeting place was, would have to look all over the hospital for her team. Invariably, when she finally caught up with them, the colonel would scold her for being “late.” When Lieutenant Haycock did her pathology assignment, she elected to work with a “lady technician,” whose project involved pap smears. Haycock made slides of specimens to check for cancer cells and did a whole series of

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pap smears on herself. She then prepared a presentation on her work and planned to show it to the department the week it was completed. Meanwhile, she got her efficiency report back from pathology, and it was very bad. When she asked the department chief why, he said his residents had never seen her and didn’t know what she was up to. She said she had been working with the technician and explained that she would be giving a presentation of what she had done later that week. She was very upset, because the chief ’s wife was a doctor who had introduced Haycock to the Women’s Medical Association, and Haycock had believed that the pathology chief would be able to overlook her gender and give her a fair evaluation. When the chief finally heard Haycock’s presentation, he went down to administration, demanded the efficiency report, tore it up, and wrote a second glowing one instead. Everyone was amazed because that had never happened before. Retelling the story, Haycock laughed and said she always knew her presentation was good. Regardless of her difficulties, Haycock made it through her internship, and the army then sent her to Japan. She was originally assigned to Puerto Rico, but since there was a war on (the Korean War) she asked to be sent to Korea instead. However, because she was a woman the army refused to send her to Korea (although there were hundreds of army nurses there) and sent her to Japan, where she was assigned to “Grant Heights,” a U.S. military compound, to care for military dependents. She was later sent to Camp Drake, which was an R&R stopover for soldiers returning from Korea. Haycock remembers one time when she was called out in the middle of the night to an emergency at the home of an army sergeant. He and his wife were concerned about their crying baby. Haycock saw that the baby’s belly was distended and asked what it had eaten. The wife said she didn’t know; their nanny fed the child. Nor did the wife know when the baby had last had a bowel movement. Haycock was frustrated, because she needed to know, and suggested to the wife that she ought to pay more attention to the baby’s routine. She then gave the infant an enema and left. The next day she was told that the sergeant had complained that she had insulted his wife. Haycock was flabbergasted. Because the complaint had gone through official channels, the army was obligated to investigate, but nothing ever came of it. Haycock believes that had a male doctor said the same thing to the sergeant’s wife, the couple would have accepted the criticism; however, because she was a woman in authority, the husband and wife were insulted. Haycock’s career in the army was twice jeopardized by her propensity for blunt, straight talk that may have worked for a man but was unacceptable for a woman in the military. When Haycock returned to the States, she needed to do her residency. Because of the poor efficiency report she had received at Walter Reed, however, she could not find a residency in surgery at a military hospital. Fae Adams was at that time a resident at Walter Reed, but her

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residency was in ob-gyn. Determined to become a surgeon, Haycock decided to leave the military and find a surgical residency at a civilian hospital. By dint of dogged persistence, Haycock found a residency at St. Barnabus Hospital in New York, where she remained for four years. In order to become board-qualified for surgery, she then had to find a senior residency, which she completed at St. Johns Hospital in New York. Haycock was then hired at the Newark, New Jersey, hospital. Although she was placed in the ob-gyn department, her job entailed a great deal of surgery and she “broke into” surgery through ob-gyn. Although HayCol. Clotilde Bowen gives her farewell speech cock’s need to do a surgical resiafter turning over command of Hawley Army dency forced her to leave the army, Community Hospital, Fort Benjamin Harrithe break was only temporary. She son, Indiana, 11 September 1978. Courtesy eventually returned through the U.S. Army. reserve. Clotilde Bowen, the first black woman medical doctor in the armed forces, also moved from the regular army into the reserves so she could get the training she wanted. Bowen was the first African American woman to graduate from Ohio State University Medical School in 1947. She interned at Harlem Hospital in New York City and was the first black woman to serve a residency at Triboro Hospital, Queens Medical Center, in Jamaica, Long Island. Bowen’s residency was in internal medicine, and she developed an interest in the treatment of tuberculosis. She pursued her interest with a New York State Health Department fellowship in tuberculosis from 1949 to 1950. Before beginning her military career in 1955, she was head of the New York Department of Public Health’s TB clinic for five years and conducted a private practice in New York City. Bowen joined the army as a TB specialist because she was unhappy with her lifestyle in the city and wanted to change the direction of her career. The army assigned her to Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania as a pulmonary disease specialist. However, while at Valley Forge Bowen developed an interest in psychiatry. In an interview many years later, Bowen stated that she applied for an army fellowship to study psychiatry “but couldn’t get into the program. At the time, it appeared to be because I was a woman.” This is interesting since in World

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War I and World War II the army frequently assigned women physicians as psychiatrists. Perhaps race as well as gender contributed to Bowen’s difficulty. Bowen was determined to study psychiatry, however, and decided that if she couldn’t do it in the army, she would do it as a civilian. In 1959, the year she was promoted to major, she separated from the army for psychiatric training at the VA hospital in Albany, New York. Bowen was not ready to give up on the army altogether, though, and joined the reserve, training with the 340th General Hospital unit in Albany. In 1962 the Veterans Administration transferred Bowen to the VA hospital at Roseburg, Oregon, as a staff psychiatrist. Bowen was appointed chief of psychiatric service at Roseburg in 1963. During this time in Oregon, Bowen continued her reserve activities and completed the reserve officer career course by driving three hundred miles a week to the reserve center in Eugene, Oregon. Janice Mendelson, the daughter of an army physician, received her medical degree from the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine and interned at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh. She then did residencies in general and thoracic surgery at St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. She continued her studies with a fellowship in thyroid and thoracic surgery at Ohio State University Hospital in Columbus, followed by a fellowship in the application of rehabilitation techniques to general surgery at New York University’s Bellevue Institute of Physical Medicine and Research. She joined the Army Medical Corps in 1955, the same year as Clotilde Bowen, and was certified as a general surgeon by the American Board of Surgery in 1957. According to Mendelson, she joined the army because she liked to travel. She was single and noticed that many of her married male colleagues, some with young children, were required to serve in the military. Several expressed distress at the prospect, because it meant uprooting their families and carried the possibility of overseas service. Mendelson, who had grown up in the army, figured it was easier for her to go and hoped that by doing so she could spare one young man from disrupting his family life and career. Mendelson was assigned to Valley Forge Army Hospital while Clotilde Bowen was there, but she left after a year for Womack Army Hospital at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. By 1959, the year Bowen left the regular army to study psychiatry, Mendelson was a major assigned to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and was one of only eight women doctors in the army. She held the position of chief of the trauma investigation branch in the biophysics division and was responsible for finding better ways of treating mass casualties. In one project, she headed a research team that developed an anti-gangrene vaccine that doctors hoped would cut down on casualties resulting from massive open wounds. Mendelson became a fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 1961. Unlike Haycock and Bowen, Mendelson was content with her military career and so remained in the regular army. Although she had joined up because she liked to travel, she remained involved in surgical re-

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search at Edgewood Arsenal and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, until her assignment to Vietnam as a colonel in 1970. The navy, like the army, had a small number of women physicians who managed to carve out medical careers for themselves. Frances L. Willoughby, who graduated from the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1938, was somewhat older than the typical medical school graduate because she had taught school for six years in order to save enough money for medical school. Willoughby served her internship at St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing, Michigan, and took a Lt. Col. (Dr.) Janice A. Mendelson, U.S. Army psychiatric residency at Travis City Medical Corps, served as the command surState Hospital, a mental institution geon, Military Assistance Command, Vietin Michigan. Psychiatry was not nam (MACV), during the Vietnam War. She her first choice of specialization, joined the army in December 1955, serving but residencies for women were as a surgeon at Valley Forge General Hospiscarce, and she accepted what she tal, Pennsylvania; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; could find. Willoughby remained Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland; and Fort Sam at Travis City until 1944, when Houston, Texas; and as chief surgeon at Fort she applied to the navy. She was Campbell, Kentucky, before retiring as a colocommissioned a lieutenant in the nel in May 1981. Courtesy Women in Military navy reserve in 1944 and assigned Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc. to the hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, where she was in charge of the WAVES psychiatric ward and helped to administer the first electric shock treatment given at Bethesda. Her next assignment was to the naval dispensary in Washington, D.C., where she treated both male and female patients including WAVES, navy nurses, and sailors in the process of demobilizing, as well as civil service applicants. She remained at the dispensary until 1949. In 1948 Willoughby was sworn into the regular navy with seven other WAVES, making her the first regular female physician in that branch of the services. Willoughby transferred to the naval hospital in Philadelphia in 1949 and was placed in charge of two wards in the neuropsychiartry section. Between 1951 and 1953 she supervised the veteran outpatient clinic and did neuropsychiatric consultations. She was promoted to captain in 1957 and became chief of

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neuropsychiatric service and officer-in-charge of the neuropsychiatric technicians school. Willoughby remained in Philadelphia until her retirement in 1964. Willoughby was described by senior reviewing officers as “quiet, conscientious, meticulous, and devoted to duty.” Her successful navy career, defined by her promotion to captain, the highest rank she could attain, indicates that her medical specialty and personality fit in with what the navy expected of its female physicians. Her quiet persistence in going after what she wanted and her willingness to accept compromise, delineated by her early career before she joined the navy, point to a woman who succeeded through diligent hard work and a willingness to overlook small disappointments in exchange for a solid career. Gioconda Saraniero’s career in the Navy Medical Corps was very different. Saraniero was born to Italian immigrant parents and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Bright and ambitious, she graduated with the highest honors from the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia when she was only twenty-three years old. Saraniero first joined the Navy Medical Corps during World War II but left in August 1946 to accept a position in hematology at Hoffman La Roche pharmaceutical company in Trenton, New Jersey. She was also on staff at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn as a clinical assistant in pediatrics and pathology. In late 1948, however, as soon as the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act created a permanent place for women in the navy, Saraniero returned to active duty in the WAVES and was assigned to St. Albans Naval Hospital in Long Island, New York. Saraniero, like Frances Willoughby, rejoined the navy at a time when, officially, the navy was not supposed to be able to commission women doctors and was dodging the law by commissioning its women physicians in the WAVES rather than the Navy Medical Corps. This allowed the navy to give Saraniero an “additional duty” as WAVES representative of the Third Naval District. Although there is no way of knowing how Saraniero felt about her status, the fact that she voluntarily rejoined the navy indicates that she had enjoyed her service and was willing to accept a commission in the WAVES as opposed to the medical corps. With the start of the war in Korea, Saraniero was ordered to the U.S. Naval Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland, where she served as the officer in charge of hematology and the blood bank. Once again, as an additional duty she served as the WAVES personnel representative. When in 1950 Congress passed legislation allowing the services to commission women physicians in the reserves of their medical corps, Saraniero was promoted to lieutenant commander in the medical corps reserves. Saraniero elected to stay with the Navy medical department after the Korean War ended, and initially she had a stellar career. She became the assistant to the director of the publications division at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in 1954, an assignment that took her out of her medical specialty of

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hematology. Perhaps as compensation, she then received a coveted overseas assignment to the naval station hospital at Naples, Italy, taking care of servicemen’s families. During this eighteen-month assignment the forty-three-year-old received two promotions in quick succession, the first to commander in September 1955, and the second two months later to captain, making her the first woman physician to wear four stripes. Interviewed at her parents’ home in Brooklyn in January 1956, while on leave prior to reporting to her new assignment at the BuGioconda Rita Saraniero’s service in the navy reau of Medicine and Surgery in spanned two decades. Commissioned in 1943, Washington, D.C., Saraniero told a she was the first woman in the navy to be seWashington Star reporter that the lected for promotion to the rank of captain in inspiration for her Navy career was the medical corps in 1955. her uncle, Andre Vignipiano, who had served as a physician aboard Italian ships. During her assignment to Naples, Saraniero explained, she was able to see her uncle, who lived in a suburb of the city, frequently. Although Saraniero was a forty-four-year-old accomplished, professional woman who had just broken a significant career barrier for navy women, the reporter, also a female, did not focus on her medical career but wrote instead that Saraniero was “feminine down to her fingertips” and that “the green-eyed doctor likes her high heels, and wears frilly dresses and earrings in her off-duty hours.” The doctor told the reporter that it was important for a woman working in a man’s world to have a life after-hours in her own home, and explained that she had designed two settees covered in a special aquamarine fabric while she was in Italy. Nothing was said about her job as a blood specialist at the naval hospital in Naples. Later that month, Saraniero returned to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery as the assistant to the director, physical qualifications and records division. With her return to the States, however, Saraniero’s career hit a dead-end. Her promotion to captain meant that the jobs to which she could be assigned were basically administrative in nature, and her training and natural abilities may not have prepared her to supervise a large staff or function as an executive officer. As a woman, she may not have received the automatic respect

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granted a male officer in her position. In 1963 Saraniero was assigned to the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda as special assistant to the commanding officer. Well before she retired after twenty years of service in 1966, Saraniero began having problems on the job. In 1964 her supervisor, Captain John R. Seal, wrote on her fitness report, “This officer has not been assigned where either her professional medical ability in patient care or special training in hematology could be utilized, as a result both capabilities are nil without prolonged refresher training.” Further on in the form he wrote, “This officer has a known psychiatric disability, but in view of its stable nature and compatibility with some types of assignment, she is being enabled to complete her 20 years of service. She works three days a week on the assignment at NMRI of preparing a brochure on the Institute, and two days a week in the research division of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.” Certainly preparing a brochure was work far below what one would expect of a physician of Saraniero’s training, experience, and qualifications. Why hadn’t the navy assigned her to her specialty, hematology, earlier in her career track, before she needed “prolonged refresher training”? A letter from the navy’s chief of personnel requested that Captain Seal provide a more detailed explanation of the lower-than-average fitness report he sent in for Captain Saraniero.  It is obvious from Seal’s response that he was not pleased with the assignment of Saraniero to his command because she had no recent “research background or experience.” He was clearly bothered by her “senior rank,” stating that her senior rank coupled with her lack of recent experience meant that she could not be assigned to a laboratory division. For this reason, Captain Seal explained, he had assigned Captain Saraniero as “Special Assistant to the Commanding Officer” and asked her to draft an updated information brochure on the institute suitable for distribution to physicians, scientists, and other professional people. He gave her other writing jobs, he said, “none of which has been completed, even in draft form, in something over a year.” Seal also mentioned “problems with several members of the Medical Department who have been associated with her in various capacities” and wrote, “It is apparent that a major problem exists in assignment of this officer with her increasing seniority, since her basic insecurity, lack of ability to effectively work with subordinates, and loss of professional competence in the practice of medicine or hematology through long assignments elsewhere limit her usefulness.” Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, he wrote, “These comments in no way detract from Captain Saraniero’s personal charm, dedication to the Navy, and desire to please her superiors and to do the best she can. In the situation where her duties are neither demanding nor responsible, where she can exercise her proclivities for social graciousness, and has the ability to enjoy ample social exchange with her colleagues during working hours, it would be expected that her rating would be much

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better. This Command cannot however evaluate her at a higher level without regarding it as penalizing those officers of equal dedication, who achieve results which enhance the operations of the Navy.” Did Captain Seal’s reference to Saraniero’s “basic insecurity” pinpoint a real problem, or was this his interpretation of female as opposed to male methods of interacting with others in a work environment? Studies have shown that rather than arbitrarily issuing orders, female supervisors often first ask the opinions of others and try to come to a general agreement on what needs to be done. Often women supervisors tend to emphasize teamwork as opposed to hierarchical decision-making. Of course, Captain Saraniero may have felt insecure. Did she wonder if she deserved her rank, or did she worry that others felt she didn’t deserve it? Reading between the lines, Saraniero’s boss seems to have believed she was a professional lightweight, an officer who did not accomplish much work but who shone in social situations. With a fitness report like this, it is not surprising that Saraniero, whom, it appeared, loved the navy, elected to retire after twenty years of service. The comments of a colleague of Saraniero’s at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery may throw more light on her problems at her last assignment. “Gigi was a competent physician,” he said, “but she had a reputation of being very hard to get along with. She was very independent, and thus had a difficult time fitting into Navy bureaucracy.” This individual believed that because the navy “couldn’t get rid of her,” they assigned her to less demanding jobs where she could do the least amount of damage. He gave the following example: “One of my responsibilities was submitting the annual budget for the department headed by Gigi. However because she was so independent, she never gave me any guidance about how much money her department would need. So with no input from her, I drafted up a budget just like the previous years. I gave it to her for approval and she sat on it and refused to release it. The Budget people called me and asked for it repeatedly and all I could say was ‘Captain Saraniero has it.’ ‘Well get it!’ they responded. She refused to give it to me, so in the end the Budget people gave the department the figure of “0.” When I told the Captain this she responded ‘No problem,’ made a phone call to a contact of hers in Navy Operations and received the cash! She simply would not follow the bureaucratic pathways she was supposed to.”  Saraniero’s actions as described by her colleague do not sound like a person who suffered from insecurity. Rather, like many professional women before and after her, she may have developed her own methods of dealing with the system because the standard good-old-boy bureaucracy that worked for men did not work for her. For whatever reasons, however, Saraniero’s navy career ended at the Naval Medical Research Institute. Upon retiring from the navy in 1966, Saraniero obtained a license to practice medicine in Massapequa, New York. Unfortunately, she disappears from the records at that point. But since

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she was able to obtain a medical license, her knowledge of medicine must not have atrophied to the point Captain Seal suggested. There were no woman physicians in the Air Force Medical Corps for almost a decade after the departure of Dorothy Elias in November 1952. Then in April 1962, the air force commissioned Patricia Nell, MD, as a lieutenant in the Air Force Medical Corps Reserve. Lieutenant Nell was the second women to join the air force reserve and eventually became the air force’s first female flight surgeon. In a newspaper interview done almost thirty years later, Nell remembered, “I was finishing my internship and the first year of residency and all my male colleagues were being drafted and going overseas. So I wrote to the Air Force and asked if they’d take me.” After basic training she moved to her first assignment with the 7310th Medical Squadron at Rhein–Main Air Force Base in Germany. Within months Nell was promoted to captain, a standard procedure due to her advanced education and training. She spent six years overseas and then returned to the United States to finish her degree in aerospace medicine through the Air Force Institute of Technology. In 1968 Nell volunteered to serve in Vietnam, but the air force said “no,” claiming fear that she would be captured. By 1969 the five-foot-tall Nell was assigned to Plattsburg Air Force Base in upstate New York. Remembered Nell, “General Townley, the commander of the Strategic Air Command, asked me if I wanted to be a flight surgeon. How could I say no? Of course I said yes!” She found earning the required one hundred hours of flying time the most difficult part of becoming a flight surgeon. “I had 73 hours earned when I moved to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but my position there was chief of pediatrics and I didn’t get to fly very often.” She was promoted to major while at Wright-Patterson. Nell remembered that during the late 1960s and early 1970s officials frequently questioned her presence on tactical air flights because they were not accustomed to seeing women as part of an aircrew: “There was always someone trying to curtail my participation. In 1971 I was told I couldn’t fly on a paratroop drop over Hawaii. When one of the paratroopers sliced his finger before takeoff, all of a sudden I was needed as a medic.” Major Nell participated in the drop after all. By then Nell had left active duty and joined the 440th Airlift Wing in Milwaukee. For several years she juggled her reserve commitment with a private practice in Green Bay and a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her busy schedule meant that she was unable to keep her flying hours current, so she resigned from the air force reserve in 1972. She found that she missed flying, however, and returned to the reserve in 1981. She was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1983 and remained in the air force reserves until she retired in 1989. Although it was possible for a woman physician to enjoy a medical career

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in the armed forces during the 1950s and 1960s, her path was fraught with potential pitfalls that had nothing to do with skill or competency. Army physicians Fae Adams, Mary Steinheimer, and Janice Mendelson and navy doctor Frances Willoughby succeeded by quietly pursuing the business of medicine and deliberately ignoring the inevitable gender-related slights and annoyances that came their way. Quiet and unassuming, they nonetheless were equally persistent, gently maneuvering around some obstacles and compromising when necessary. Army physicians Christine Haycock and Clotilde Bowen and air force doctor Patricia Nell were more forthright by nature and unwilling to compromise when remaining in the service became incompatible with their career goals. Haycock and Bowen decided to leave the army when that service refused to give them the training they wanted, while Nell left the air force when a combination of career advancement and official nervousness limited her ability to fly. Navy physician Gioconda Saraniero’s career foundered because in the eyes of her coworkers and superiors, her essential feminine characteristics outshone her professional capabilities. When describing Saraniero, her colleagues used loaded phrases such as “personal charm,” “desire to please,” and “social graciousness.” They appeared unable to equate their conceptions of her with their expectation of what a navy doctor should be. Perhaps because of this, Saraniero was unable to fit into the naval bureaucracy and thus was unable to efficiently perform her duties. In order to have a successful career in the armed forces, then, a woman physician needed to be capable and efficient and do her job quietly without calling attention to herself by complaining. She had to be persistent and willing to overlook slights and annoyances. Women who were too aggressive or acted too much like their male colleagues, like Christine Haycock, were resented by male doctors and female nurses alike; however, those whose behavior was “too feminine,” like Gioconda Saraniero, were brushed aside and belittled. Although in theory women physicians were allowed to serve in the military on a career basis, little else had changed regarding society’s and the military’s expectations of women doctors in the twenty years since the end of the Second World War.

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hroughout the war in Vietnam, the U.S. military had consistent trouble recruiting physicians. The vast majority of military doctors came into the service through the Berry Plan, which of course did not include women. By 1966 both the army and navy were experiencing significant shortages of physicians. At this time both services became more interested in recruiting women physicians and took deliberate steps to facilitate their recruitment.

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That year Diane Colgan, a third-year student at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia, heard about a navy “clerkship” program for aspiring physicians and inquired at the recruitment office in Philadelphia. She was told that the navy did not accept women into that particular program, so she asked the recruiter to send her information if the requirements changed. Several months later a packet of information arrived— the navy had decided to accept women into the Ensign 1915 Program. For Colgan, this meant that the navy would pay her an ensign’s salary during her last year of medical school and that in exchange she would owe the navy one year Capt. (Dr.) Diane L. Colgan, Medical Corps, of active duty service after she U.S. Navy (Retired), July 1967–October 1978 and U.S. Navy Reserve, October 1978– graduated. Diane Colgan had wanted to be- September 1989. Courtesy Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc. come a pediatrician since she was seven years old, when she “fell in love” with her own pediatrician. But at the Woman’s Medical College, the chief of surgery, a Dr. Cooper, became one of Colgan’s favorite professors, and Diane changed her mind. She so loved the “instant gratification” of surgery that she decided she would become a surgeon instead, not particularly concerned that surgery was a fairly unusual choice of specialization for a woman. One reason for this might have been that as a student at the Woman’s Medical College, Diane had not yet been exposed to gender-related difficulties. Colgan spent “one or two” summers as a clerk at the naval hospital and then entered Bethesda Naval Hospital as an intern in 1967–68, probably the first woman intern at Bethesda and the only woman intern in a group of sixteen to seventeen men. The administrators at Bethesda were somewhat disconcerted to have to deal with a woman intern. One of the big problems was where she would sleep—usually the male interns were placed together in a dorm, but they could not have a woman in with them. Eventually a room was found for her in “the towers,” where navy officer patients were housed. Another concern for administrators was the possible reaction of male officer patients when a female asked them to disrobe for a medical examination. This turned out to be more of an imagined problem than a real one. Everyone,

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stated Colgan, was very professional, and male patients did not object to a female doctor examining them. Colgan remembers very few instances when she faced difficulty because she was a woman. Her fellow interns were all “great guys,” and she got along “just fine” with everyone. Interestingly, the navy didn’t accept another woman intern until four years after Colgan left, and at that point some of these early women interns did have trouble. When asked why she thought that she had avoided gender-related difficulties as an intern, Colgan said it was a matter of “personalities.” Sometimes, she stated, women felt that they had to “show up” the guys, but that attitude never worked. Colgan said that her residency in general surgery at Bethesda was a good experience because the chief of surgery was “a wonderful man.” The hospital had two new residents each year for a total of eight residents each year. Unfortunately, Colgan’s counterpart had trouble with alcohol dependency and had to drop out of the program, which meant that she was the sole fourth-year resident and had to carry a heavy load. The hospital saw many of the worst wounded from Vietnam so that much of the surgery involved men with blown-up intestines and other horrific wounds. By the end of her residency, Colgan had decided that she wanted to specialize in plastic surgery. This meant that she was required to undertake another two-year residency in plastic surgery at Bethesda. During this time, surgeons were doing a lot of facial reconstruction on soldiers and sailors who had been wounded at the end of the Vietnam War. When Colgan finished her two-year residency in 1974, she stayed on at Bethesda as attending staff in the plastic surgery department, and in 1976 she became chief of plastic surgery. She held this position until 1978, when she received an offer “too good to turn down” and became a partner in a private practice. Until this offer came along, she had planned to stay in the navy for twenty years, because she was enjoying the experience so much. Colgan remained in the navy reserve for ten years after she retired from active duty. During the 1980s she usually did her reserve duty at Bethesda, which was often short of staff. She left the reserves in 1990 as a captain, just before the start of the Gulf War, and was very glad, because if she had been called to active duty, her private practice might have been in trouble. In the reserve, she said, one could count on not being deployed. After the Gulf War, however, this was not the case for medical personnel. Colgan did not remember ever feeling gender discrimination during her time in the navy. She admitted there may have been some “little things” over the years, but they were negligible and easily ridden out. She realized, however, that many of her female colleagues in the navy did have to battle sexism, especially from “older male physicians,” who sometimes deliberately attempted to make difficulties for young female physicians. While she believed that some luck was involved in her own situation (she never ran into that

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particular type of male supervisor), she also believed that a woman’s own personality sometimes compounded the problem. Women who try to outshine their male peers, she stated, always have difficulties. She tried to counsel younger women who found themselves having gender-related problems by telling them that “whatever the situation is, it will eventually pass. A hostile supervisor will not always be your supervisor, you just have to ride it out and get it over with.” In 1966 the army, like the navy, stepped up its recruitment of women physicians. The army surgeon general explained to a newspaper reporter that “women could care for the sick and injured equally as well as men in various medical specialties.” Officially, the army stated, “Medical doctors are actively recruited for duty in the United States Army without preference to sex.” By 1971 twenty-two female physicians were on duty with the U.S. Army, including Janice Mendelson, Clotilde Bowen, and Christine Haycock. Haycock returned to the army via the reserve in the early 1960s by joining the 344th Army Reserve Unit out of Brooklyn, New York. The unit went on active duty for two weeks every year, to Fort Drum, New York, and Fort Dix, New Jersey. Haycock stated that she encountered considerable sexism in the reserve, especially when it came to promotions. Her promotion from captain to major, for example, was delayed for more than a year, ostensibly because someone had “lost” the paperwork. She later discovered that a male doctor in her unit did not want her supervising him, and the unit waited until he transferred out before putting in her paperwork. She sometimes felt that her commanders doubted her competency. For example, once, when the unit was training at Fort Drum, she diagnosed an appendectomy but was not allowed to operate until a male supervisor confirmed her diagnosis. Had she been male, she believes, she would not have needed permission to operate, but because she was a woman, she was not granted the assumption of competency automatically given a man. Eventually Major Haycock grew tired of this never blatant but fairly frequent attitude and transferred to the 322nd reserve. But she continued to encounter resistance during her promotion from major to lieutenant colonel. Although by virtue of seniority she was entitled to the position of commander of the field hospital, she did not attain the appointment until another woman in an Ohio reserve unit demonstrated that a woman was capable of such a command. Haycock eventually reached the rank of colonel and believes that sexism denied her the opportunity to be a general officer. When a vacancy occurred in her geographic area, she was not informed and so did not submit her name. After the appointment was made the selectors told her that they were “disappointed” that she had not put in for it. Confident and assertive, Haycock appears to have alienated numerous superiors, colleagues, and subordinates at different times in her career, an un-

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fortunate situation that her competency and hard work were not able to overcome. Her personality would undoubtedly have been more acceptable had she been a man. Had she been willing to tone down her personality, she may have had an easier time of it in the service. Did Haycock’s “typical surgeon-type” personality prevent her from reaching general officer rank? Possibly not, given the fact that no female physician in any service reached general officer rank during this era, regardless of her personality or medical specialty. Lt. Col. Anna Brady may have been the first female army docAnna Brady served as an army nurse for more tor to serve in Vietnam during than two years in Europe during World War II the war. The army recalled the before becoming a doctor and serving in an fi ft yfi veyearold Brady to active army reserve unit in Vietnam. While in counduty in June 1968 and assigned try she commanded a medical detachment her to the army hospital at Chu and, as a lieutenant colonel, was at one point Lai, Vietnam, where she spent ten the highest-ranking woman officer serving in months heading an eight-man orVietnam. After the war, Dr. Brady returned to thopedic surgery team. Brady had her private practice, and in 1972 she was promoted to colonel in the reserves before her re- direct experience treating battle catirement. Courtesy Women in Military Service sualties; she had served as an army for America Memorial Foundation, Inc. nurse in an evacuation hospital in France during World War II. After the war, she remained in the army teserves and attended the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia, graduating with her medical degree in 1951. She interned at Philadelphia General Hospital and ultimately became chief of orthopedic surgery at Frankfort Hospital and a member of the teaching faculty at the Woman’s Medical College. The hospital at Chu Lai treated Vietnamese civilians as well as U.S. soldiers. Brady noticed that many of the Vietnamese who came to the hospital were seeing a physician for the first time and that they frequently suffered from malaria, intestinal parasites, and tuberculosis. To Brady’s frustration, however, she was sent home before her year’s tour was up, as part of Nixon’s cutback in troops in Vietnam, feeling as if she should have been able to provide more help to that beleaguered country.

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In 1967 Clotilde Bowen, the African American physician who had been refused psychiatric training by the army, returned to active duty with the army as a psychiatrist. In her memoir she stated that the death of a friend’s son in Vietnam in 1966 convinced her to return to active duty, where she might be in a position to help other young soldiers. Bowen, a lieutenant colonel, was assigned to Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii as the chief of psychiatric service and assistant chief of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology. After a year at Tripler, Bowen was assigned to Schofield Barracks as chief of the Mental Hygiene Consultation Service. This was during the Tet offensive of 1968, and army hospitals in Hawaii were overwhelmed with wounded and combat-fatigued personnel in transit to mainland hospitals. Bowen’s next assignment was to the Office of Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services in Denver, Colorado, where she was promoted to colonel. Then in May 1970, “To my surprise and dismay, I received orders to go to Vietnam.”  Bowen’s concerns about her new assignment rapidly came to fruition. “We landed in Bien Hoa after midnight on July 6, 1970, in a hail of gunfire, rockets, mortar rounds and unbearable heat,” she wrote in her memoir. Bowen was the army’s chief psychiatrist in Vietnam, responsible for assigning and directing twenty psychiatrists and two neurologists in hospitals and combat divisions from the DMZ into the Mekong Delta. Bowen visited each of her staff several times during her one-year tour, traveling by plane, helicopter, jeep, or staff car, “often under enemy fire, always packing my .45 caliber sidearm.” Bowen reported on the morale and mental health of troops and civilians in Vietnam and briefed congressmen, visiting foreign dignitaries, superior officers, and news reporters who wanted to know “what was really happening” in Vietnam. Bowen took a particular interest in the drug abuse then occurring among troops in the Far East. As a psychiatrist with both the Veterans Administration and the army, Bowen had consistently alerted the military to the hazards of alcohol abuse, so she quickly saw tremendous potential problems relating to drugs in Vietnam. She wrote, “I set up an investigation throughout the medical command and I found that physicians in some hospitals were admitting as many as 400 cases a month of heroin overdose—and this was pure heroin. Then I set about trying to find some way to help, to work with federal authorities who were trying to stop the flow of drugs and figure out what was going to happen to these people when they came home.” Bowen understood the psychological stresses and strains that drove some young soldiers to substance abuse; she herself had a problem with loneliness in Vietnam. “I didn’t fit in,” she wrote. “I was a civilian in battle fatigues. I got along better with women civil servants than military personnel. My position and rank precluded me from socializing with most officers or NCOs. We worked 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or longer, 365 days. Chaplains were my best friends

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with whom I ate, drank and played cards with in the O-6 club for colonels. On Thanksgiving Day 1970, the O-6 club was closed. I walked two miles to my trailer to cry my heart out alone over several martinis. Next door, the logistics commander was having a party. . . . They had all the Thanksgiving trimmings. They even had music and everyone was dancing. When the commander’s secretary saw me, she insisted I join the party. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving after all. The only reason I left was that incoming mortars and rockets were getting too close for me.” In an interview conducted in 1971 when Bowen was still in Vietnam, a reporter with the Baltimore Sun asked her about her chances to become the first African American women general officer in the Department of Defense. “Officers don’t comment publicly on their chances for promotion,” said Bowen, “but I have enough confidence in the Army to say that, if I earn it, I think I’ll get it. And that’s the only way I want it—if I earn it.” In his article, reporter Michael Parks wrote that “Army sources” described Bowen’s chance of becoming a general as “fairly good.” Bowen’s army career continued on its upward trajectory on her return from Vietnam when she was appointed chief of psychiatry at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver. In an interview done at this time, when she was forty-nine, Bowen stated that the discrimination she faced during her life had more to do with gender than race. “It is difficult to be a woman in the Army,” she said. “At best you are patronized, at worst there is outright discrimination. Many assume you are weak and inferior, not very capable.” Her race, she said, is not as much of a problem as her gender. “The Army is learning, painfully, how to accept blacks as people. But it is still uptight about women.” In 1977 Colonel Bowen was appointed commander of the Hawley Medical Center at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, becoming the first woman to command a U.S. military hospital.  Two years later, however, as Bowen was preparing for retirement, an African American colonel in the Army Nurse Corps, Hazel W. Johnson, was promoted to the rank of brigadier general when she was selected to head the Corps. Although there is no way of knowing why Johnson and not Bowen was selected for promotion, it is interesting to note that in each service, a nurse rather than a female physician became the first female general officer and the first minority female general officer. Lt. Col. Janice Mendelson was also in Vietnam in 1970, although Bowen’s and Mendelson’s disparate specialties and assignments ensured they saw very little of one another. Mendelson was the army’s only female board-certified general surgeon. Originally assigned to Vietnam for one year as surgical adviser to the Office of the Command Surgeon, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Colonel Mendelson extended her tour for six months so that she could complete the establishment of a model burn treatment center in a Vietnamese military hospital near Saigon. She wanted to be certain that the center was fully operational before she left.

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Mendelson was already familiar with the Vietnamese people and their culture, having spent several years in the Far East with her retired Army physician father. Her lifelong interest in folk dancing inspired her to found a dance group that met regularly on the roof of the USO near Saigon. When her tour of duty was over, Mendelson left Vietnam with regret and maintained personal and professional ties with her Vietnamese medical colleagues for many years. While in Vietnam, Mendelson had been elected a fellow in the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, and on her return to the States, she was promoted to colonel and assigned as the director of the Tri-Service Military Blood Program Agency in Washington, D.C. By 1971 twenty-nine women medical doctors were on duty with the Army Medical Department, but Colonel Mendelson continued to be the only female board-certified general surgeon. In 1973 Mendelson was assigned as the chief of surgery at the U.S. Army Hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and in 1975 she became the director of the Armed Forces Central Medical Registry at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Her last assignment in 1978 was in the medicine and surgery division of the Academy of Health Sciences at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas. Her responsibilities there included teaching and curriculum and doctrine development. Colonel Mendelson retired in 1980 but continued to write and publish up through 2001. Her later writings focused on the use of a topical treatment she and her colleagues developed years ago to prevent infections in wounds and burns. She suggested that the Army Medical Corps give the treatment a second look and test it for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army physician Joan Tracz Zajtchuk accompanied her army physician husband to Vietnam in 1971. The army, in great need of physicians in Vietnam, was willing to send physician couples in uniform together there and guarantee them assignments near one another. The Zajtchuks were not the first army physician couple to go to Vietnam. This was one of the programs begun in 1966 when a significant doctor shortage encouraged the services to make deliberate attempts to recruit female physicians. Initially, Tracz Zajtchuk had reservations about joining the army. Her husband had received his commission the previous year and had volunteered to go to Vietnam. Rather than be separated from his wife of ten years, he suggested that she accompany him. Many years later, speaking at his wife’s retirement ceremony, Brig. Gen. Russ Zajtchuk stated that when he first broached the subject of Joan joining the Army Medical Corps and going to Vietnam with him, “There was a long pause on the phone. I didn’t know if she had hung up . . . she told me to come home that weekend and we would discuss it.”85 Zajtchuk knew his wife of ten years was an exceptionally determined woman who let very little stand in the way of reaching her goals. All through her undergraduate years at the University of Chicago, Joan Tracz had worked hard to maintain a high grade point average so that she could get into medical school, pref-

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erably a school in Chicago so she could live at home and cut costs. At that time most medical schools had strict quotas limiting the number of women students they accepted. When Tracz graduated with a premed major in 1959, the only school she could get into was the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia, which was extremely expensive. She attended WMC for one year, met and married her husband, and returned to Chicago, set on continuing her medical education in her hometown. For two years Tracz Zajtchuk worked as a research assistant in the Department of Physiology at the University of Chicago, and in 1963 she Col. Joan (Tracz) Zajtchuk served in the U.S. was accepted as a transfer student Army Medical Corps from July 1971 until at the University of Chicago Mediher retirement in November 1996, including cal School. She believes she was an assignment in the Vietnam War. Courtesy accepted because the professor for Women in Military Service for America Memowhom she worked strongly recomrial Foundation Inc. mended her. For a time Tracz Zajtchuk and her husband were both students at the University of Chicago Medical School. In order to make ends meet, both worked. Joan had her research job and a job with a blood bank, and her husband had a series of lab jobs. Russ Zajtchuk, several years ahead of Joan, did a straight surgical residency, specializing in cardio and thoracic surgery. Surgery required longer training than many other medical specialties. Both Zajtchuks took out loans to help pay for their medical education. Tracz Zajtchuk’s class had an unusually large number of women students; out of seventy-one students, seven were women, almost double the standard 5 percent quota adhered to by many schools. There were a number of women professors at the school as well, although they were not in the “big” departments like surgery, which was what Tracz Zajtchuk, like her husband, decided to specialize in. Surgery was an unusual specialty choice for a woman medical student. Tracz Zajtchuk’s intern class had four or five women in it, but she was the only one who wanted to specialize in surgery. Although no one tried to discourage her from being a surgeon, instructors did give her a hard time

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because she stuck out in a crowd. In selecting a surgical specialty, Zajtchuk found herself thinking about otolaryngology (ENT) and urology. In the end she was more interested in ENT. By the time Zajtchuk finished her residency in 1971, there were only about five women otolaryngologists out of approximately five thousand in the country. Zajtchuk’s husband had finished his residency ahead of her and decided to go into the army. He spent nine months at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, doing general surgery and then volunteered to go to Vietnam because he thought his skills were needed there. Initially Tracz Zajtchuk believed the army would be too rigid and authoritarian a system for her. Most of her friends also advised her against going into the army, and her mother was definitely opposed to the idea. However, Tracz Zajtchuk didn’t care for the idea of an additional longterm separation from her husband and investigated other ways she could get to Vietnam as a practicing physician. She considered a position with the U.S. Agency for International Development teaching ENT surgery at USAID’s Vietnam Medical School Project in Saigon. One of her professors at the University of Chicago Medical School was involved with USAID and had sent a number of his former students to the school in Vietnam. However, when she discussed the possibility with him he said, “You might want to consider joining the Army.” Tracz Zajtchuk decided to try it, thinking that if she didn’t like it “it would only be for two years.” She was thirty-two years old and had to get an age waiver. The army commissioned her as a captain, but she was promoted to major after two days because of the extent of her training and experience. She stated that she did not find the army as rigid as she had feared. “My husband and I had always been the type of people who, when told something could not be done—went ahead and showed how it could indeed be done. This characteristic did not conflict with the Army—although initially I assumed that it would.” After Tracz Zajtchuk had attended the Medical Officer’s Basic Course at San Antonio, Texas, she and her husband were assigned to the 24th Evacuation Hospital at Long Binh, Vietnam. The 24th received casualties within an hour after they were wounded, and the 24th’s surgeons operated as quickly as possible, depending upon the number of incoming patients. Tracz Zajtchuk was the only woman physician there, as most of the physicians were surgeons and, of course, very few surgeons were women. When the Zajtchuks first arrived and hospital administrators discovered Tracz Zajtchuk was a woman surgeon, they didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with her—they had never had a woman surgeon before. She had to point out to them that she should be treated and assigned the same as any other surgeon. Once her supervisors had gotten over their shock, they decided that she should draw all the night duty

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because “as a woman I was the lowest on the totem pole. I told them that they were not treating me fairly, that there was no logical reason to give me all the night duty simply because I was a woman. Then they said ‘Oh, you can be the physician at LBJ,’ (Long Binh Jail). They then discovered that women were not allowed in the jail.” Eventually Tracz Zajtchuk was simply rotated through her assignments the same as all the other surgeons at the 24th. Once a month, the unit’s commander allowed Tracz Zajtchuk to go into Saigon to teach the Vietnamese physicians that she would have been working with had she kept her original position with USAID. Her husband volunteered at the military hospital in Saigon while she volunteered with the civilian hospital. The Zajtchuks were in Vietnam for a year between 1971 and 1972 and celebrated their 11th anniversary there in 1972. After six months both were transferred to the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon. When they rotated back to the States, the couple was assigned to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Colorado, where they stayed from 1972 to 1977. During those five pivotal years, the United States officially withdrew its armed forces from Vietnam. Fundamental changes occurred in American society in the twenty-five years from the start of the Korean War in 1950 to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. The women’s movement precipitated a whole new way of looking at women and taught women to view themselves differently. A whole new set of expanded goals was suddenly deemed possible. Groundbreaking physicians such as Tracz Zajtchuk began seeing more young women interns and residents in hospital training programs. At the same time, increasing numbers of women began applying to medical schools, and feminist leaders encouraged medical schools to forsake gendered admission quotas by challenging this practice in the courts. The proportion of women physicians in the country rose from 7.6 percent in 1970 to 11.6 percent in 1980, and by 2003 one quarter of physicians in the United States were women. Meanwhile, the army, navy, and air force medical corps faced new recruiting realities driven by the end of the draft and the establishment of the AllVolunteer Force in 1973. The Berry Plan, which had ensured the medical corps a small but steady supply of physicians, ended with the draft. In an attempt to encourage qualified young men and women to accept commissions in the medical corps, Congress established the Health Professions Scholarship Program in 1972. That same year, it authorized the creation of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) to educate future physicians seriously contemplating a medical career in the armed forces. From the start, both programs accepted women on an equal basis with men and provided the foundation for the rapid movement of women into the army, navy, and air force medical corps. Women military physicians breached the last ramparts of official gender-

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based inequities in the military when assignment limitations related to combat were finally lifted in the years after Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Women physicians could now be assigned to any medical position in the armed forces. Too often, however, individual choices driven by social expectations and family needs continued to limit the service careers of twenty-first century women physicians. The story of these contemporary women military physicians is the subject of the following chapter.

Chapter Six

ON THE EDGE OF EQUALITY Contemporary Women Military Physicians

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he establishment of the All-Volunteer Force and the end of the Berry Plan set the stage for a new era in military medicine. The armed services now had to compete directly with the civilian sector for newly trained physicians. What could the services do to attract talented young doctors into the medical corps of the army, navy, and air force, and once those doctors were commissioned, how should they be retained? The programs established to train and retain physicians, coupled with the increasing number of women entering the medical field throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, combined to create a favorable environment for women physicians in the military. Although few would make the claim that women physicians enjoy total equality in today’s armed forces, the barriers that remain in place are more a function of societal constraints than of institutional policies. At the turn of the twenty-first century, then, women physicians who elect service careers continue to face personal challenges as they negotiate their career paths. As it does for their counterparts in the civilian sector, career advancement for women physicians in the military often depends on their choice of a medical specialty, and it may also be affected by family-related issues such as pregnancy, child care, and dual-career marriages. Other gender-related difficulties, such as sexual harassment and the continuing scarcity of female mentors, also come into play. While military women physicians undoubtedly face some hurdles that their civilian counterparts do not, such as the need to relocate every few years to accommodate military assignment requirements, many women see several advantages to a military medical career. The services’ rank and merit promotion systems can, especially in the early years of an officer’s career, offer women a level playing field. Military physicians are also insulated from many of the drawbacks inherent in civilian medicine, including difficult choices mandated by insurance regulations and the exorbitant expense of malpractice insurance.

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Choosing a Service Career

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n 1972 the Department of Defense established the Armed Forces Health Professional Scholarship Program (HPSP). Students who attend medical school on HPSP scholarships receive free tuition, room, board, and living expenses. On graduation, they do internships and usually residencies at military hospitals, after which they are required to “pay back” in active duty years the time spent on their education. Aspiring physicians who cannot afford the cost of a medical education find HPSP to be an appealing route to a medical degree that will not leave them drowning in debt by the time they graduate. The program provides the armed forces with an excellent source of newly trained physicians. While many physicians leave the service at the end of their “pay back” years, others opt for a career in the military. The Department of Defense opened the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in 1976. The school’s purpose was to train students in military medicine, which has a slightly different emphasis than medicine as practiced in the civilian sector. USUHS teaches its physiciansin-training to work toward the overall health of the unit rather than focus solely on the health of the individual patient. Although USUHS graduates are required to remain in service only as long as necessary to “pay back” the military for their medical educations, many opt to serve for a full twenty-year career. Navy Capt. Sandra Yerkes was one of five women in the original thirtyone-member class that began its studies in the fall of 1976, before the new school even had a building. Yerkes’ selection interview was conducted at a CVS pharmacy in Bethesda, Maryland, and the school started its classes in borrowed rooms at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Medical Museum. The first semester was fraught with anxiety; Pres. Jimmy Carter threatened to close the school in a budget trimming measure, and time and again congressmen visited the classrooms and grilled the students. “Many of my classmates testified on the Hill about why USUHS should stay open,” said Yerkes. The school was vulnerable because it was too new to have a track record, but even today lists of graduates are periodically reviewed to see how many alumni remain in the armed forces for full twenty-year careers. Many military doctors trained via the Health Professions Scholarship Program serve only the years they owe the military for their education and then get out, but the majority of USUHS-trained physicians spend full careers in the service. Of the twenty-eight graduates of the first USUHS class in 1980, four were women. Yerkes was the last member of her class on active duty, retiring after twenty-five years of service from her position as deputy to the chief of the Navy Medical Corps. Yerkes is only one of the female USUHS graduates who have had stellar military careers; Adm. Connie Mariano, a member of the second class at USUHS, reached the apex of her navy medical career from 1989

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to 2000 as the White House physician for presidents George Bush Sr., William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush. When women physicians were asked why they remained in the armed forces after their initial service agreement was fulfilled, the vast majority said one of the major reasons is because they can practice medicine without worrying about the cost of proper treatment to the patient. Said retired army colonel Praxedes Belandres, MD, “When I was practicing in New York City before I joined the Army Medical Corps, I saw many middle class patients who simply could not afford the treatment I knew would help them. But with the Army, I never had to worry about cost, insurance forms and paperwork. I simply prescribed the very best treatment available for each and every patient.” Military doctors do not have to worry about the cost of malpractice insurance or the business difficulties involved in running a medical practice. Said Col. Susan Dunlow, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps and chief of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, “You can call in another physician to consult if you believe you should, and not worry about whether the doctor accepts the patient’s insurance.” The women also talk about the availability of educational fellowships and assignments that help physicians learn and grow into their specialties. Most important, however, seems to be the spirit of teamwork that these women doctors feel permeates much of the military medical community. They meet and work with individuals at all levels of medicine who are dedicated to providing American soldiers, sailors, and airmen with the best of care possible in every situation and contingency. Teamwork is absolutely essential to the accomplishment of this mission, and once an individual becomes accustomed to working in that type of environment, serving men and women who willingly sacrifice themselves for their country, returning to civilian life can be difficult. Thus it appears that many physicians who chose a service career are idealistic individuals who are motivated by something other than the bottom line. Patriotism, the ability to heal without having to take finances into account, and appreciation of a team-oriented environment are all cited as reasons for selecting a service career.

Selecting a Specialty

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he selection of a specialty is of critical importance to a physician, whether she plans a military or civilian career. A physician’s choice of specialty can often determine her income and influence her career track and job satisfaction. Although salary in the armed forces is directly related to a physician’s rank, which in turn is dependent on the number of years a physician has been in the service, the military regularly provides yearly monetary bonuses to physicians in certain critical specialties such as surgery. Thus, while

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the choice of a specialty may not have as much impact on the incomes of military physicians as it does on civilian doctors, it can make a considerable difference. The importance of specialty selection to personal job satisfaction, on the other hand, is equally critical to physicians in either sector. Frequently, young physicians have a difficult time deciding on a specialty, and sometimes they initially make a wrong choice. Connie Mariano had aspired to be an obstetrician ever since junior high school, when she attended a school-sponsored “career day” and became entranced by the stories of a navy doctor who specialized in R. Adm. (Dr.) Eleanor (Connie) Mariano, obstetrics. Mariano knew that her Medical Corps, U.S. Navy, August 1977– father had lost his mother when June 2001. Dr. Mariano is the first Filipinohe was eleven years old because American to become an admiral in the U.S. she had bled to death while giving Navy and the first military woman to be birth to her eighth baby. Mariano named White House physician. Courtesy decided she wanted to help other Women in Military Service for America women in perilous situations, and Memorial Foundation Inc. she maintained her goal throughout college and into her third year of medical school at USUHS. When Mariano did her ob-gyn rotation, however, she found that she didn’t particularly care for the obstetricians she met. She sensed “an overall negative attitude” in that unhappy department and decided that she did not want to be a part of it. When she rotated into internal medicine, she felt she belonged there. The doctors were dedicated to their craft and had a positive outlook. She realized that she wanted to take care of men patients as well as women and that with internal medicine “everyone who lived long enough would ultimately become a patient.” Mariano decided that a wide variety of patients and problems would ultimately be more stimulating than a narrower medical field. Sandra Yerkes, one year ahead of Mariano at USUHS, also had difficulty settling on a medical specialty. After her internship Yerkes trained as a flight surgeon and served two active duty assignments as a general medical officer (GMO) before returning to the National Naval Medical Center to do her residency in her chosen specialty, otolaryngology. During her residency she

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began to realize that she was more interested in talking to patients about how they dealt with their physical problems and facial deformities than she was in performing surgery. Eighteen months into her residency, Yerkes realized that she needed to change specialties. She told the navy assigners how she felt and offered to do what they needed her to do until a slot in psychiatry opened up. Taking her at her word, they sent her to the physical exam section at the center, where she cleared up a huge backlog of exams, performing between three thousand and four thousand herself and reviewing six thousand others. She then started her psychiatry residency and was promoted to commander during her second year, about ten years after she had graduated from USUHS. By the end of her third year of medical school, air force Col. Linda Lawrence, MD, was still very undecided about a medical specialty. She decided against the surgical field since it was “not very woman friendly.” She was interested in emergency medicine, but the field was undeveloped, and her advisor discouraged her from pursuing training in such a new field. In the end Lawrence decided to specialize in pediatrics. She did her intern year at Geissinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania, and when she did a rotation in emergency medicine she realized that really was where she wanted to be. So she switched specialties and did her residency in emergency medicine at Geissinger. She notes that while there were other women residents in pediatrics, there were none in her class in emergency medicine. For her first active duty assignment, Lawrence was sent to a base where emergency medicine was understaffed and underfunded and commanded little respect. Her next assignment, however, was as a faculty member at USUHS, and her career since then has been extremely satisfactory. Colonel Lawrence is now the chief of medicine at Travis Air Force Base in California. Not all women who are initially uncertain about the selection of a medical specialty make a wrong initial choice. Sometimes it just takes time and the courage to follow a gut instinct. By the time navy doctor Brianna Hill graduated from USUHS in 1982, she was still uncertain about her medical specialty, so she selected a transitional internship (in which one can experience a little bit of everything) at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. During her internship Hill decided that dermatology would be a good choice for her. She liked the fact that it is a “visual field,” and she enjoys working with all age groups and being able to do some surgery. Hill appreciates the fact that the hours are good and believes that the specialty will offer a good income once she starts to practice in the civilian sector. When air force physician Barbara Cooper was a medical student she decided to specialize in internal medicine. When Cooper discovered that there were only two women physicians in the internal medicine department at the hospital on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where she was scheduled to do her internship, she was not dissuaded. The scarcity actually reinforced her choice, because she believed that many women patients at Wright-Patterson

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who would have liked to see women doctors were discouraged from doing so because of their rarity. Cooper noticed that older women in particular prefer female doctors, and this has made her more passionate about her specialty within internal medicine, women’s health.

Surgery as a Specialty

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ertain medical specialties, particularly surgery, have traditionally been regarded as a male province. Surgeons, who spend longer years in training than other physicians, command higher salaries in both the civilian and military sectors. In the armed services, surgeons consistently receive the highest yearly bonuses. Women surgeons have historically faced considerable challenges in both the military and civilian sectors. When the army assigned Maj. Joan Zajtchuk, an ENT surgeon, to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Colorado in the early 1970s, she was the only woman surgeon at the hospital, and comments about her gender were a regular occurrence. For example, one day a resident said to her, “Ma’am, you are the only woman physician I have ever seen in the operating room.” Zajtchuk’s response sent a clear message to the resident: “Do you want to continue in the residency program here?” Later she explained, “You couldn’t let such comments pass, or life would have rapidly become impossible.” When Zajtchuk was assigned to Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1977, she had three women residents in ENT between 1982 and 1992; however, cardio, orthopedics, and general surgery were the three big specialties where women remained extremely rare. Zajtchuck believed that “women had to be masochists to stick it out in those specialties. Sometimes surgeons gave me a hard time about doing head and neck operations or facial operations even though that was what I was trained to do, but eventually I was accepted. You just had to push in and keep doing it and eventually you would be recognized— although getting that recognition was vital, and it sometimes took time. It wasn’t enough just to do it—you had to be recognized as doing it.” When army colonel Mary Maniscalco-Theberge first entered Eastern Virginia Medical School in 1978, she did not plan to be a surgeon. “Surgery was a very difficult lifestyle. It’s draining and intense and not many women were in it,” she explained. Maniscalco-Theberge took surgery as her first rotation “to get it over with” and “fell in love with it.” She was also good at it. She entered a five-year surgical training program at Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Fort Gordon, Georgia, which covered her internship and residency. Like her fellow male trainees, Maniscalco-Theberge experienced significant stress and difficulties throughout her years at Fort Gordon, but her troubles were exacerbated by her gender. Maniscalco-Theberge was the only woman in the surgery program throughout her internship and residency. When her engagement to

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an aspiring oral and maxillofacial surgeon was announced, her supervisor brought her fiancé into his office and lectured him for a full hour about her medical responsibilities, something he did not do when the male residents became engaged or got married. During Maniscalco-Theberge’s fourth year as a resident, “a classmate told me that the only place a woman belonged in the operating room was on the table.” Throughout her five years as a surgical intern and resident, ManiscalcoTheberge found that the nurses she worked with were exceptionally supportive. They helped her and smoothed the way for her as much as possible. After a couple of years, Maniscalco-Theberge developed her own coping mechanism. She told herself that the men were being tough on her because she threatened their masculinity. The more they blustered and the nastier they got, she figured, the more threatened they must feel. They were the problem, she told herself, not her. Colonel Maniscalco-Theberge went on to have a highly successful military career, retiring as chief of surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital. When navy physician Tracy Bilski was in medical school more than a decade after Maniscalo-Theberge, she planned to specialize in family practice or ob-gyn. Like Maniscalco-Theberge, however, she fell in love with surgery during her surgical rotation in medical school and decided that surgery was a good fit for her. She liked the surgeons she worked with as people and appreciated their ability “to present a patient, so focused and so without all the garbage. I just loved it. I felt like I fit in.” She admits her choice was unusual for a woman and that “it’s not the greatest life in the world—but it’s—I guess it’s what you love, you know?” Bilski had one female “anti-role model” in surgery, a married woman with children who personified the stereotype of the arrogant, difficult surgeon. “I thought ‘God, don’t ever let me be a female surgeon like that. Don’t ever.’ ” None of the other female surgeons Bilski knew had children, although some were married. Although more women still choose medical specialties other than surgery in both civilian and military medicine, women surgeons are slowly becoming less of a rarity in both sectors. Women surgeons such as ManiscalcoTheberge who have reached high-level supervisory positions are now available to younger women as mentors and role models, encouraging more women to enter this challenging field.

First Assignments—Welcome to the Navy!

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he navy sometimes places its newly minted MDs on a career path that is very different from that of physicians in the civilian sector and even in the other services. As soon as a physician has finished her internship, she is given an active duty assignment—before being allowed to do a residency in a specialized field. The navy calls these physicians on their first and second

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active-duty assignments general medical officers or GMOs. In 1976 Renata Engler, now a colonel in the army, accepted her first active duty assignment as a GMO at the naval hospital in Rota, Spain. She was the first woman doctor at the base, and she felt her inexperience very keenly. She wondered if she would be able to respond quickly enough during a trauma situation. As fate would have it, on her very first night in charge of the dispensary, she received a sailor who had been involved in a motorcycle accident. There was no time to read up on what should be done for head trauma, but she found that she did indeed know what had to be done and how to do it. By the end of her time in Rota, Engler felt like a seasoned professional. The navy began assigning women physicians as flight surgeons in 1978 but the assignments they could receive were limited by law. Women doctors could not be assigned to combat vessels such as aircraft carriers or units with a combat mission; instead they were assigned to stationary billets in dispensaries around the world that served pilots, flight crews, and their dependents. Flight surgeon training involves ten weeks of medical information related to aviation and five months of classes with student pilots. Alongside the pilots, physicians learn how to take care of a plane and emergency procedures during flight. They even practice takeoffs and learn to fly, although they usually do not learn how to land an aircraft. Navy “Docs” don’t solo because it is too expensive, but as navy flight surgeon Sonovia Johnson explained, “You learn everything else alongside the pilots so that you become one of them. Otherwise they would never trust you and they would not let you touch them.” After completing her internship at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Sandra Yerkes attended flight surgeon training in Pensacola, Florida, and was then assigned to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 1981. Her responsibilities included handling the sick calls among helicopter pilots as well as caring for dependents. Yerkes explained that flight surgeons are expected to spend a good deal of time out on the flight line observing so that they know at all times exactly what is going on with their air crews. Traditionally, pilots and crew members do not want to be taken off of flying status and so will not necessarily report to sick call at the clinic even if they are actually too sick to fly. By interacting with the crew, doctors can often spot debilitating colds or psychological issues and prevent tragedies. Rotations to Guantánamo, said Yerkes, usually last only thirteen months because the base is tiny and there are numerous restrictions about where personnel can go, so the assignment can quickly become boring and claustrophobic. Yerkes’ next assignment as a flight surgeon was to the navy hospital at Beaufort, South Carolina. This was in 1983, when female physicians could not be assigned directly to deployable marine squadrons. To work around the prohibition, Yerkes was assigned as the medical director of the clinic at the Marine Corps Air Station. Thirty to forty corpsmen and five to six deployable male flight surgeons were assigned to the air station. Yerkes notes that the as-

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signment of female physicians to marine squadrons is now allowed. Women physicians began serving in these assignments during the 1990s. Navy psychiatrist Jennifer Berg graduated from USUHS in 1984. Her first active duty assignment was to a navy base in Newfoundland, where she took care of navy dependents. She then took flight surgeon training at Pensacola, Florida. “A large part of a flight surgeon’s job is helping pilots decide how to cope with personal and family issues so they won’t be distracted while flying,” said Berg. “I found being a female flight surgeon was an asset—male pilots were more likely to confide in a woman than another man because of the macho culture that still existed in the Navy.” After two active duty assignments, Berg did her residency in psychiatry at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, finishing in 1993. She then moved back to Pensacola to work as a psychiatrist at the Naval Aerospace and Operational Medical Institute, where she conducted research on personality styles and teamwork skills. Berg was also appointed a member of the Astronaut Selection and Psychological Support Team. In this assignment, she interviewed applicants for missions, evaluating their teamwork skills and their ability to withstand extreme isolation and stress. After her internship at the navy hospital in Balboa, California, Elise Gordon attended flight surgeon training in Pensacola for six months and then in 1992 was assigned her first active duty billet as the station flight surgeon at Sigonella, Italy. The other flight surgeons stationed at Sigonella, men in combat-related billets, were often deployed, so she had to take care of their patients as well as her own, which meant that she was responsible for about two thousand personnel. As a flight surgeon, Gordon was required to spend about 50 percent of her time in the clinic and 50 percent on the flight line with her crew, and she also had to log a certain amount of flight time each month. Gordon enjoyed her assignment, which lasted for three years. She didn’t feel like she was ostracized in any way. She considered her crew to be “my guys” and flew with them and took care of them. She says she really didn’t notice gender issues too much at Sigonella, but she did during her second tour as a flight surgeon at Pax River, Maryland, where she was the squadron flight surgeon for the Strike, Tactical Test, and Evaluation Squadron. These pilots flew “F-18s (Hornets), Tomcats, Prowlers, A-6’s and T-45’s. A woman test pilot left the squadron just as I arrived, but there weren’t any other women pilots. Out of a squadron of 400, I was one of 12 women and the only officer. Most of the guys were 18–19 years old. Even the maintenance squadrons didn’t have women because they deployed to aircraft carriers and women were not assigned to aircraft carriers until 1994.” Gordon’s tour at Pax River lasted four years, and she found that she missed the camaraderie she had experienced at Sigonella. According to Sonovia Johnson, “The first time I realized I was a girl was when I joined the Navy’s Flight Surgeon Training Program.” She explained

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that in medical school some of the other women had sometimes complained that there were only six women in their class of thirty, but it had never bothered her. She would respond with “So? I’m the only black person, and you don’t see me complaining.” However, when she finished her internship and flight surgeons’ school and went to her first active duty assignment, at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, she knew immediately that she was the exact opposite of every other flight surgeon the command had seen: she was very young, she was a woman, and she was black. The only way she knew how to deal with her fellow soldiers’ surprise was to be as professional as possible—as were they. A very “up-front” person, Johnson had several conversations with the commanding officer, who she believed was the most uncomfortable with the situation. When Johnson was slated to give the commander his physical, he wanted to go to someone else. She insisted that as his flight surgeon she should be the one to give him his physical. He acquiesced, and afterward he complimented her and said she was very professional throughout the exam, which made her feel good. Still, she asked him, half-jokingly, “You mean you doubted it?” The navy began assigning women physicians aboard ships in 1979. Anne Marie Cepeda completed her medical internship in 1979 and received her first active duty assignment to the USS Yosemite AD-19, a destroyer tender of World War II vintage. Cepeda was the sole physician for the ship’s 850 crew members and was one of only four females. The other three women onboard were line officers. Cepeda was fresh out of civilian medical training and had had a two-week orientation to the navy and one month at the Norfolk dispensary seeing navy patients. She had not volunteered to serve aboard a ship and was not at all happy about her assignment. “The Navy had trouble finding female docs willing to serve on ships at that point,” she explained. “I did not know how to say ‘No’ and got the job.” The Yosemite’s sick bay was a busy place. Cepeda attended to every complaint, from injuries that had resulted from drunkenness or carelessness to gonorrhea, gastroenteritis, and strep throat. She also did a substantial amount of psychiatric counseling, low-level orthopedics, dermatology, and urology. She explained that sick call is usually heavier aboard a ship than on shore because “an unhappy, bored sailor will be a sick sailor.” Cepeda herself got mononucleosis from stress and overwork. Toward the end of her deployment, she wrote a letter to her replacement, who happened to be another newly graduated female physician. “They do not want a woman doctor here,” she stated, and advised her to “fight the assignment.” It is uncertain who Cepeda was referring to when she said “they” did not want a woman doctor. Did she mean the ship’s officers, or the crew in general? She told her replacement that she herself was “outspoken” and “drew wrath” but did not add any details except to say, “You might have an easier time of it . . . the XO (second in command) will have changed.” She also explained that she had been threatened with a court-martial when she tried to

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get out of serving aboard the ship, adding that the navy did court-martial another doctor who tried to avoid shipboard service. As Anne Marie Cepeda was leaving the Yosemite, the future admiral Christine Hunter accepted her first active duty assignment as the physician aboard the USS Hunley, a submarine tender. Hunter was the only physician aboard for a crew of 1,500. Her staff included medical corpsmen, nurses, and other medical specialists. Fewer than ten of them were women during the two years Hunter was aboard the ship. The navy started its integration of women aboard ships with female officers, which required less restructuring of berths because officers slept two to a room. Unlike Cepeda, Hunter always felt she was a valued member of the crew. As the ship’s only doctor, she explained, she was vital to the health of the crew, and her gender really didn’t matter. The Hunley deployed to Scotland, where the crew loaded, unloaded, and repaired submarines. Like Hunter and Cepeda, Connie Mariano was also assigned to a ship immediately after her internship in internal medicine at the naval hospital in San Diego. Mariano had her operational tour in 1982 on the USS Prairie, an old destroyer tender (the oldest ship in the fleet—forty-five years old). The tour, originally intended to be one year, was extended to two. Mariano, again like Cepeda and Hunter, was the first woman physician the ship had had. The only doctor onboard, she was responsible for the health of more than 750 people, and she supervised 15 medical corpsmen who helped her with sick call and caring for the crew. She was one of 5 women officers; enlisted women aboard numbered about 150. Mariano referred to the ship as a “floating factory.” The nearest medical facility was seven sailing days away. She dealt with psychiatric issues, accidents, chest pains, and dermatology, seeing generally fifteen to twenty patients a day. The ship had a pharmacy bay, a small operating room, and a sick bay. Occasionally, young physicians who have served more than one tour as a GMO or a flight surgeon find it difficult to transition into a residency. For up to six years, they have worked as physicians, with all the responsibility and authority vested in that job, and suddenly they are placed back into a position where they are once more students, their work is monitored, and they are no longer the final authority. Elise Gordon applied for a residency in orthopedic surgery after three years as a flight surgeon at Sigonella, Italy, but wasn’t selected. That meant she had to do a second active duty tour, at Pax River, Maryland, and hope to obtain a residency in another three years. By that time Gordon had been out of school for more than six years and found that she had to repeat her internship before being allowed to complete her residency. The same thing happened to navy physician Deborah Hinckley, who reported that her internship at the naval hospital at Jacksonville, Florida, required some adjustment on her part, as well as on the part of her supervisors. She was shocked, for example, when after she had run a lab test, diagnosed

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the patient, and reported her diagnosis to her supervisor, he asked to see the lab slide she had used to make her diagnosis. “I had to tell him that I had already thrown it out,” she said. “He asked me why I had done that, and I told him that it had not occurred to me that he would want to see the slide and that I had been diagnosing patients for eight years now and knew what I was doing.” In the end they worked out a compromise: Hinckley’s boss made some exceptions for her, but she had to remember that she was being supervised because he had to verify that she knew what she was talking about.

Military Mentors

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everal of the physicians interviewed for this book believe that at least one significant stumbling block remains to prevent female physicians in the armed forces from reaching the highest levels of command. In the years just prior to her retirement, Joan Zajtchuk aspired to a star but realized that she lacked the political support for one. In 1992 Colonel Zajtchuk returned to Walter Reed as the deputy commander and director of Graduate Medical Education. She remembers that she had to fight hard to get the job, “butting heads and going toe to toe.” The job was desirable because it was a good position from which to be promoted. One of the problems, she believed, was that she and her husband had the same last name, and “it seemed as if one or another Zajtchuk was always wanting to do something.” He had been the deputy prior, and the selectors did not like the idea of her following him into the job. But in the end she got the position. She wore two hats, serving at the same time as the chair of the Joint Medical Education Committee, with the mission to integrate the armed services residency programs. It was a difficult period of drawdown, when all the services were fighting for money. After three years as the deputy commander at Walter Reed, Colonel Zajtchuk was assigned to work with the surgeon general as his special assistant, developing health policy recommendations. With a potential promotion in mind, she took a degree in health services management from George Washington University’s School of Business and Public Management and asked the surgeon general what her next step should be. “He didn’t have a clue,” she explained years later. So, angered, she prepared for retirement in 1996. She knew that if her boss didn’t know what was next for her, she had nowhere else to go. Colonel Zajtchuk lacked a mentor, someone who would support her and orchestrate her career so that she would be in the right place at the right time to be considered for promotion to general officer. Zajtchuk’s problem throughout her career was that no mentor was looking out for her. When she was promoted to colonel in 1980, she explained, she was promoted from the “secondary zone” just as she had been when she was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1974. What that meant was that she came from below the sup-

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posed top qualified candidates for promotion. Zajtchuck explained that this happened because no one was mentoring her—guiding her to positions and seeing to it that she got assignments that would be stepping-stones to promotion. Thus she didn’t have the right items checked to make it into the selection zone. Col. Doris Browne, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, strongly agreed with Colonel Zajtchuk that a lack of mentoring often held women back. Women physicians pursuing a military career, explains Browne, often don’t receive the mentoring necessary to see to it that they jump through the speCol. (Dr.) Doris Browne, U.S. Army Medical cific hoops needed to get them on Corps (Retired), May 1979–February 2000. track for general officer appointCourtesy Women in Military Service for Amerments. Women physicians often ica Memorial Foundation Inc. don’t attend the Command and General Staff College or the War College simply because no one thinks to send them. In direct contrast, the officers of the Nurse Corps, the Finance Corps, and the Quartermaster Corps each have a system that takes care of their people. Women physicians in the medical corps, many of whom work quietly on their own at various hospitals and institutes, are often forgotten until they are too senior to cover bases usually completed by officers at the midpoint of their careers. Unlike Col. Joan Zajtchuk, navy doctor Connie Mariano had a supervisor who thought well enough of her to recommend her for an extremely important and prestigious job—that of White House physician. Ironically, Mariano, who had recently completed the active duty time she owed the navy for her medical education, had been contemplating leaving the service. That Monday she had gone to the personnel office at the hospital to get the necessary paperwork for separation. Totally unaware of her plans, her boss, Capt. John Midas, called her into his office and told her that he wanted to nominate her for the two-year position at the White House. Shocked, Mariano called her husband and asked him what he thought of the idea. He was dubious. His law firm was in California, as were both their parents. They had just purchased a house. As soon as they hung up, however, her husband paged her and said, “On second thought, go ahead and apply. They won’t take you anyway, so what can it

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hurt?” Mariano, of course, was selected for the position, in which she would ultimately spend eleven years before retiring as a rear admiral. Navy doctor Elise Gordon believes that her biggest problem during the early years of her career was finding a mentor—there just weren’t any women doctors in the service with children whom she could look to for advice. Her mentors were all men. As a resident, she was one of only three women in the program, and she was the only woman who was married with children in the group. That is why she makes an effort now to mentor the younger women coming up. She and her family are still nontraditional for the navy, where many married men with children have stay-at-home wives, whereas her family is dual income. As more senior women physicians such as Gordon step up and take the time to mentor their younger colleagues, the younger generation will have fewer problems remaining in the service for full twenty-year careers and reaching general officer rank.

Connie Mariano: White House Physician, 1989–2001

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avy doctor Connie Mariano reported for duty at the White House in 1992 as the first military woman White House physician. Pres. George Herbert Walker Bush was in his last year in office. Initially, Mariano said, people kept mistaking her for a nurse. She didn’t let their reactions bother her, however. She had faced this type of situation before, when the navy assigned her to a ship earlier in her career. Her best course, she knew, was to simply concentrate on doing her job to the best of her ability. Mariano believes that her gender was an asset throughout her nine years as physician to three different presidents. As a woman, she found it easier to deal with male presidents than if she had been a man because presidents can become a bit egocentric and sometimes subconsciously resist orders from other men. A woman physician, however, can adopt a “nagging mother” or “bossy older sister” persona when discussing the president’s health issues. A president might feel more inclined to heed a woman’s advice about jogging in the rain than he would another man’s. When William J. Clinton was elected president, he requested that Mariano remain in place as his physician. She actually had her new orders; she was to go back to California as the Marine Corps recruit depot director. The navy had pretty much given her her choice of assignments, and she wanted to go back to her home in California; her parents lived nearby and helped with the children, and her husband, who had taken a sabbatical from his law firm, naturally wanted to get back to his job. However, President Clinton was upset when he heard about her new assignment. He didn’t have anyone else in mind to be his personal physician, and he liked Mariano. He insisted that she stay, so she planned to stay another two years.

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Soon after her decision to remain in Washington, an article about her appeared in the Washington Times. A retired army brigadier general, Dr. Chet Ward, who had been Pres. Richard Nixon’s physician, saw the article and wrote to Mariano, informing her that a 1920s-era law stipulated that the senior military physician to the president had to be at least an O-6. If Ward was correct, the navy would be forced to promote Mariano to captain, even though she had only recently been promoted to commander. The White House lawyers and the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery researched the law and discovered that Ward was indeed correct. Mariano was promoted to captain in an Oval Office ceremony with Clinton presiding. Would the navy have needed prodding from an outside source to promote their White House physician had that individual been a man? Although it is impossible to know, Mariano’s situation is interesting when one takes into consideration the armed forces’ traditional “absentmindedness” when it comes to the career paths of female physicians. When Clinton was reelected to a second term, he again insisted that Mariano remain as his physician. When she became a rear admiral in 2000, she was the first Filipino and the first doctor in her USUHS class to achieve the rank. She was proud that her husband and her father pinned on her shoulder boards. By the end of Clinton’s second term, however, Mariano knew that it was time to move on. George W. Bush’s parents asked her to consider staying on as their son’s doctor, but she declined. Her children, age three and five when she started at the White House, were twelve and fourteen by the time her stint at the White House was over, and she wanted to establish a lifestyle that would give her more flexibility as a parent.

Careers and Family Accommodations

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ust like female physicians in the civilian sector, women military physicians find it difficult to balance their working lives with the needs of their families. A military career, however, usually requires an individual to relocate every two to three years, and these necessary disruptions can pose difficulties to a spouse’s career and impose significant stress on children, particularly adolescents. Air force colonel Elizabeth Jones-Lukacs accepted a commission in the Air Force Medical Corps in 1978. She had thirteen years of private practice behind her as well as a husband and two children when she decided to join the medical corps hoping for “professional stimulation.” Because of her age and experience, Jones-Lukacs was commissioned as a major. Leaving her family at home in Virginia, Jones-Lukacs went to Brooke Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for the basic flight surgeon course. Upon completion, Jones-Lukacs was the fifth woman flight surgeon in the air force and “quite a shock to the boys at Andrews Air Force Base,” her first active duty assignment. After their initial surprise, however, “and once they saw what I was all about,

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they began to request me over other doctors,” she said. Jones-Lukacs believes this was simply because she had more experience than some of the younger doctors “and it showed.” Her job was to take care of the families of pilots and crew members as well as the men themselves, and frequently the airmen’s wives asked for her as well, because she was a woman and they felt more comfortable discussing female problems with her. A year into her assignment at Andrews, Jones-Lukacs’s husband died. Although shaken up, she decided to stay in the air force. The hours were good, and she needed that flexibility since she now had sole responsibility for her children. Although the air force required flight surgeons to accompany flight crews whenever there were no U.S.-trained physicians at the point of destination, she tried not to be away from her children for more than a week at a time. Jones-Lukacs remained on active duty for six years, resigning only when a new assignment required a geographical relocation. She believed the move would be too hard on her children, one of whom had been diagnosed with dyslexia and was in a special school and doing well. Jones-Lukacs found a job directing the Urgent Care Facility at the University of Maryland and joined the air force reserve. She was made commander of a reserve unit at Andrews Air Force Base and remained in the reserve until after the first Gulf War, when she was asked to return to active duty to take a specific position at Andrews. Understanding the she would not be required to relocate, she accepted the offer and remained on active duty until 2000, when she retired as a colonel. The same year Jones-Lukacs joined the air force, practicing physician Cecily David, a pediatrician at the Westchester, New York, Department of Health, “joined the service because my son had been born the previous year and I wanted a full career without all the headaches of a business overhead. I had a good friend who had just joined the Navy and he said it was a rewarding job.” David made inquiries and spoke to an army recruiter, who took her to an interview with the commanding officer of Keller Army Hospital at West Point, home of the U.S. Army Military Academy. After her successful interview, David, like Jones-Lukacs, was commissioned as a major. For two years she was the only female doctor at Keller. A pediatrician, she of course saw children but also treated cadets, “who were very compliant and easy to handle.” She did not experience any gender-related difficulties, and although as a working mother she often had to juggle conflicting responsibilities, she believes “all career women juggle. Having to balance being a wife, a soldier and a doctor can be difficult—but having a supportive spouse helps.” David’s military career required that she and her family relocate numerous times. David’s second military assignment was to Nuremberg, Germany, for three years, where she was chief of the Department of Psychiatry. The family then moved to Columbia, South Carolina, followed by a second tour of duty at Keller Army Hospital. In 1993 the army assigned David to Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland,

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where she commanded the health clinic. Further postings included another stint at Keller Army Hospital, this time as the commander, and then as medical director of Tricare Northeast before moving to her current job as assistant chief of Pediatrics and Faculty at the San Antonio Military Pediatric Center. Colonel David believes that her gender had no impact on her military medical career “until the colonel rank—after that it is all politics and who you know.” She does believe, however, that her ethnicity may have had an impact on her career: “Being an Asian American, I was privileged to have been selected for command early.” Col. (Dr.) Cecily M. David, U.S. Army MediLike Jones-Lukacs and David, cal Corps became the first female surgeon of air force psychiatrist Molly Hall the U.S. Military Academy in 1998. Courtesy joined the service as a practicing Women in Military Service for America Memo- physician with children. Hall was rial Foundation Inc. attracted to the air force because she saw “a lot of upward mobility for qualified women physicians in the education, clinical, and administrative career tracks.” Hall accepted a commission in 1987, and initially her air force career reflected the upward mobility to which she had aspired. Assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Hall became the director of the air force/civilian psychiatric residency program. In this program, residents from the psychiatry department at Wright State University School of Medicine trained with psychiatry residents from Wright-Patterson. In 1989 Hall was promoted to chief of the psychiatry service at Wright-Patterson. During this time she also held a faculty position at Wright State University. In 1990 Hall trained to be a flight surgeon, an exciting opportunity that allowed her to pin wings on her uniform. “The wings are a status symbol in Air Force culture and can enhance careers,” said Hall. She and her four children moved to Andrews Air Force base in 1995 so that she could become the psychiatric field consultant to the surgeon general of the air force. The family then moved to San Antonio, Texas, where Hall initiated and directed the air force’s second integrated residency training program. They then returned east to Bolling Air Force Base in Virginia, where as a colonel, Hall supervised six in-house medical consultants and one hundred psychiatric field consultants. In this posi-

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tion, she was able to develop policies pertaining to mental health issues such as sexual assault and suicide prevention. She was a member of the air force’s suicide prevention task force, which developed and implemented the suicide prevention program that decreased the suicide risk by 33 percent across the board in the air force. By 2000 Colonel Hall was on the faculty at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and on track for promotion to brigadier general. A reluctance to move her four children yet again, however, led her to give up her pursuit of a star. “My children couldn’t handle another move,” she explained. Colonel Hall remains happily at USUHS, where in addition to teaching she directs the Bioterrorism Education Project for the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress. Although frequent geographical relocations often require considerable flexibility and sacrifice from physicians who pursue a career in military medicine, the services themselves realize the need to take families, particularly spouses, into consideration when making assignments, particularly if they want to keep their doctors for the long term. For example, the services frequently assign dual military-career couples together. When army physician Rhonda Cornum and her husband, an air force surgeon, graduated from USUHS, they had to look for geographic locales that had both an army and an air force base located close enough to allow them to live together. The couple convinced the air force and army personnel officials to make the effort to co-locate them because they possessed critical skills that both services needed. According to physician Sybil Tasker, the navy’s willingness to keep her and her husband together figured strongly in their decision to remain in the navy. Tasker, a GMO assigned to Okinawa, married another GMO her second year on the island. The navy, explained Captain Tasker, has been very supportive in seeing to it that she and her husband are assigned together. The Taskers thought about leaving the navy a few times but always decided that it was easier to stay in—they were both happy in their assignments, and there was no reason to change. When the Taskers’ assignments on Okinawa ended, they were assigned to San Diego, where Sybil Tasker did her residency in internal medicine at the naval hospital while her husband worked at Camp Pendleton. Navy physician Briana Hill stated that throughout her career, the navy has done an excellent job of keeping her and her naval officer husband together. After her “out of service” residency, Hill owed the navy six years of active duty service. The Hills were assigned to Portsmouth, Virginia, where they remained for ten years. Hill was on staff at the major naval hospital in Portsmouth, and her husband, who worked in public relations, was assigned to several different jobs during that ten-year period, all in the same geographical area. The navy, explained Hill, was “fine” with her remaining in Portsmouth and would only have reassigned her had she requested it, which she did not want to do.

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When possible, the services sometimes make a deliberate effort to accommodate a non-military spouse. The navy sent family practitioner Lisa McGowan to Sigonella, Italy, for her first operational assignment fresh out of her residency at the naval hospital at Jacksonville, Florida. By the end of her two-year assignment, McGowan had fallen in love with her landlord’s son and married him. He was in dental school in Italy and wanted to complete his degree, so McGowan asked the navy to extend her assignment. The navy “was kind enough,” said McGowan, to allow her to stay at Sigonella for six years, where she had her first child. By that time McGowan had finished her active duty commitment to the navy and opted to stay on. For her next assignment, she went to Newport, Rhode Island, as the primary care manager for the Naval War College, while her husband took a two-year residency in oral facial pain at Boston’s Tufts University. McGowan is grateful to her husband for being so flexible and willing to “go with the flow.” Because it can be very difficult for the spouses of military members to have careers, McGowan and her husband believe strongly in “actively managing” their careers rather than trying to adjust to whatever military assignment comes along. They were in Newport for two years and had a second child there. Shortly after that birth, the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred, and the operational tempo of the navy began to pick up. McGowan was vulnerable for deployment months after having her second child, and she did not want to have to deploy with two children under two years old. Her husband had only been in the United States for a couple of years and was still learning the language and the culture, and he would have faced a tremendous challenge handling the home front alone. Searching for an alternative, McGowan’s husband located a job description on the Internet for the position of deputy special assistant for women’s health at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, D.C. McGowan put in for and got the assignment. The position gave her the opportunity to set policy for health issues relating to women in the navy, and it carried a relatively low risk of deployment. McGowan emphasized that she has stayed in the navy only because she has been able to actively manage her own career. She appreciates that she has been lucky; the navy could have ordered her out of Sigonella and forced her to leave her new husband. Because she knows she must take a turn at deployment if she wants to stay in the navy (she has thirteen years in and has just signed on for another two years) she has once again taken control of her career and sought and received an assignment as a senior medical officer aboard a submarine tender. Submarine tenders deploy frequently, but only for a couple of weeks at a time. Her children are three and five now, and she and her husband believe they can handle short separations. Because the ship’s home port is in Italy, meaning her in-laws can help her husband while she is deployed, this is an optimal assignment for her. Although the services have learned to be flexible in physician assignments, the physician’s spouse is often the one who has to be the most flexible of all. A

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significant number of women physicians with careers in the military have had husbands who were willing to place their careers second to those of their wives. Some of these men had jobs that enabled them to work at home, while others worked part-time or even gave up their jobs or retired to stay at home with the children, a phenomenon their wives recognized with gratitude. Air force physician Col. Shirley Lockie met her husband when she was a resident at Andrews Air Force Base and he was chief of the emergency room. They married during her second year of residency. When she completed her residency, the air force gave the Dr. Shirley (Hilsgen) Lockie graduated with couple a joint-spouse assignment, the second class of women at the U.S. Air and she became a staff physician Force Academy in 1981 and then became the at nearby Bolling Air Force Base. first female Air Force Academy graduate at When the chief of clinical services the Uniformed Services University medical school in 1985. Lockie served as an air force left the base, she had been there family practice physician until her retirement only a year but was made chief beas a captain from the Air Force Medical Corps cause the other two doctors on in February 2005. Courtesy Women in Military base had even less time than she Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc. did. She explained, “I had to learn my job from my nurses and physician assistants.” That same year, she and her husband had twin boys. In 1991, when the boys were still small, she received a plum assignment at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. Her husband retired from the air force and became “Doctor Dad.” He now works part-time at emergency rooms wherever she is stationed. Navy doctor Lt. Cmdr. Denise Peet met her husband-to-be, a civil service engineer, when she returned from her Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm deployment as a naval laboratory specialist. She remembers telling him that she had decided to return to school and become a navy doctor. “If we get married,” she said, “we could end up living anywhere in the world.” He told her that he was okay with that and found a job in the Washington, D.C., area while she attended USUHS. Knowing that they had only a limited amount of time to have a child, the couple timed the birth to occur during Peet’s fourth year

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of residency, which she had heard was the “lightest year.” Peet took six weeks off, and her husband became “Mr. Mom” the day she went back to work. He had a hard time at first, she said, because “he is a logical engineer-type person and a baby is anything but.” However, he adjusted. She took a breast pump with her to work and found a quiet place to pump each day. When she was on call and couldn’t go home with the milk, he simply brought the baby into the hospital so she could nurse him. He then took bottles of milk back home with him for the baby. Army doctor Col. Paula Underwood and her husband decided that he would remain at home with their baby while she pursued a military career. Underwood’s husband was Brazilian, and his culture was very macho, so this was a huge sacrifice for him. Navy doctor Lt. Janine Danko is in the process of completing her residency and has an eighteen-month-old son who “is just starting to get interactive.” Danko admits that juggling her responsibilities as a physician and a mother can be very demanding. Her job-related hours are very long and can be just as physically demanding as child care. Danko believes that even in 2006, women still accept more household and child-care responsibilities than men do. “For example when a child becomes sick, it is usually the mother that stays home with the child, not the father. The unpredictability of such small crises sometimes leads to a lack of respect on the part of male colleagues who may not understand,” she said. With only one child, Danko has not yet reached the point where it is impossible to handle both child care and professional demands. Professional women who eventually face this conflict have the option of paying for child care—a possibility that is viable for military physicians because their salaries are high enough to accommodate this need. Army colonel Susan Dunlow, chief of obstetrics at Walter Reed Army Hospital, stated unequivocally that in order to survive her dual roles as a mother and army physician, she must have live-in help who she can trust. Dunlow’s husband is also a career army officer, so the couple relies heavily on paid child care. Dunlow is extremely aware that she and her husband are fortunate in that they are able to afford the best child care possible, and she empathizes with the enlisted personnel and single parents at Walter Reed who struggle with this issue on a daily basis.

Accommodating Pregnancy

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nlike in past eras, today’s military women do not have to leave the service when they become pregnant. The armed forces attempt to accommodate pregnant servicewomen whenever possible, and regulations are designed to protect women from adverse performance appraisals and negative impacts on their careers. Sometimes, however, a woman’s colleagues resent

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her pregnancy because they fear that her inability to “pull her weight” will result in longer hours for them. Alternatively, other well-meaning coworkers will attempt to coddle a pregnant colleague and insist she accept special favors. In an environment where it is particularly important to be perceived as a “team player,” either reaction can result in strained working relations and performance-related difficulties. Women who experience high-risk pregnancies are even more vulnerable to this type of problem. The navy was the first of the armed services to adopt a standard six-week postpartum leave for servicewomen. Navy physician Catherine Christenson, working with the office of the navy surgeon general and the chief of navy personnel, developed and established the navy’s pregnancy policy in 1989. In her two years with the surgeon general’s office, between 1988 and 1990, Christenson also worked on regulations pertaining to abortion and single parenthood. Almost fifteen years later, navy commander Lisa McGowan, MD, the deputy special assistant for women’s health, wrote a policy paper suggesting that after giving birth, women should not be deployed for at least twelve months, giving them a full year to bond with their baby. The paper is now undergoing review, and McGowan hopes that it will be seriously considered. The navy may not accept the suggested twelve-month period, she says, but even six or eight months would be better than the current four months allotted. McGowan explained that when women are deployed after only four months, breast-feeding becomes impossible. When McGowan herself was breast-feeding, her command always gave her the necessary breaks in her schedule to pump, but she realizes that not all commands do this. She is developing a policy that would make time for pumping standard throughout the navy. If the navy wants to keep good people, she says, they will make these small concessions. Navy flight surgeon Elise Gordon was assigned to Pax River Naval Air Station in Maryland during the mid-1990s when there were very few servicewomen in the tactical, test, and evaluation squadron to which she was assigned. “The Doc” she said, is a separate entity, considered neither male nor female, so the sexism at Pax River, although definitely there, wasn’t that much of a problem for her. She assumes that it was a significant problem for the enlisted women at the station. Gordon was told that in the beginning of her tour, she did a good job of fitting in with the men. Later, after she got pregnant, it became harder to fit in because she wasn’t flying with them as much and they all felt the need to take care of her. This was her second pregnancy, and she made a point of continuing to fly, just as she had during her first pregnancy in Sigonella, Italy. She flew until twenty-five weeks with her first child and then until twenty-two weeks with her second. Gordon stated that “being pregnant while in uniform can be difficult, especially overseas where they aren’t always equipped

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to handle your special needs, i.e. breast feeding.” Pregnancy still carries a stigma in the service, she says: “Many people will assume that you aren’t pulling your load, [an attitude] to which women can respond by working until they drop.” At Pax River, she remembered, many people “tried to baby me, giving up their choice parking spots and ordering me to take it easy even though I insisted I was okay.” Army physician Paula Underwood became pregnant during her last year of residency in preventive medicine at the Walter Reed Institute of Research in Washington, D.C. It was a difficult pregnancy, and during the last few months Col. (then Maj.) Paula K. Underwood has she had to remain at home due served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps June to high blood pressure. Still, the 1984–present, including Operation Desert army accommodated her so that Storm. Courtesy Women in Military Service the residency was not interrupted. for America Memorial Foundation Inc. They allowed her husband, who had a degree in public health, to bring work she performed at home into the office and even allowed him to present her findings. The baby was delivered two days after the end of the residency. Air force physician Barbara Cooper remained in the service throughout her first, high-risk, pregnancy, during which she had to have a certain amount of bed rest, but decided to separate from the air force after she had her second child, which was also a high-risk pregnancy. When she gave birth to her second child, she had just completed the four years of active duty she owed the air force for her education. She believed that with two children, there was no way she and her husband, an army neurosurgeon, could both have remained on active duty. Cooper was upset by the lack of support from her male colleagues when she took time off during her pregnancies. She noticed that colleagues whom she believed were her friends prior to her pregnancies and complications often were the ones who became resentful afterward. She was disappointed, she said, because pregnancy affects only a few months in a career; people often have accidents or illnesses that keep them out of the office for weeks or months at a time—why the resentment about a pregnancy? “They kept asking me if

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I had had a good vacation, and if I had been able to get in lots of sleep,” said Cooper. Her colleagues appeared to be very resentful of her time off and had no sympathy for the problems she encountered during her pregnancies. There was also a lot of resentment about the fact that when she was pregnant she was non-deployable. “The men would make comments like they wished they had a uterus so they didn’t have to worry about being deployed,” which was unfair, said Cooper. “Obviously if you want a family and wait until after your medical training period is over, you can’t afford to wait much longer or you will lose your window of opportunity. I didn’t get pregnant because I wouldn’t have to deploy; it’s that my time to have a family was limited.” When Cooper returned to work after her first pregnancy, she discovered that there were no provisions for breast-feeding; no designated area for pumping breast milk, no scheduled times for her to do so, and no set way to establish such time periods. Cooper had to block off one appointment time in the morning and one in the afternoon to pump, and she usually worked through lunch to make up; however, “my colleagues acted like I was taking a nap or something during my pumping times,” she said. Realizing the need and hoping to ease the way for other air force women, Cooper obtained the go-ahead to write and publish the air force “Instructions for Breast Feeding in the Military.” Air Force emergency care physician Col. Linda Lawrence received an assignment as a faculty member in the department of military and emergency medicine at USUHS in the mid-1990s. Her first operational assignment at Scott Air Force Base had been difficult, but her assignment at USUHS was rewarding because she had the opportunity to mentor other women doctors. Within two years at USUHS she had fulfilled her obligation to the air force and needed to decide whether she wanted to remain in the service or move into the civilian sector. She was pregnant, and this became a factor in the decision. She began looking around the Washington, D.C., area for opportunities, paying special attention to maternity benefits and policies. Lawrence and her husband wanted to stay in Washington because he worked for the federal government. She discovered that most places weren’t very hospitable to pregnant women doctors, and since the air force had excellent benefits, she decided to continue in her assignment for another two years, a decision that pleased air force officials because they appreciated continuity in academic assignments. Lawrence took six weeks of maternity leave with her first child, a daughter, although she did come into the office occasionally, by choice, to fulfill certain academic responsibilities. Her second pregnancy was more problematic and required bed rest, but university administrators were exceptionally supportive throughout. The military system, said Lawrence, is set up so that in most cases women do not have to worry about losing jobs or seniority due to pregnancy; the system treats pregnancy like a deployment. That is not to say, she added, that all of the individuals one works for and with will be as supportive as the

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system is. In her case, one man at the university was upset when she could not take a class into the training field during her third trimester of pregnancy and claimed that she was not a “team player.” Here Lawrence notes that she had already taken classes to the field several times before, even while pregnant, but this time she happened to be in her third trimester. Her colleague created such a stir, however, that she had to obtain a medical profile that prevented her from going to the field. Unfortunately even that did not stop this particular individual’s complaints. Some who didn’t want extra work were forced to pick up the slack, and this caused some resentment to fester. Lawrence dealt with it, but the circumstances would haunt her later in her career during her second tour at USUHS when she was selected to become the commandant of the university. This was a prestigious appointment; she was the first air force doctor and the first woman to be selected for the position. Unfortunately, however, her new supervisor had been at the university during her first tour, and he remembered that she had not gone into the field. He was angry that she had been selected as commandant, insisted that she was not a team player, and argued that he did not want her on his team. This created a great deal of friction between the two of them and made what should have been a very enjoyable assignment anything but, Lawrence said. The situation did not, however, have a negative impact on her career. After three years, she was promoted to full colonel and assigned to Travis Air Force Base as the chief of medicine at the hospital there. Navy physician Lt. Cmdr. Denise Peet doesn’t remember much resentment from colleagues concerning her pregnancy, except during one rotation when morning sickness prevented her from keeping up with the other residents. After Peet’s child was born, she was required to go to Texas to participate in a combat medicine class. Because she had been breast-feeding, she pumped the entire time she was away, disposing of the milk. (She had left plenty stored away at home for the baby.) When she returned, she discovered that her son had gotten so used to the bottle (which was faster) that he didn’t want to be breast-fed any longer. He had weaned himself. In speaking about the special problems that servicewomen face when they are deployed, navy physician Sonovia Johnson said, “Pregnancies shouldn’t happen in a battle theater, but they do.” Navy physician Tracy Bilski provides a perfect example. Commander Bilski discovered she was pregnant while she was deployed with the 15th MEU to Camp Rhino, Afghanistan, in late 2001. The unit’s mission was to establish a hospital to care for forward-deployed marines. Camp Rhino “had nothing—we slept in sleeping bags on the ground and had no toilet facilities. Food was rationed,” she said. After eight weeks, Bilski realized she was pregnant, although she had tested negative just prior to deploying. The discovery meant “they had to get me out of there.” Bilski said that the reactions of her fellow marine officers were “very professional.

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They knew food rationing wasn’t a good idea for a pregnant woman and they knew I had to leave.” Officially then, pregnancies, even high risk ones, are not supposed to have a negative impact on a servicewoman’s career. Servicewomen, however, understand that the negative attitudes of a woman’s colleagues can indeed harm her career. Attitudes, of course, cannot be regulated. Uniformed personnel bring their attitudes with them when they join the armed forces, and often these beliefs are hard to change. The military is, after all, merely a reflection of the society it serves. Until society’s attitude toward working mothers changes, military women will continue to face difficulties as they try to combine motherhood with a service career.

Dealing with Deployment

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y the time the first Gulf War occurred in 1990 and 1991, women physicians were well integrated into both the regular and reserves of the U.S. Armed Forces. Some physicians, such as air force reservists Col. Elizabeth Jones Lukacs and Lt. Col. Moira Burke, and army reservist Lt. Col. Marjorie Mosier, deployed to locations within the United States. Others like army doctors Col. Paula Underwood and Col. Rhonda Cornum and army reservist physician Maj. Barbara Walker, deployed to Saudi Arabia with their commands. Deployments mean disrupted lives for regular and reserve physicians alike. Those who deploy to the battlefield deal with primitive conditions and physical danger; reservists with private practices in civilian life face the loss of their business, and women with families suffer when forced to leave their loved ones. Col. Elizabeth Jones-Lukacs was the commander of an air force reserve unit at Andrews Air Force Base when Operation Desert Shield began. Her unit backfilled for another unit at Andrews that was deployed to Saudi Arabia. Jones-Lukacs, who worked as civilian physician at Andrews when she wasn’t activated, did not have to deploy to a new geographical location; she merely switched jobs on base, so her family was not affected. For physician reservists who maintain private practices in civilian life, deployment can be far more problematic. Their absence can do irreparable damage to their practice as their patients find other doctors. Ophthalmologist Moira Burke of Tampa, Florida, joined the air force reserve in 1989 with sixteen years of private practice behind her. Burke, who had a teenage son living with her, hadn’t even been to boot camp when she got a letter suggesting that she begin packing her bags and making arrangements for deployment. Burke found making plans to put her life and her practice on hold for an indefinite amount of time to be very stressful. A friend who was an emergency room nurse volunteered to move in with her son so he could remain at home and not have to change schools.

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Burke hired an ophthalmologist to run her practice while she was away and then left for Andrews Air Force Base for what would be a two-and-a-halfmonth deployment. Her reserve unit replaced staff members at Malcolm Grove Memorial Hospital, who were deployed to Germany to replace military personnel sent to Saudi Arabia. Burke was so new to the service, however, that “I didn’t know how to get dressed much less who to salute.” Because she came in as a major, she had her own room in the barracks. After her appointment received Senate approval, she was promoted to lieutenant colonel. The senior-level nurses helped her acclimate to the service and taught her how to get along and how to deal with the protocol, all of which were new to her. She kept a “picture of what she was supposed to look like” on her mirror to help her get dressed every morning. Her job as an ophthalmologist, however, was not new, and she continued to love what she was doing. Her reserve medical unit introduced some new civilian-type practices to the military hospital, such as doing cataract surgery on an outpatient basis rather than keeping patients overnight. Also, because some of the other reservist physicians were younger than Burke and had attended medical school later, they knew some newer and better medical, surgical, and diagnostic techniques that she was able to learn from them. When her son visited her at Andrews, her colleagues spent a good deal of time with him explaining the importance of what his mother was doing. By the time he left the base he was seriously considering going into the service himself. Burke was bothered by the uncertainly surrounding the length of the deployment, however. She wanted to go back to Tampa and was annoyed by rumors that the unit was going to Germany. “All of this was very aggravating for someone who likes to plan out her life,” explained Burke. “The individual I had hired to see my patients did not have a vested interest in my practice, and didn’t manage the practice the way I would have. Had the deployment lasted much longer, I may not have been solvent!” When the unit was finally sent home after two and a half months, Burke was relieved. Although she remained in the reserve for eight years, she came to believe that her practice would not survive if she were called up again, so she reluctantly resigned her commission. Army reserve physician Lt. Col. Marjorie Mosier and her husband, also a physician, were both activated in December 1990 and sent to Fort Ord, California, to replace physicians that had deployed to Saudi Arabia. Mosier and her husband did not have children and were stationed together, so they did not have to deal with certain emotional stressors, but they did have to worry about issues such as shutting down their house and making arrangements to pay bills. The only ophthalmologist at the hospital, Mosier was kept busy examining soldiers on their way to and returning from southwest Asia. During routine exams on soldiers, she spotted quite a few cases of glaucoma in

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otherwise healthy young men who had no idea that they had the disease. She was pleased to able to catch the disease in the early stages when it is curable. In one sense, she says, these young men were lucky that they had been deployed and screened; otherwise the disease may not have been caught in time. She did not mind the deployment or the uncertainty surrounding the length of the deployment because she knew she was performing a highly necessary service. The Mosiers also knew that when the war ended and they returned to their civilian lives, their jobs at the University of California would be waiting for them. Army reservist Maj. Barbara Walker was in a similar position to that of Moira Burke when Walker was called to active duty and deployed to Saudi Arabia with the 82nd Airborne Division. Walker became the first female physician in the 82nd to be sent to Saudi Arabia during the war. The mother of five and grandmother of one was given two days’ notice that she would have to deploy. Although she had been in army reserve since 1984, she had had minimal field experience and didn’t know how to pack her gear. Said Walker, “I had to employ my stepdaughter, who is in the ROTC program. She helped me pack and gave me some tips.” Once Walker’s unit got to Saudi Arabia, she and the other physicians were instructed to carry a weapon because they were close (within one hundred miles) to the border of Iraq. She told her commander that she would not be able to shoot someone if the occasion arose. He responded that her job was to care for casualties—and it was part of the job to carry a weapon. Walker, like Burke, was frustrated at not knowing when she would go home. The fact that she was not particularly busy exacerbated her frustration. There were “so many physicians available” at her particular station that they often just “sat around waiting for patients. When one finally came, we all ran and gathered around him.” Most of her duties involved preventative medicine; she inspected sanitation facilities and trained medics. Deployment to a battle theater can place servicewomen at risk, a contingency of which their families at home are well aware. Army flight surgeon Col. Rhonda Cornum went to Saudi Arabia assigned to an army Apache attack helicopter battalion attached to the 101st Airborne Division. Before the war, Cornum had been the chief of the crew life support branch at the army’s Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Cornum was the quintessential field soldier as well as a physician. She had earned the Expert Field Medical Badge and had graduated from the airborne school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Cornum’s husband, an air force physician, also deployed to Saudi Arabia. The Cornums sent Rhonda’s teenage daughter, Regan, to live with her father in North Dakota. According to Cornum, Regan was not surprised at her mother’s decision to deploy to Saudi Arabia. “She would have thought I was a wimp if I stayed home,” wrote Cornum in her memoir. Then Major Cornum arrived in Saudi Arabia in late August, the only woman

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Former prisoner of war Maj. Rhonda Lee Cornum disembarks an International Red Cross DC-9 at the Riyadh Air Base, 6 March 1991. Courtesy U.S. Dept. of Defense.

officer in her three-hundred-man battalion, although there were five enlisted women. In theory, her job entailed flying aboard search-and-rescue-mission helicopters as well as flying aboard a helicopter that followed the other battalion helicopters during missions, so that if a battalion helicopter was shot down, Cornum’s helicopter could aid and retrieve the pilots before they were captured. The battalion surgeon, assisted by several medics, also provided medical care to the battalion. This routine duty occupied Cornum and her staff for the first four months of the unit’s deployment, when the battalion was quartered in a parking garage at the King Fahd airport, waiting for Operation Desert Storm to begin. Cornum wrote to her daughter once a week and called her on Thanksgiving. She believed that her daughter was handling the separation well. “Regan was busy with school and sports, and seemed to understand what we were doing,” she wrote in her memoir. “Her friends were impressed that Kory [Regan’s stepfather and Cornum’s husband] and I were in Saudia Arabia.” The battalion went into action when the ground war started on January 16, 1991. On the fourth day of the ground war, Cornum was part of a helicopter search-and-rescue mission that crashed behind enemy lines. Cornum and one other crew member survived the crash, but Cornum broke both arms, took a piece of shrapnel in the shoulder, tore the ligaments of her right knee, and crushed a finger. When Iraqi soldiers discovered the crash site, Cornum and her fellow survivor, Sgt. Troy Dunlap, were taken prisoner. During her ordeal,

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Major Cornum, a flight surgeon assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 229th Aviation Brigade, sits next to U.S. Army Col. Richard Williams on a C-141B Starlifter transport aircraft after her release by the Iraqi government during Operation Desert Storm, 6 March 1991. Courtesy DefenseImagery.mil, U.S. Dept. of Defense.

Cornum thought often of her daughter: “I didn’t know how she would react. How long could she stay strong? What if I were here for months? Her teenage years were supposed to be fun and free of worry. How could she live life normally, worried about me in Iraq?” Cornum’s story of her seven-day captivity has been detailed in her memoir, She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story, written with Peter Copeland. Cornum remained in the army, later serving overseas again in Bosnia and Germany. Not all military physicians who deployed to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm had duties as dangerous as those of Colonel Cornum. Army doctor Capt. Carolyn Sullivan, a pediatrician, deployed to the Persian Gulf with the 3rd Armored Division’s 1st Brigade. Initially, Sullivan expected to be caring for wounded GIs. However the 1st Brigade was assigned to run a refugee camp in Safwan, Iraq. Sullivan, the only female physician in the camp, began treating Iraqi children and their mothers. Because Iraqi women are more comfortable with a woman physician, Captain Sullivan was kept extremely busy. Malnutrition, infections, and diarrhea were the most common problems among the children. When the division first deployed with a combat mission, the commander of the 1st Brigade had wondered why a pediatrician was on his medical staff. Once the unit received the mission of supplying and guarding the refugee camp, however, he recognized her usefulness.

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Army physician Maj. (now Colonel) Paula Underwood deployed to Saudi Arabia with the 1st Armored Division in November 1990. When the ground war started and the 1st Armored moved into Iraq, she was with the division. Initially, her responsibilities involved caring for enemy prisoners of war, the “walking wounded behind barbed wire,” as she described it. All ages, young and old, had been conscripted into the Iraqi Army and thus became her patients. As the division’s preventative medical officer, her responsibilities also entailed ensuring that the command took the necessary measures to keep the division’s soldiers healthy. For example, malaria was a problem in southwest Asia, and commanders were expected to follow certain guidelines to curtail the disease. Underwood conducted inspections to make sure that latrines were kept clean, insects were controlled, and sanitation regulations were being followed. Many women find the separation from their families that deployment brings is exceptionally difficult to handle. Underwood and her family were stationed in Germany when she received her orders to deploy with her division, and she stated that leaving her husband and small daughter was “the hardest thing I have faced in my military career.” She didn’t know whether she would live to come home and wondered whether her daughter would forgive her. In the end, after agonized soul searching, Underwood deployed with her unit, leaving behind a letter for her daughter to read “in case I didn’t come home.”  Navy doctor Sandra Yerkes’ psychiatric residency was interrupted in its second year when she was deployed on the hospital ship USS Comfort during the first Gulf War. Yerkes called herself “a sort of baby psychiatrist” who worked closely with the other psychiatrists aboard the ship, helping male and female sailors deal with the separation from their families. “Everyone has connections,” said Yerkes. “People worried about spouses, children, and elderly parents. Many of the sailors had been given only 48 hours notice before they deployed.” Yerkes learned that people handle anxiety in a variety of ways. Personnel aboard the Comfort were very nervous, waiting for the war to start and wondering how their families were dealing with the situation. When Yerkes went back to Bethesda after three months, the people there were worrying about the possibility of being deployed—a situation that also produced anxiety. Dealing with deployment and the possibility of deployment can be a formidable challenge for female physicians trying to balance career and family responsibilities. This is a problem their civilian counterparts do not face and one that in the long run may account for significant numbers of women opting out of a service career. Air force colonel Kimberly May, MD, believes that one reason many women air force physicians leave the service after their active duty commitment is up is because of the expeditionary-type of rotation system that regularly put physicians on deployment for four-month intervals.

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She says that the air force is having a hard time sustaining this rotation system, which has been in place since before 9/11, because it means that normal assignments (those not in Iraq or Afghanistan) now sometimes end after six months or a year in one spot instead of what had been the usual three-year stay. These frequent reassignments have been hard on many people, and the air force has lost many doctors as a result. May believes that women physicians in the service tend to migrate away from operational jobs and toward academic or teaching jobs. While the army and navy have medical commands, the air force does not. Air force doctors work for the wing to which they are assigned, without the protection or access to long-term assignments that medical commands can provide. “You have to be willing to go with the flow in an Air Force career,” says May, “so you will see fewer women at the senior ranks in the Air Force than you see in the Army and the Navy.” Captain Yerkes echoes May’s analysis but believes that the Navy Medical Corps also has fewer women physicians at higher ranks because of this very issue—the difficulty of balancing family life while moving every few years and the possibility of having to deploy. Navy physician Lt. Cmdr. Tracy Bilski provides a perfect example. She has three young children, whom she calls “the greatest adventure in life.” All the stress and multitasking that career women deal with is well worth it, says Bilski, but the idea of deploying and leaving her children for months at a time worries her. She was supposed to deploy to Iraq in August 2006 and did not know how she would handle it emotionally. She had only six years of active duty with the navy at the time and did not think she would do another fourteen until retirement—she foresaw too many deployments down the road. Navy lieutenant Rachel Umi Lee had a six-month-old baby and was not sure she would want to deploy now that she had a child. Her husband was not in the Navy and had a computer-programming job that allowed him to work at home, so she had no child-care worries. Lee’s husband was even willing to get another job if she wanted to stay in the navy and was required to relocate. Lee thought she would actually like the idea of deploying if it weren’t for the thought of leaving her child. She was only thirty-one years old and had a very supportive husband—so it was possible she might have more children. She said there were not many women doctors in the navy with children, so there weren’t any role models to guide her. Navy captain Sybil Tasker also worried about the increasing possibility of deployment. Tasker’s children were eleven and thirteen years old, and she believed it would be more problematic to leave them at this stage than it was when they were younger. She actually deployed to Guam for four months on a humanitarian assistance assignment during her second pregnancy. She was in her first trimester but believed there was no risk in deploying to Guam and that, should anything happen, there were facilities there for her. “So I just didn’t make an issue out of it—because I wanted to get an overseas deploy-

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ment out of the way before there were two small children at home and deploying would be far more difficult. Leaving my husband with a two-year old for four months was far better than leaving him with a two-year old and an infant later on.” Also, Tasker wanted to nurse her second child for at least a year, believing that would be healthier for the baby, so she took the Guam deployment to cut her risks of a later, less convenient deployment. No one in the armed forces is completely safe from deployment these days. When army reserve ophthalmologist Marjorie Mosier deployed to Kuwait in 2003, she was six months short of retiring with twenty years of service at age sixty-five. Mosier was surprised to be called up, but the army needed an ophthalmologist in Kuwait, and no one expressed any concern about her age. Her physician husband, who had already retired from the reserve, remained at home, so Mosier did not have to worry about making arrangements for the care of the house and mail as the couple had done when they were deployed during the first Gulf War. Mosier arrived at Camp Doha and was immediately afflicted with the dysentery that about one-third of all newly arriving personnel there suffered. The camp was blisteringly hot; 130-degree heat was not abnormal, and personnel quickly learned to keep covered outside and to drink bottled water constantly. It appeared to Mosier that while enlisted troops got to ride everywhere, officers, including physicians, were usually required to walk everywhere—to the mess hall, to headquarters, to quarters, and to work. Another irritation was the fact that many of the buildings were “too air-conditioned,” and thus “freezing cold,” including the living quarters. Given the conditions at Doha, Mosier was happy that her assignment was only for ninety days. Shortly after arrival, Mosier was told that she was needed in Afghanistan for a short-term assignment to care for a particular patient, a fifteen-year-old enemy combatant. The young soldier’s eyes had been injured by a grenade he attempted to throw at American troops after he had been shot. Her supervisor explained that the patient was physically large and threatening, and that he had attempted to kill the last physician who treated him. He had told his captors that his “mission in life” was to kill an American. Mosier was flown to Afghanistan, arriving in the middle of the night because incoming aircraft were targets. Her patient was at a combat support hospital, or CASH, that had limited equipment for eye surgery. To her surprise, Mosier was able to talk to her patient in English, which he spoke fairly well. He was physically restrained, and an armed guard was present during the exam and throughout the treatment. The operation was a long procedure because both eyes were seriously damaged. Once the surgery was over, Mosier was flown back to Camp Doha. On her return Mosier was assigned to a general walk-in clinic. Her patients were both soldiers and army contractors. Many of the contractors were older and had more serious vision problems, so she stayed busy. Her deploy-

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ment was supposed to be for three months, but she was allowed to go home two weeks early because the military had located other ophthalmologists who were ready to deploy. Mosier e-mailed her suggestions regarding the necessary equipment for ophthalmology in Iraq and Afghanistan to the surgeon general in Washington, D.C., and hoped her advice was heeded. Commander Bilski deployed to Afghanistan in mid-November 2001 and endured exceptionally primitive conditions. The Navy Special Forces and 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit had deployed forward into Afghanistan with no close medical care. The marines did not want soldiers to die because medical care was too far away, so twelve medical personnel from Camp Pendleton, including Bilski, were deployed to Camp Rhino, a forward operating base in Afghanistan. Their mission was to stabilize any casualties brought to them so that they could be medically evacuated. The camp did not have toilet facilities. Personnel helped cover each other to provide privacy for one another, but one of the women in the group “did not handle the situation well,” Bilski said. As time went on, however, things slowly got better. A unit of Seabees arrived “and built a tiny outhouse.” Water and food, however, remained rationed, because the unit was so far forward that getting supplies was sometimes difficult. The medical unit responded to two major incidents, which created a significant number of casualties, and the unit exhausted all of its supplies, including drinking water, to get the injured troops off base quickly. Bilski was only in Afghanistan for seven to eight weeks before she herself was medically evacuated because she had discovered that she was pregnant. A year later, army doctor Mary Krueger deployed to Afghanistan. Although Krueger had young children, she was excited by the prospect of overseas deployment and expected to enjoy the experience. She knew that her children would be fine with her husband for six months. She had not shot a weapon in ten years and had to relearn. One reason she had neglected weapons training, she explained, was that the army does not allow women at the shooting range when they are pregnant because of the potentially harmful effects of lead dust on the fetus. Krueger replaced another doctor at the 48th Combat Surgical Support Hospital, which had already been on the ground in Afghanistan for four months. The hospital was in tents and well equipped, although there were supply problems that sometimes forced the doctors to be creative and innovative in devising replacements for items they normally would have used. During Krueger’s two months with the 48th, the hospital treated 9,200 patients at sick call, where the most common diagnoses in soldiers were diarrhea, respiratory illness, fevers, heat injury, kidney stones, and dental problems. The combination of dehydration, high altitude, and the high protein diet typical of MREs caused a high number of kidney stones and led to numerous medical evacuations. As an emergency room surgeon, Krueger responded to coalition mass casualties and dealt with numerous land mine injuries. Afghanistan is the

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Maj. Mary V. Krueger applies ointment to a rash on the face of a young boy from the Kuchi tribe in Gardez, Afghanistan. Courtesy U.S. Department of Defense.

most heavily land-mined nation in the world, and land mine injuries included traumatic limb amputations, ruptured eardrums, and loss of sight. Venomous snakebites were also a frequent problem; Afghanistan has fifty-two varieties of poisonous snakes, and troops who kept food in their tents attracted mice, which in turn attracted snakes. Medical personnel also saw frequent sprains and strains and other accidents caused by working with heavy equipment. Toward the end of her assignment, Krueger traveled with a cooperative medical assistance unit that provided medical care in Afghan villages. Many of her patients were Afghan women who had never seen a doctor before and were often extremely eager to be evaluated and reluctant to leave. Krueger wanted the chance to do more of this type of work, but it was time for the 48th hospital to return to the States. She approached the command civil affairs unit and expressed interest in staying another four months. She was then appointed the deputy surgeon of the Coalition Joint Civil Military Operations Task Force, which was responsible for forming strong relationships between coalition medical personnel, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, and for helping the Afghan government doctors improve their own system of medical care. This involved partnering with the medical schools in Afghanistan, in which there were a significant number of women students. Krueger’s unit traveled around the country and set up clinics and symposiums to train medical students.

Krueger examines a child as her mother tries to comfort her. Courtesy U.S. Department of Defense.

Krueger plays with a little boy during her assignment in Gardez, Afghanistan. Courtesy U.S. Department of Defense.

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Army doctor Dina Schweitzer deployed to Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division in April 2003. As a battalion surgeon, she supervised the medical care of five thousand soldiers. While the battalion was stationed in the Sunni Triangle it came under mortar fire almost daily. Schweitzer provided medical care for the wounded when a medical tent near her was struck by a mortar round. Seventeen of twenty people inside the tent received shrapnel wounds, including punctures of the liver and the lungs. She also cared for victims of the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Schweitzer received the Bronze Star for helping to “unkink” the military’s medical supply system in Iraq. As of 2006, there are no longer any medical positions that female physicians can’t fill, and women doctors can be deployed anywhere in the world at any point in their career, regardless of the conditions or the danger involved in the assignment. Not surprisingly, some women with family obligations will decide that a military career is incompatible with the way they want to live their lives, just as many male doctors have already done. The effect of today’s “increased operational tempo” on the number of women physicians who choose careers in the service remains to be determined; however, there will always be some women doctors like Paula Underwood, Mary Krueger, and Rhonda Cornum who weigh the risks and choose to put themselves in harm’s way so that they can serve their country and its soldiers to the best of their ability.

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emale physicians who began their service careers during the 1970s faced both official career-limiting restrictions and unofficial career-related difficulties that often originated with their male colleagues, many of whom were simply reflecting society’s expectations of gender roles in the workplace. Slowly, the official limits placed on women military doctors’ assignments eased, and the American public began to find the concept of a woman doctor less startling. As we shall see, however, women military physicians still face gender-related difficulties in the workplace, although the armed services can do little to alleviate them because they are almost solely of a social nature. When army colonel Renata Engler was attending high school in the 1960s, her guidance counselors and teachers discouraged her from attempting to become a doctor. When Engler told her mother, a Holocaust survivor, about their attitudes, her mother said, “Don’t pay any attention to that nonsense, the U.S. can be backward in many ways.” Engler attended Stanford University between 1967 and 1971, majoring in premed. “There was a lot of bias against women there as well,” she said. “The attitude was that women would not have to work or have careers, but I always knew that I would be responsible for my parents, both of whom were in ill health.”

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Army colonel Renata Greenspan first came to the United States from Poland in 1970. As a single woman with a child, she had great difficulties finding a position in New York City. Potential employers looked briefly at her credentials and medical training but focused on the fact that she was a woman doctor, single and with a child, a foreigner, and Jewish. Many were frank regarding some of their concerns. As a female, they asked, would you feel comfortable giving our female lab technicians orders? Where would you eat lunch—with the female lab techs or the male doctors? How could you be comfortable in either lunchroom? What bathroom would you use? No one wanted to hire Greenspan—until she talked to an army recruiter. Her gender and religion did not appear to matter to him. He told her that the army liked the fact that she had already graduated from medical school and that she only needed her residency training. With an HPSP Army scholarship, Greenspan completed a residency in anatomic and clinical pathology at Roosevelt Hospital, followed by a fellowship in surgical pathology at Roosevelt and a second fellowship at the blood bank at Sloan-Kettering Hospital. By the late 1980s, women physicians still faced some restrictions in the types of assignments they could receive. For example, as an army flight surgeon Rhonda Cornum could not be a battalion surgeon for special forces or aviation battalions because of gender regulations. Several years before the first Gulf War, the army sought flight surgeon volunteers willing to serve on a navy barge in the Persian Gulf where army OH-58D helicopters were based. Said Cornum, “Because I was the flight surgeon for the 58D instructor company at Fort Rucker, I knew many of the pilots and a fair amount about the mission and their aircraft. I volunteered and was recommended by the commander of the hospital at Fort Rucker. We were told no, there were no facilities for women on the barge. I complained to the Army’s legal office, the Judge Advocate General, but the decision was blamed on the Navy admiral who ‘owned’ the barge. Eventually everyone agreed I could go but would have to stay nights in a hotel in Bahrain and be chauffeured back and forth from the hotel to the barge.” Cornum declined, understanding that she would be more of a drain on the mission than an asset. Navy doctor (now admiral) Christine Hunter also faced assignment limitations during the Gulf War era. When U.S. forces deployed to Saudi Arabia during the first war, Hunter was at the naval hospital in San Diego, which supported marine platforms. Because medical positions with these marine units were considered combat positions, Hunter was ineligible for deployment. All around her, however, her male colleagues were disappearing. Her own workload increased because she took on a large number of her colleagues’ cancer patients. Continuity of care is exceptionally important to the successful treatment of cancer, so it did not bother Hunter that she could not deploy; she felt that she was making a significant contribution by remaining behind. The experience, however, did make her rethink her career plans. When the war

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began, Hunter was toward the end of her active duty obligation to the navy and had already begun to explore opportunities in private practice. By the time the war was over, however, Hunter’s commitment to her patients and to navy medicine had strengthened, and she realized she was not yet ready to leave the service. Assignment limitations did not keep army colonel (then major) Paula Underwood from being deployed to Saudi Arabia, but she faced a significant challenge to her authority while she was deployed. Underwood was promoted to major shortly before she left for SWA, which was a good thing, she said, because while she was in the desert, she clashed with another doctor, also a major, who was senior to her. This man, the medical company commander, demanded that Underwood give him two of the three vehicles and two of six men that had been assigned to her so that he could use them on a special “Pony Express” mission, she said. She refused, because had she done so, she would not have been able to carry out her own assigned mission. He threatened to give her a poor evaluation and destroy her career, and eventually threatened to court-martial her, she said. Underwood believed that he tried to get vehicles from her because he thought he could push her around, because she was a woman, and when he found that he couldn’t, he became exceptionally angry because he viewed it as a hit against his masculinity. In the end, the division surgeon did her evaluation. In retrospect, Underwood believes that “[the medical company commander] was very frightened and his fear came out in his actions. He kept talking about his survival—the fact that he was going to make sure he returned to his wife and children—but never mentioned the company’s survival.” According to Underwood, everyone was frightened; this particular commander was not alone. She remembers that she had been able to get along with him prior to the deployment, but he became “very selfish” while in Saudi Arabia. Air force reserve physician Col. Elizabeth Jones-Lukacs also faced challenges to her authority while in the Gulf. Immediately following the first Gulf War, Jones-Lukacs was sent to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to command a clinic that cared for U.S. troops of all services. Many of the complaints she dealt with were heat related, Jones-Lukacs explained, and she learned a great deal about the affects of heat on the human body. She enjoyed her assignment, although it did have one drawback. As commander, she was responsible for dealing with the Saudis, and they were uncomfortable with women in leadership positions. Many were consistently rude to her, she said, and most of them refused to look at her directly. She was not allowed to wear her military uniform in town unless she was going directly to the hospital there. Jones-Lukacs could not let the Saudis’ attitude impact her staff ’s ability to do their jobs, and she had to work very hard to maintain her authority and her hospital’s autonomy. For example, the Saudis made it extremely difficult to obtain approvals to medevac pregnant U.S. troops out of the country, particularly if the woman

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was unmarried. In one particular situation Jones-Lukacs described, a female soldier was miscarrying and bleeding heavily, but the Saudis did not want to allow her to leave. Jones-Lukacs stood her ground and successfully demanded that the Saudis allow the evacuation. Contemporary women physicians with careers in the armed forces believe that as a rule, gender-related problems are minimal. When asked whether gender had had much of an impact on her career, navy doctor Elise Gordon said that gender problems are much more subtle than they used to be and that sometimes individuals see what they want to see: if they are looking for gender issues they will find them, and if they don’t want to acknowledge them they won’t see them. Said Gordon, “I usually just ignored stuff like that and simply went on ahead. It usually worked out for the best that way.” She believes that women in the medical corps encounter fewer problems than women line officers and that for physicians, gender-related problems can be specialty-dependent, with some specialties being far tougher on women. However, she said she doesn’t let herself spend much time thinking about these problems or attitudes “because that can weigh you down.” She also believes that civilian medicine is also still gender challenged and that in her experience military men can be less sexist than civilian men, because they are trained to be. At the University of California at San Diego, where Gordon did her fellowship in sports medicine, some of the male physicians were skeptical of her abilities, she said. Overall, she said, the military community is much friendlier and open to new people than the civilian sector. Air force colonel Kimberly May agrees with Gordon’s statements. May said that overall the military rigidly enforces zero tolerance of sexism and that evaluations and assignments are based on performance alone. She does believe, however, that some services are harder on women than others. She explained that she didn’t feel the pinch of gender discrimination until her first job after her residency, when she was assigned to work for the army for three years. She is a rheumatologist, or arthritis specialist. At that time, there were not many training programs that she could attend, and the air force’s program at Wilford Hall in San Antonio was full. The man who ran internal medicine at Wright-Patterson, where May was, knew his army counterpart, Col. Sterling West, very well and recommended that she take a three-year fellowship in rheumatology with him at Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center, Colorado. Colonel West, who May began to call “Attila the Hun,” was an old-school West Point graduate. The only time she was almost brought to tears at work was because of him. She said he was the type who would walk by as she was typing up a report and make a negative comment on her typing skills, attributing them to her gender. During her army assignment, May noticed that the army’s culture was different from that of the air force. May found that many army jobs involved heavy-duty physical labor, and she believes that as a rule, women have a

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harder time with physical jobs than men. Some army leaders, said May, can be impatient with this. They feel that women can lower performance and are being forced on them. If women want to be accepted in the army, says May, they have to excel at physical training and prove themselves fully physically capable or they receive “attitude.” May felt that she had to constantly prove herself to the army, something she did not feel at Wright-Patterson and has never felt in the air force. During army doctor Mary Krueger’s tour in Afghanistan, she said, her hospital commander refused her permission to visit medical units from other countries, saying that the only reason they had extended such invitations was because she was a woman, a statement that Krueger found insulting. “The commander automatically discounted any other reason such as medical skills, knowledge and abilities or even sincere interest, and assumed the only reason for the invitations was that I was female,” she said. Krueger wanted to visit the other medical units to expand her professional knowledge and learn what sort of equipment they had and how they ran their medical organizations. Krueger’s problems with her supervisor did not end there. She had been a replacement physician to the unit, which meant that when the hospital received orders back to the States, she had only been with it a short time. Believing that if she returned she would be liable for a subsequent deployment, possibly to Iraq, she decided to try to extend her tour in Afghanistan. She arranged for an assignment to a civil affairs unit. Her old commander was irritated that she had “gone behind his back” to obtain the appointment, Krueger said, and wrote a letter of complaint intended for her personnel file that intimated that she was romantically involved with the commander of the civil affairs unit. Krueger was furious. During the four months she was with the civil affairs unit, she said, she was in the field, while the commander remained behind at headquarters. He was more of a father figure or mentor than anything, she said, but because she was a woman everyone assumed that their relationship had been sexual. Navy doctor Rachel Lee realized that she did not fit the typical stereotype of a physician. At the San Diego naval hospital, she said, all her female navy colleagues were very stoic, fairly non-feminine women. Lee understood without being told that they felt they had to be that way to survive in the medical military environment. One woman colleague, a surgeon, who is very small (four feet eleven) compensates by being “mean,” Lee said. Lee is certain this is a coping technique designed not to show weakness but says, “That is not my style.” Lee is a small (five feet two) Asian woman with a girlish voice that she consciously tries to deepen while at work, allowing herself to speak in her naturally higher pitch only while in the privacy of her home. Air force colonel Linda Lawrence explained that her residency was a fairly negative experience, because she felt like she was not a member of “the boys club.” She says that a lot of inappropriate jokes and comments were made, and

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that the majority of her patients expected doctors to be male. She was a petite female, and patients always assumed she was a nurse. She tried to discount most of it, figuring that success was the best defense. Lawrence, like army surgeon Mary Maniscalco-Theberge, was also well supported by the nursing staff, who made it easier for her on a day-to-day basis. Navy physician Sybil Tasker said that never in her navy career has she felt discriminated against as a subordinate because of her gender. She worked hard, did a good job, and was always given credit for her work. She is beginning to notice, however, that gender is coming into play in her relationships with male subordinates. For example, she might say to one of her male staff, “I think you need to put this patient on such and such an antibiotic.” He, however, doesn’t necessarily do what she thinks she has told him to do. When she notices that he has not done as she “suggested,” she becomes angry because she believes that she has given him an order. He doesn’t see it so much as an order as a suggestion, which he does not feel obligated to carry out. Tasker has discussed this phenomenon with her husband and realizes that she is running into “typical female leadership style problems,” she says. Young men, her husband told her, “want and expect an Alpha leader . . . but that is not my style of leadership. I am a very relaxed and nurturing superior, and as a result I am seen as more of a mommy than a daddy. People like working with me, I mentor them and thus they look really good, but they get the credit for being good—I don’t get the credit for making them good. I am told I am ‘lucky’ with my interns!” Tasker explained that she is a specialty leader with thirty doctors under her command, very few of whom are women. Most of the women are civilians. Tasker has been in the navy for eighteen years and planned to retire when she has twenty years in. She realizes that the more senior she is, the more administrative her jobs will be, and she feels that she doesn’t do well as a boss. She would ultimately like to find a position in a nonprofit international aid society where she can work independently without having to be an administrator. Gaining recognition for one’s work appears to remain a problem for some women military physicians. Retired Army colonel Praxedes Belandres believes that she did not get proper recognition for her work toward the end of her career. Her assistant and her colleagues were recognized, she said, although she had done most of the work. Said Belandres, “It is one thing to work hard and succeed—another to get the recognition for it. The discrimination was always there; it may have been subtle but it was definitely there.” Navy doctor Sonovia Johnson says that she continues to be annoyed when people assume she is a nurse, and she goes out of her way to make sure that she carries herself with authority and establishes herself as a presence. Also, she feels that many times in hospitals male doctors are treated like gods, while women physicians are not—in fact often people will ask women physicians to do things they would never have the nerve to ask male doctors. Her advice

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to the young women physicians following her footsteps: “Don’t think about being a woman,” she says. “You already know you are, and a lot of other people will keep reminding you that you are a woman, so you won’t be in danger of forgetting. Just ignore it.” Although military regulations do not specifically state that women officers must be respected, the authority vested in military rank, regardless of who is wearing that rank, often helps female physicians counter sexist attitudes among military personnel. Many female physicians believe that women in the medical corps are somewhat insulated from the gender-related problems other military women experience. In certain off-duty social situations, however, some of these protections may not work as well: many women military physicians who have not experienced gender-related problems while on duty report having been annoyed or embarrassed while attending work-related dinners or parties. Army colonel Renata Greenspan remembers a party she attended for the army surgeon general when she was assigned at Fort Belvoir in 1979. Her male colleagues had all brought their spouses, but she came alone, and none of her colleagues approached her or introduced her to their wives. She stood in a corner with her drink for an hour and then told her boss that she wanted to leave. He said that according to protocol, she should not leave the party before the surgeon general. She asked him, “Don’t you see what is happening here?” He then told her that she could leave, quietly and by the back door. When navy flight surgeon Elise Gordon’s new base commander arrived, she did his preflight physical. That same night she and her husband attended a dinner with the base commander, the executive officer, and their spouses. Gordon said that the executive officer, trying to make a joke, commented about the fact that Gordon, who was around twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old at the time, had just “checked out” the new skipper’s private parts. Suddenly the new commander’s wife looked up and said, “What? What?” The woman could hardly believe that the young woman standing next to her had just examined her husband. Gordon remembers looking at her in amazement and thinking to herself, “What did you think my job entailed?” Air force doctor Nicole Thomas remembers a single experience in which she was treated differently because of her sex. The episode occurred at a military banquet. She was not in uniform and was attending with her date, a colonel who was also a physician. They were with two other couples, a male physician colonel and his date, a civilian nurse, and a female colonel and her date. A very high-ranking military doctor approached the group and engaged the two male colonels in conversation, completely ignoring the women officers, Thomas said. She was stunned and remembers thinking that she wouldn’t be able to put up with such treatment on a daily basis. A number of women physicians have experienced sexual harassment at one time or another during their military careers. In most cases, harassment

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episodes occurred during the 1970s and 1980s rather than the 1990s and beyond. Dr. Jones-Lukacs’s first military boss, a colonel, expected her to “perform extra duties that were not military and had nothing to do with her job.” He was married, and Jones-Lukacs said she kept suggesting he run his ideas by his wife to see what she thought of them. The colonel did not find her suggestions funny. Unfortunately, the situation was reflected in her performance grades, but eventually he was transferred to another post. Army colonel Renata Engler, who started her career in the navy and interned at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda in 1975, described “becoming skilled in dodging the advances of male supervisors without insulting them. The thought back then was that it was the woman’s responsibility to manage those situations without upsetting anyone—men can’t help it— women just have to deal with it!” Engler’s story is echoed by her colleague Greenspan, whose first active duty military assignment in the late 1970s was as staff pathologist and director of the blood bank at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Greenspan explained that she and other women “learned to control” situations involving gender. “If a conversation became personal,” said Greenspan, “women steered it in another direction or stopped it. If a woman became uncomfortable, she would attempt to extricate herself without anyone knowing that she was uncomfortable.” Army physician Paula Underwood believes that whenever women attempt to push through a glass ceiling in a profession that is predominantly male, they are going to face both overt and subtle forms of discrimination. She experienced all of that and says that the higher her rank, the subtler the discrimination got. She experienced some very overt discrimination at her first assignment at Fort Riley during the 1980s. The medical company commander, who was in the process of getting a divorce, asked her out on a date. She said that when she declined, he threatened to “do something to my PT scores that would result in an adverse report. I went to my superior officer, the deputy commander for clinical services, and that ended the situation.” More commonly, women experienced attempts to make them uncomfortable or to encourage them to quit training or leave positions. Army physician Mary Maniscalco-Theberge will never forget her extremely difficult surgical internship and residency, during which she said she was constantly buffeted by overly harsh criticisms and attempts to break her will. Navy physician Connie Mariano was a member of the second class of students at USUHS, in which fifteen of the sixty-five students were women. Early in their first year, an older male professor used a “girlie” slide during a lecture. The women students immediately asked him whether the woman pictured was his mother or his sister. The slide did not appear again. “It was a matter of education,” Mariano said. “We were educating the male hierarchy to the fact that women were going to play a part in military medicine.” Of course, sexual harassment is not solely a military problem. Navy physi-

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cian Lt. Cmdr. Tracy Bilski said she was repeatedly propositioned by a superior during her third year as a surgical resident at Cornell Medical School in New York City. Bilski was in the process of obtaining a divorce, and one of her professors “decided this was a good time to console me. He would page me throughout the middle of the night. It came down to me threatening him—threatening to record a conversation on the phone—and it stopped—it stopped.” She added, “When you are working 110 hours a week and everybody’s on your case about doing everything, and suddenly somebody does something like this to you that makes R. Adm. Bonnie B. Potter, Medical Corps, U.S. you feel so small, it destroys every Navy (Retired), 1975–2003. Courtesy Women ounce of confidence you have and in Military Service for America Memorial it adds—it adds a stress like I’ve Foundation Inc. never experienced before. This was worse than my divorce, you know.” Bilski explained that of the three women in her class at Cornell, one always felt picked on because of her gender. Bilski and the other woman did not. “Evelyn,” remembered Bilski, “cried all the time in front of the whole surgery department if she was asked a question she couldn’t answer.” Evelyn’s attitude irritated Bilski and the other female resident because they felt it reflected poorly on all the women students at the school. Although sexual harassment was far more prevalent in earlier eras, the armed services now officially prohibit it, and it appears to be less common and usually far more subtle than it was in the past. Furthermore, procedures are now in place that allow women to officially combat it when it does occur. As the number of women physicians continues to climb and the medical environment becomes less “macho,” harassment should decline as well.

Women Physician General Officers

T

he navy promoted Bonnie Potter to rear admiral in 1997, making her the first woman physician to reach general officer rank. Potter, an HPSP graduate, received her second star in 2000. Connie Mariano was promoted

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to rear admiral that year as well, and Christine Hunter was promoted to rear admiral in 2004. The army did not promote its first woman physician to brigadier general until 2004, when surgeon Carla Hawley-Boland, the commander of the European Regional Medical Command, received her first star. Hawley-Boland was nominated to receive her second star in June of the following year. The air force, meanwhile, had yet to pin stars on a female physician by the end of 2007.

EPILOGUE

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his book has dealt with the progress of women doctors in war, delving back into eras in which military medicine resisted the very idea of women physicians in uniform. In many ways the military’s attitude has been a simple reflection of the society it served, a society in which women physicians were viewed with suspicion and distrust. In August 1865, for example, Dr. Ann Preston, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, wrote to Mary E. Walker about conferring an honorary degree on her: “As far as I know you are the only medical woman in the army who was recognized as such although several . . . worked hard and faithfully in subordinate positions (as nurses, for instance), forced to do so by the distrust and prejudice of professional men.” Women physicians in the Spanish-American War devoted themselves to a variety of tasks other than purely medical ones because they had to volunteer as nurses on contract. This apparent contradiction between their training and their activities during wartime was rooted in the fact that society continued to have defined sex-role expectations that impacted the roles and choices of female physicians. Irene Toland was thirty-seven before she graduated from medical school because she could not make her own career choices earlier while she had an invalid mother to tend. Isabel Eliot Cowan admitted that even after acquiring her degree, she quit practicing medicine twice to care for one parent and then the other, even remaining as “housekeeper” until her father’s death in 1922. Certainly such expectations were not placed on the male physicians of that day. Women doctors, who courageously and persistently battled prejudice and obstructionism to obtain a medical education and earn a living practicing medicine, were also required to face and overcome a formidable set of prejudices and regulations when they offered to contribute their skills and abilities in defense of the nation. Indeed, the military medical community may have been even more hesitant than civilian medicine to accept women or even to acknowledge their service. Forced by dire need to send Dr. Edith Haines to France during World War I because a male physician with her skills in anes-

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thesia could not be quickly located, the army utilized her services for sixteen months but refused to pay her veterans benefits because she had served under contract rather than as a commissioned officer or enlisted soldier. In March 1943, Dr. Ruth E. Ewing, speaking on the issue of women doctors in World War II, stated: “We wish to serve as doctors, caring for sick and wounded, male or female.” The following month, her dream became reality when commissions to the army medical reserves finally became available to females, largely due to the American Medical Women’s Association’s successful campaign to gain women’s admission. Yet the majority of female doctors were assigned to care for the WACs, a huge disappointment for those women who expected to have more challenging medical assignments or, at the very least, hoped for overseas duty. By war’s end, however, most women practitioners “soon lost interest in directly challenging the gender norms governing American society and the medical profession.” Time and time again, women physicians proved their skills, strengths, and abilities to military commanders who were certain that they would not be able to handle discipline, primitive and dangerous field conditions, and horrific battlefield wounds. Serving first as nurses, then as contract surgeons, and next on a temporary, emergency basis, women physicians proved themselves essential on both the home front and the battlefront, until they finally received the right to serve permanently as commissioned officers in the armed forces in 1953. Yet despite these gains, the culture of postwar America in the 1950s “was deeply ambivalent toward women in medicine and other professions. Murmurs that women professionals had been used during the war only as a last resort demonstrated the stubborn persistence of old prejudices.” In 1953, former navy physician Hulda Thelander published her prescient survey of women physicians, which identified a set of family- and careerrelated conflicts that would haunt women physicians well into the next century. Married female physicians, Thelander explained, really had two jobs, as a physician and as a homemaker. Physician mothers, she continued, faced even further demands on their time, and these demands, many of which were emotional in nature, required “enormous reserves of energy.” Thelander noticed that women physicians faced with the conflicting demands of home and practice often chose to make deliberate career-related sacrifices, scaling back office hours and even relocating for the sake of their families. During the twenty years following the Thelander survey and the removal of the last official barrier to women physicians serving as permanent commissioned officers in the U.S. Armed Forces, social expectations and constraints ensured that the numbers of women doctors in the army, navy, and air force would remain miniscule. By 1973, however, two disparate forces combined to create an atmosphere in which women physicians were welcomed into the armed forces. By then the women’s movement of the 1960s had begun to equalize economic and educational opportunities for professional women

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across the board. At the same time, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War drove Congress to end the military draft and create an All-Volunteer Force. In order to survive, the armed forces actively recruited the highest-qualified individuals they could find, regardless of gender, and welcomed women into an increasing variety of noncombat-related roles. Although the military services did welcome women physicians into the All-Volunteer Force, the playing field was initially far from equal. Women physicians could not serve aboard military vessels or aircraft, nor could they serve in medical units that deployed with troops that were likely to engage in combat. These assignment limitations added legitimacy to the officially nonsanctioned attitudes of many male physicians, who grumbled about women physicians who did not have to deploy and were not considered for isolated hardship assignments (often because no living accommodations existed for women). Furthermore, the difficult-to-regulate but nevertheless demeaning social difficulties, as described by army doctor Col. Renata Greenspan and air force doctor Nicole Thomas in the previous chapter, contributed to a rather chilly, lonely environment for women physicians and made peer networking difficult. Over the next thirty years, the armed forces slowly opened more opportunities to women and allowed them to serve closer to combat operations. The navy began assigning women to noncombat vessels in 1979 and put them on vessels assigned to combat duties in 1993. Women began serving as flight surgeons during the 1980s and can now be assigned to medical units servicing combat troops in all areas of the world. At this point, no official regulations or officially sanctioned practices remain in the armed forces that discourage, retard, or prevent women physicians from receiving assignments or promotions that lead to the top of the military medical career ladder. The factors limiting active duty and reserve women military physicians’ ability to serve their country are now completely social in nature. A small segment of the male population persists in doubting women’s professional abilities; this problem, which is basically generational, should eventually disappear. Child-care and family-related problems, however, continue to plague both military and civilian women physicians. In the 1890s, physician and mother Anita Newcomb McGee hired a nanny to stay home with her children, and today army colonel Susan Dunlow believes that military mothers with young children cannot succeed professionally unless they do the same. Women military physicians continue to make extremely tough decisions as they balance the demands of their military career with the needs of their families. “How many relocations can my school-age child handle before his or her performance is affected?” they wonder. “What effect will my six- to twelve-month deployment have on my family?” Even more poignantly, physicians serving on active duty today might have to ask themselves the same

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question army doctor Paula Underwood asked herself back in 1991: “What will my daughter think of me if I fail to return from war?” Although every working woman must seek a balance between career and family, women seeking a military career may face some of the toughest choices. As we have seen, the armed forces are working to retain talented personnel whenever possible, but if they want to keep their skilled and experienced women physicians in the post 9/11 world, they must put into place more family-friendly regulations that extend, rather than limit, the deployment, reassignment, and work schedule options of medical personnel. Simultaneously, more women physicians may want to follow the example of the navy’s Dr. Sybil Tasker, who proactively took control of her own career, fitting in “must-do” assignments into her calendar at the least personally disruptive time. As the numbers of women physicians in higher ranks slowly increase throughout the armed forces, younger women may have an easier time finding female mentors willing to make certain that they attend the necessary courses at the proper time in their careers and to guide them along the path to promotion. As overcommitted as many of these older women might feel, they must be willing to provide guidance to those below them on the career ladder if they want to see eventual parity in military medicine. Women military physicians can look back on a long history of personal and professional sacrifice that ultimately ended successfully with the ability, both officially and in the abstract, to serve their country on an equal basis with their male colleagues. Whether large numbers will continue to choose to do so will depend on the steps the services are willing to take to recruit and retain them.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, A History of Women in Medicine: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Milford House, 1938), 4. 2. Ibid., 487. 3. Ellen S. More, Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20. 4. Mary Sotir, “Women Doctor Seeks Equal Pay for War,” Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1964, C44. 5. Ellen S. More maintains that the lives of American women physicians represent a model that continues to the present, which is “the quest for a balanced, well integrated life for their patients and for themselves.” 6. Early women physicians who volunteered during wartime are either omitted from or given only a passing mention in many texts about war. See, for example, Stewart Brooks, Civil War Medicine (1966); Mary C. Gillette, The Army Medical Department, 1818–1865 (1987); and Mattie E. Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, Special Studies: The Women’s Army Corps (1954). They are also overlooked in many books about women physicians: Ruth J. Abram, ed., Send Us a Lady Physician, Women Doctors in America, 1835–1920 (1985); Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply,” Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (1977); Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (1985). A recent book, however, delves into the lives of women doctors in early wars—Mercedes Graf, On the Field of Mercy: Women Medical Volunteers in the Civil War to the First World War (forthcoming)—while another treats the work of women medical workers in the Confederacy—Carol C. Green, Chimborazo (2004).

Chapter 1 1. After Blackwell’s graduation in 1849, the doors of the school were immediately closed to women. For more on Blackwell’s early years in medicine, see Blackwell, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women and Baker, The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D. The Elizabeth Blackwell Papers are housed with the Blackwell Family Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. 2. Van Hoosen, Petticoat Surgeon, 222. 3. Moldow, Women Doctors in Gilded-Age Washington, 16.

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4. For information on medical schools see Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” 14, and Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 65, 113. Morantz-Sanchez stressed that most of the women’s institutions performed valiantly despite their enforced isolation from the mainstream of American medicine. 5. Statistics are from Hine, “Co-Laborers in the Work of the Lord,”108. Quote is from Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” xii. 6. Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War, 83. For Civil War (CW) nurses, see Carded Service Records of Hospital Attendants, Matrons, and Nurses 1861–65 (535A), Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s–1917, Record Group (RG) 94, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C. These cards list only those women who were paid for their government service to the Union. For records of female contract nurses and women doctors who volunteered as nurses in the Spanish-American War (SAW), see Personal Data Cards of Spanish-American War Contract Nurses, 1898–1939, RG 112, E149, NARA, hereafter referred to as PD cards. In postwar years comments were added regarding marriage and divorce, discharge, service in the army reserves, application for pension or medals, admission to a veteran’s home, death, and application for burial in Arlington or other national cemetery. 7. Ritter, More Than Gold in California, 171. Also see Martin, “Dr. C. Annette Buckel, the ‘Little Major,’ ” 74–76. For documents regarding Buckel’s work in the Civil War, see Buckel records from the U.S. House of Representatives, 58th Cong., Committee on Invalid Pensions, RG 233. She left her estate for research, which became the Buckel Foundation at Stanford University. Some material regarding Buckel is also housed at the California Historical Society, North Baker Research Society, San Francisco. 8. Adkinson, “The ‘Mother of Women,’ ” n.p. 9. She wrote two books: Hit consisted of chapters on love and marriage, temperance, women’s franchise, divorce, labor, and religion; her second book, Unmasked or the Science of Immortality, To Gentlemen by a Woman Physician and Surgeon, followed about seven years later. Most notable about this volume was its frank treatment of sex. Housed at Syracuse University, Department of Special Collections, are thirty-eight pages of notes about the Civil War typed by Mary E. Walker on legal size paper. The undated notes are not in any order and are entitled “Incidents Connected with the Army.” Included is an untitled two-page section that appears to be part of an introduction to a planned autobiography. For more on Walker’s achievements, see Leonard, Yankee Women. Also see Graf, A Woman of Honor, for Walker’s battle for professional status and equality during the Civil War. 10. See the Anita Newcomb McGee Papers housed at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. She is credited with forming the first Nurse Corps Division, which became the permanent Nurse Corps as of 2 February 1901. Quote is from “Testimony of Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee,” Report of the Commission Appointed by the President to Investigate the Conduct of the War Department with Spain, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), vol. 1, 725, hereafter referred to as Conduct of the War Department with Spain. 11. “Testimony of Dr. Mary Eloise Walker (not to be confused with Mary Edwards Walker of the Civil War),” Conduct of the War Department with Spain, vol. 3, 451. 12. More, “American Medical Women’s Association,” 166. She also noted that the careers of women doctors differed in important ways from those of their male colleagues, both from personal agency (choice) and sociocultural imperatives (necessity). Also see More, Restoring the Balance, 7. 13. During this period physicians were educated as apprentices or received their train-

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ing in medical colleges of varying quality. Evidence of professional training was either the medical degree or a letter of commendation from the mentor. A license represented the collective judgment of a board of recognized physicians and gave the new doctor a certified stamp of approval. See Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” 12, 47. 14. Samples of Walker’s handwriting are in her letters and on a copy of a calling card in her pension file, SC 142715, Army file, W2066-VS-1862, Medical Officers File, in Records of the War Department, Office of the Adjutant General, RG 95, NARA. 15. Moldow, Women Doctors in Gilded-Age Washington, 16. Some Civil War nurses also went on to get medical degrees. Mary Safford, called the “Cairo Angel,” graduated in 1869 from the New York Medical College for Women, trained in surgery in Vienna and Germany, and while at the University of Breslau, was credited with the first ovariotomy performed by a woman. Belle Reynolds, who was awarded the rank of major because of her exploits at the Battle of Shiloh, became the resident physician in the Home for the Friendless in Chicago. Following their service at City Point, Frances M. Nye studied in New York City while Mary Blackmar (who had interrupted her medical studies) finally completed her degree at the Philadelphia Medical College for Women. Vesta Swarts became a physician like her husband, and Nancy M. Hill went on to study under Dr. Zakrzewska before graduating from Michigan University at Ann Arbor in 1874. Lastly, Harriet Dada graduated from the Women’s Medical College in New York in 1868, and Ellen E. Mitchell from the same school in 1871. 16. Ibid., 17. 17. “Mary Frame Myers Thomas” in James, Wilson, and Boyer, Notable American Women, vol. 3, 450–53. For more on Winslow, see Schultz, Women at the Front, 177. 18. Blackwell, Pioneer Work, 260–61. Jealousy noted in Massey, Women in the Civil War, 46. Another writer noted that Blackwell and her associates in the WCRA “were frustrated that they had not been officially recognized as the primary recruiting agency for female nurses” (Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses, 98.) Collision noted in Moldow, 15. She points out that male physicians began to take actions to limit the number of graduating doctors in order to sustain a fair income and a high level of status within the profession, and “women were primary targets among those considered superfluous.” 19. For more on Thompson, see Bonner, Medicine in Chicago, 62. 20. Adams, Doctors in Blue, 9, 174, “departmental” quote on 174; “inferior” quote on 11. Adams does not discuss the work of women doctors. A classic account from the Confederate view, Cunningham, Doctors in Gray, makes no mention of them either, nor does Gillette, Army Medical Department. 21. Clinton noted that women doctors were rare in the South as they were perceived as “a threat to the image of southern ladyhood and the Confederate medical establishment.” Little is known of Louisa Shepard, who completed her training in 1861 at the Graefenberg Medical Institute in Dadeville, Alabama, while Elizabeth Cohen of New Orleans limited her practice to “ladies only”; in The Other Civil War, 83. Schultz named two other southern women doctors, Ella Cooper and Elizabeth Carraway Holland, in Women at the Front, 296. For information on Edson and Winslow, see Kirschman, A Vital Force, 41. Also see Cleave, Cleave’s Biographical Cyclopaedia, Edson, 135; Winslow, 264. 22. Birthplaces for women doctors: Painter, Pennsylvania; Thomas, Maryland; Buckel, Reid, and Walker, New York; Hawks, New Hampshire; Clapp, Maine (reared in Illinois); Andrews, Virginia; Winslow, England (reared in Utica, New York); Edson, unknown. 23. Abolitionism was something they had in common with the few pioneer black women physicians who flocked to Washington to study or practice between 1865 and 1884; see

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Moldow, 21, 34. For more on black women doctors, see Abram, Send Us a Lady Physician, 107–120. 24. Notes on Walker’s home as an Underground Railroad stop are found in “Applicant’s Working Sheet: National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution” in “Records Relating to Corrections to Military Records, Proceedings of the Army Board for Correction of Military Records (May 4, 1977) for Dr. Mary E. Walker (deceased),” hereafter referred to as ABCMR. 25. Painter’s maiden name was Kelsey. Her pension record contains a letter from family members who tried to verify her birth date for a headstone after her death. See “Letter of John Slaker, Dated 20 November, 1917,” Painter’s pension cert. 405628, RG 94, NARA. Also see “Dr. Hetty K. Painter, Niece of John Brown,” Nebraska History Magazine, January/ March 1942, 72. 26. Heald, “Mary F. Thomas, MD,” 369–73. 27. Schwartz, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War, 1. 28. Teachers: For Thomas quote, see Adkinson, “The Mother of Women,” n.p. 29. “Chloe Annette Buckel,” Medical Woman’s Journal, January 1924, 15. Rachel Reid: See “40th Anniversary of Drs. H. S. and Rachel Reid,” Pasadena Daily News, 2 July 1900. Also see her pension file, cert. 869478, RG 94, NARA. A small collection of materials regarding her is housed at Pasadena Historical Society, California. Gordon Agren, a relative of the Reids, supplied materials from his personal collection. 30. The exceptions were sister nurses. For more on them, see Jolly, Nuns of the Battlefield (1927) and Maher, To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the Civil War (1999). 31. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 96. She cautions historians against viewing the socialization of girls in the nineteenth century as entirely uniform or monolithic. For more on Andrews, see Una Roberts Lawrence, Lottie Moon (Nashville, Tenn.: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1927) a book about Andrews’s younger sister, Lottie. Various newspaper articles and other information, including Andrews’s listing (under her maiden name Moon) as a graduate in the “Eighth Annual Announcement of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, for the Session of 1857–58,” are housed at the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA. 32. Snyder, Dr. Mary Walker, 13. The bloomer costume got its name after Amelia Bloomer, who made this dress style popular in the United States after a trip abroad where she saw it worn. 33. For Hawks, see Schwartz, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War. John Milton and Esther Hill Hawks Papers are also found at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and in the Compiled Military Service Record of John M. Hawks, RG 94, NARA. Mary Thomas also had two half-sisters who became physicians. See Waite, “The Three Myers Sisters,” 114–20. 34. Quote in “Affidavit of Elizabeth O. Gibson, Dated 7 June, 1893,” Reid’s pension file, NARA. 35. Painter’s service noted in Foster, New Jersey and the Rebellion, 9. There is a copy of the original House bill for Painter, which is not numbered but dated 12 July 1886, in Original House Bills, Nos. 9748–10017, 49th Cong., 1st sess., bound volume, NARA. 36. Copy of “Letter of O. P. Morton, Governor of Indiana to General U.S. Grant Notifying Him of the Appointment of C. Annette Buckel to Look after Conditions and Wants of Indiana’s Sick,” 4 August 1863, in Records from the U.S. House of Representatives, 58th Cong., Committee on Invalid Pensions, RG 233, NARA. Buckel quote in “Handwritten

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Statement of Services of Miss C. Annette Buckel during the Civil War,” 32 pages, notarized 7 December, 1889, ibid. 37. Walker’s grandniece defended the fact that Walker was a good wife. She stated that after the divorce, Alfred Miller said to his family, “She was a good and dutiful wife and I [am] sorry she left.” Quoted in “Applicant’s Working Sheet: National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution,” submitted by Helen Hay Wilson, in ABCMR, 4 May 1977, for Dr. Mary E. Walker. For more on Clapp’s private life, see Goldstein, Roses Bloomed in Winter. 38. See Walker, Hit. This book contains her views on dress reform, woman’s franchise, temperance, and love and marriage. Also see Poynter, “Dr. Mary Walker, the Forgotten Woman.” 39. “Letter of Dr. Mary E. Walker to the Judge Advocate General, April 14, 1867,” Entry 6, Letters Received, RG 153, Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, NARA. Also see Walker’s relief: Report No. 1671 to accompany H.R. 7153, 23 April 1890, in Walker’s pension file, SC 142 715, NARA. 40. Walker in U.S. Congress, House, Private Bills, H.R. 10801, 51st Cong., lst sess., 1890, p. 5760 and H. Rep. 2933. 41. Pension Application (as widow of Private Henry Clapp) no. 831086, Certificate no. 601330, RG15, NARA. She was unsuccessful in getting a pension in her own right, however, although her widow’s pension was ultimately raised to $12. She died at the age of eighty-three in 1908. 42. Walsh, 140. Moore, the author of the classic text Women of the War; Heroism and Self-Sacrifice, did contact Walker, however, to ask if she wished to include her account in his book on nurses, but she declined. 43. Nurses’ “strain” quoted in Massey, Women in the Civil War, 63. Hardships and injuries of women doctors noted in the pension accounts of Buckel, Clapp, Painter, Reid, and Walker; Schwartz, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War; and for Andrews see Chretien’s “Scottsville Produces First Southern Female Doctor” and “Gutsy Ladies, Courageous Women People in Albemarle’s History.” Articles on Andrews supplied by Albemarle County Historical Society. 44. Edson noted in Schultz, Women at the Front, 175; Winslow, in Moldow, Women Doctors in Gilded-Age Washington, 137. 45. For surgeons in disguise, see Blanton and Cook, They Fought Like Demons, 66. Also see Eileen Conklin, Women at Gettysburg 1863, 16. 46. Adams, Doctors in Blue, 229. 47. Conduct of the War Department with Spain, vol. 1, 725. 48. Woman’s Journal, January 5, 1884, 6. 49. Statistics were noted by Anita Newcomb McGee, “Women Nurses in the American Army,” speech delivered at Kansas City, Missouri, September 1899, Proceedings of the 8th Annual Meeting of the Association of Military Surgeons. 50. She had gone to Johns Hopkins, where her father was professor of mathematics and astronomy from 1884 to 1894 while serving concurrently as director of the Nautical Almanac Office (later part of the United States Naval Observatory). She married William John McGee, a geologist and anthropologist who was eleven years her senior. At that point he was geologist-in-charge of the Atlantic Coastal Plain Division of the U.S. Geological Survey, and she participated with him on a geologic survey of the country shortly after their marriage. He left geology in 1903 to join the Bureau of American Ethnology, where he became ethnologist-in-charge, and he was later associated with the Smithsonian Institution.

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Notes to Pages 22–28

For her biography, see Oblensky, “Anita Newcomb McGee, MD,” 398. Also see Dearing, “Anita Newcomb McGee,” 465. 51. Young, The Women and the Crisis, 63. Young points out that this went far beyond the power Miss Dix had wanted. 52. Untitled and unsigned text probably meant to be a comprehensive history of McGee’s work with the Army Nurse Corps, in Records of the Surgeon General’s Office, RG 112, Entry 230, box 3: Correspondence/Office Files of Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee 1898–1936, NARA; hereafter referred to as McGee’s Office Files. 53. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 28. 54. See PD Cards: Mary Eloise Walker, box 6; Laura Hughes, box 3; Irene S. Toland, box 6; and Dadmun and Danford, box 2. See American Journal of Nursing 25, no. 4, April 1925, where Dadmun noted she “had nursed three years” and was now in medical school at Tufts College. She completed her medical degree after SAW and became the examining physician for the public schools of Boston from 1911 to 1915, the first woman to be so appointed. Danford wrote on her card that she had done “12 months hospital work” and was a student at Ohio Medical University. 55. See Dabbs PD card, box 2. Marital status and age were determined by scanning the PD cards of the women. Green was born in 1844; Dabbs in 1853; Toland and Haverfield in 1857; Hughes and Robbins in 1860; McGee in 1864; Howell in 1868; Walker in 1869; and Cowan in 1871. 56. Green quote from daughter, Korstad, One to Follow, 135. For Toland, see Fernandez, “Fifty Years of Irene Toland School.” Cowan’s account in an undated handwritten “Memoir” housed in the Bass Collection, Tulane University Medical Center. 57. Green graduated with honors from the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia in 1868. 58. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 90. 59. Handwritten comments appear on Toland’s PD card, RG 112, Entry 149, box 6, NARA. She was among twenty-two women who died as a result of service in SAW. See “Order of Spanish American War Nurses,” Trained Nurse and Hospital Review, vol. 23, 81, 208–210; vol. 24, 423; vol. 25, 447. Also see Women in the Service of America (WIMSA) website for the names of all twenty-two women. 60. See Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 97, where Cirillo notes that by the time the camp closed 21 November, 21,870 men had passed through the camp and 357 had died. Also see Kate M. Walsh, “Extracts from Camp Wikoff,” RG 112, Records of the Surgeon General’s Office, E230: Correspondence/Office Files of Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee, 1898–1936, NARA. See Hughes PD card, box 3. 61. See Cowan’s “Memoir.” She was an 1895 graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She stated that she served as chief nurse at the U.S. Army Hospital, Presidio, California. Walker quote is from her testimony, Conduct of the War Department with Spain, vol. 3, 122. Also see “Record of War Service for Roll of Honor: Mary Eloise Walker,” Faculty Roll for General Catalogue, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 62. See Howell’s PD card, RG 112, Entry 149, box 3, NARA. For Robbins see, “Robbins Handwritten Note,” 17 February 1899, in Records of the Surgeon General’s Office, General Correspondence 1894–1917, RG 112, Entry 26, NARA. For “neglect” comment, see Cromelien, “Red Cross Work at Chickamauga Park,” 128–29. 63. All comments for Dabbs, Haverfield, and Robbins are on their PD cards. 64. Italics ours. Quoted by Oblensky in “Anita Newcomb McGee, M.D.,” 398. 65. “Surgeon General Sternberg Calls on the Red Cross for Assistance,” New York Herald

Notes to Pages 29–37

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Tribune, undated newspaper clipping reproduced in Anita Newcomb McGee’s “Untitled Text” (in what appears to be a history of the Army Nurse Corps written by McGee) in Records of the Surgeon General’s Office, RG 112, Entry 230, box 1: Correspondence/Office Files of Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee 1898–1936, NARA. 66. See Journal of Anita Newcomb McGee 1898–1936, in two volumes, RG 112, Entry 229, NARA. For more on her Japanese medals, see “A Documentary History of the Inception of an Army Nurse Corps” (taken entirely from the diary/correspondence and other supportive documents that were presented to the Nursing Division, SGO by Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee), unnumbered pages, Historical Files of the Army Nurse Corps 1898– 1947, RG 112, Entry 103, box 2, NARA. 67. “Mrs. Anita N. McGee, Organizer of Army Nursing Corps Dies,” Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.), 6 October 1940. 68. Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, 4. 69. Mary E. Walker, “Incidents Connected with the Army,” thirty-eight unnumbered and typed pages, Walker Papers, Syracuse University. Another copy is also housed at the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA. 70. Handwritten comment of “Major Mearns” noted on PD Card: Isabel Eliot Cowan, box 1, NARA. 71. Copy of the letter “To the Army Board of Corrections,” dated 18 August 1976, from Chauncey G. Bly, MD (associate director for Armed Forces Institute of Pathology), ABCMR. 72. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli, 31, 33. 73. More, Restoring the Balance, 126.

Chapter 2 1. Pocklington, Heritage of Leadership, 31. 2. DeFiore, “From Intolerance to Indifference,” 115, 121–22. 3. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 240; Snodgrass, Historical Encyclopedia of Nursing, 279. 4. Jensen, “Uncle Sam’s Loyal Nieces,” 67, 682. 5. DeFiore, 115, 121–22. 6. More, “Rochester Over There,” 18; Jensen, 671. 7. More, 18. 8. Jensen, 671. 9. Hocker, “Personal Experiences of a Contract Surgeon,” 9. 10. Ibid. 11. More, 20. 12. List of fifty-five women contract surgeons, “Women Contract Surgeons, U.S. Army, Who Served During the War with Germany,” unknown author, undated, American Medical Women’s Association Collection, Hahnemann University Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Research indicates that this list does not include Dr. Anne Tjomsland, who served as a contract surgeon with the Bellevue Hospital unit. 13. Ibid. 14. DeFiore, 139, sources pertaining to signal corps women. 15. Gilmore did not recommend Dr. Anne Tjomsland, and her name does not appear in the files of the Committee on Women Physicians. The committee may have been unaware of her service.

212

Notes to Pages 37–43

16. Jensen, 670–90. 17. “Kate B. Karpeles,” Medical Woman’s Journal, March 1939, 91. 18. Calmes, “Virginia Apgar M.D.” 19. RG 62, Records of the Council of National Defense, “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability,” 62/130/64/ 42/007. 20. Calmes, “Virginia Apgar M.D.” 21. DeFiore, 138. 22. Gavin, American Women in World War I, 164–66. 23. Ibid.; Tjomsland memoir at Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. 24. List of fifty-five women contract surgeons. 25. Gavin, 164–66. 26. Haines, “Army Service”; Women’s Memorial Register no. 218489. 27. Haines and Women’s Memorial Register no. 218489. 28. Ibid. 29. Frances E. Haines, “Summary of Service as a Contract Surgeon,” Frances E. Haines Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Drexel University College of Medicine. 30. Haines, “Army Service.” 31. Esther Leonard Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri. 32. Iphigene Bettman, “Hereabouts,” 3 June 1949, Cincinnati Time-Star, 2; “Local Pioneer Woman Doctor Dies,” 23 May 1949, Cincinnati Post, 21; “Rites Arranged for Pioneer Among Women Doctors,” 23 May 1949, Cincinnati Time-Star, 22; “Dr. Elizabeth M. Hocker Dies; Pioneer Woman Physician With Army In World War I,” 23 May 1949, Cincinnati Enquirer, 1; Hocker, “Personal Experiences of a Contract Surgeon,” 9–11. 33. Hocker, 9–11. 34. Ibid. 35. Esther Leonard Papers; “Women Contract Surgeons, U.S. Army, Who Served during the War with Germany,” American Medical Women’s Association Collection, Hahnemann University Archives; Larry Fugate, “Female Physician Was Independent in Life, Practice,” 22 October 1991, the Advocate (Newark, Ohio), 2; “History of South-East Ohio and the Muskegee Valley 1788–1928,” Clarke Publishing Company, 1928, 399–400. 36. Esther Leonard Papers; “Women Contract Surgeons, U.S. Army, Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability.” 37. Esther Leonard Papers; “Recruits Learn Work Rapidly at Camp Grant,” 9 June 1918, Chicago Daily Tribune, 10; “Woman is Army Officer,” 9 June 1918, Washington Post, 8. 38. Esther Leonard Papers. 39. Esther Leonard Papers. 40. Esther Leonard Papers; “Women Contract Surgeons, U.S. Army, Who Served during the War with Germany;” “Blackburn Head Medical Society,” 11 May 1921, Sandusky Star Journal. “Biographical Sketch of Hugh Marcy,” http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ ~donkelly/WILLIAMSON/BiosIndex.txt. 41. Esther Leonard Papers; “Women Contract Surgeons, U.S. Army, Who Served during the War with Germany;” “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability”; “1914 List of Hospitals and Homes, etc.” www .bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Directory/1914.Hosp.Homes.NYS.html.

Notes to Pages 43–50

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42. “Biography and Service Record,” Esther Leonard Papers. 43. Bispham, Training, vol. 7, 382. 44. Calmes, “Founding of the California Society of Anesthesiologists”; Calmes, “Dr. Mary Botsford (1865–1939) of San Francisco,” 99. 45. Pinero, “Contract Surgeon,” 310. 46. Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3 of the Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, 78th Cong., 1st sess., on H.R. 824 and H.R. 1857 10, 11, and 18 March 1943; Record Group 62, Stack 130, Row 64, Compartment 43, Shelf 00, Entry 247, Card File of Women Physicians, National Archives, College Park. 47. “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability.” 48. Bailey, Neuropsychiatry. 49. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability”; “Dr. Marie Walker to lecture Tonight,” 9 November 1924, Syracuse (New York) Herald. 50. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability”; Papers of Rose Alexander Bowers, History and Special Collections, Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, University of California–Los Angeles; Obituaries, Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 February 1938, Dr. Paul E. Bowers. 51. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability”; “Dr. Julia Hill is in Processional,” 29 April 1955, Bulletin Journal, Independence, Iowa; “Phi Mu Gives Iowa Charter,” 3 July 1925, Davenport (Iowa) Democrat and Leader, 19; “State Occupational Therapy Conference Opens Here Today,” 1 July 1925, Iowa Press Citizen; “Child Welfare on Conference Table is Great Success,” 23 April 1937, Clearfield (Pennsylvania) Progress. 52. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Women Contract Surgeons USA,” no author, n.d., Historian’s Files, World War I Contract Surgeons, Women in Military Service For America Memorial Foundation Office; “Dr. Anne Burnett,” Decatur Illinois Daily Review, 20 November 1892; “Dr. Anne Burnett,” Evening State Journal and Lincoln Daily News, 12 April 1919. 53. Donahue, “Fifty Years in Medicine,” 43–44. 54. “Dr. Minnie Burdon is Home From Service,” Anacortes American, 8 May 1919, 10. 55. www.pbs.org/wgbn/amex/influenza;www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/march97/ 1918_3–24.html. www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/ 56. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “In Women’s Club Circles,” 4 June 1911, Chicago Daily Tribune; “Dr. Loretta Benedict,” Washington Post, 29 January 1982. 57. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; Kratz, “Contract Surgeon,” 67. 58. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; More, Restoring the Balance, 92, 120; Edward R. Foreman, World War Service Record of Rochester and Monroe County New York, vol. 2 (City of Rochester, 1928) 64; information on Lucy Baker obtained from Philip G. Maples, director, Baker-Cederberg Museum and Archives, Rochester, New York.

214

Notes to Pages 51–60

59. Kratz, “Contract Surgeon,” 67. 60. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany.” 61. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Card Record of Offers of Medical Services by Women Doctors Showing Special Training and Availability”; “Dr. Anna Daniels, Obstetrician, 76” New York Times, 23 March 1970. 62. Brody, Jewish Heroes and Heroines. 63. Mendenhall, “Jean C. Mendenhall,” 161; McCann, “Contract Surgeon,” 345. 64. Ruddock, “Contract Surgeons,” 34. 65. McCann, “Contract Surgeon,” 345; Biography, vita, and newspaper clippings, Gertrude Fisher McCann File, University of Rochester Library. 66. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany”; “Dr. Ruth Tunnicliff,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 September 1946, 18; Dr. Irving S. Cutter, “How to Keep Well,” Chicago Daily Tribune 19 November 1926, 10; Cutter, “How to Keep Well,” 10. 67. The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War, vol. 9, Communicable and Other Diseases, chapter 12, “Measles,” n. 35; “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany.” 68. “Women Contract Surgeons Who Served during the War with Germany.” 69. Loy McAfee, MD, “Contract Surgeon Loy McAfee,” Medical Woman’s Journal, September, 1942, 276. 70. Hope Ridings Miller, “Health Rules Outlined For Working Wife,” Washington Post, 29 July 1936, 12. 71. Joy Daniels Singer, My Mother the Doctor (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1970). 72. Pinero, 310. 73. Jeannie Williams, “Happy Birthday to Dr. Lucy Baker, 90 Today,” Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, December 1977. 74. “General Benedict Dies; Headed West Point,” Washington Post, 18 September 1953, 31. 75. Kratz, 67. 76. McCann, 345; Biography, vita, and newspaper clippings, Gertrude Fisher McCann File, University of Rochester Library. 77. Mendenhall, 161. 78. Ruddock, 34. 79. Babcock, Michigan Humane Society history online, http://www.michiganhumane .org/site/PageServer?pagename=aboutHistory. 80. Selma H. Calmes, MD, “Dr. Mary Botsford (1865–1939) of San Francisco,” 99; “Mary E. Botsford, Anesthesiology: San Francisco,” University of California: In Memorium, http:// sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/in_memoriam/sanfrancisc01.html. 81. Iphigene Bettman, “Hereabouts,” Cincinnati Times-Star, 3 June 1949, 2; “Local Pioneer Woman Doctor Dies,” Cincinnati Post, 23 May 1949, 21; “Rites Arranged for Pioneer Among Women Doctors,” Cincinnati Times-Star, 23 May 1949, 22; “Dr. Elizabeth M. Hocker Dies; Pioneer Woman Physician with Army In World War I,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 23 May 1949, 1. 82. “Dr. Ruth Tunnicliff,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 September 1946, 18; Dr. Irving S. Cutter, “How to Keep Well,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 November 1926, 10; Cutter, “How to Keep Well,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 22 January 1935, 10; Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 161. 83. Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” 224–25.

Notes to Pages 61–64

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Chapter 3 Much of this chapter is based on material from the Margaret D. Craighill Collection, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, herein referred to as the MDC Collection. Note references as follows: Box 1: “Personal Papers” of Margaret D. Craighill Box 2: “Appointment and Biographical Information” Box 5: Official Correspondence—Women Medical Officers, A–Y; referred to as “Official Correspondence” Box 10: “Speeches” Box 18: “Training” Box 29: Histories of the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit and Women’s Army Corps Activities, referred to as “Histories.” Box 30 “Questionnaire” 1. More and Greer, “American Women Physicians in 2000,” 168–70. 2. Ibid., 172. 3. Barringer, “War and the Woman Physician,” 120. 4. “Women Physicians and the Medical Reserve Corps,” Norfolk Medical News no. 3, January 1943. 5. Emily D. Barringer, “Commissions for Women Physicians,” Women in Medicine, July 1943, 11; Barringer, “Women Physicians and the Medical Reserve Corps,” Norfolk Medical News no. 3, January 1943. 6. Barringer, “War and the Woman Physician”; “Woman Doctors Seek Officer Status in Medical Corps,” Medical Economics, September 1942, 53. 7. “Women Doctors Want to Serve,” New York Sun, 21 January 1942. 8. Barringer testimony in “Appointment of Female Physicians and Surgeons in the Medical Corps of the Army and Navy,” 1943, 2, 20; hereafter referred to as Hearings; also noted in Walsh, Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply, 230. 9. “Testimony of Ruth E. Ewing, MD,” Hearings, 1943, 82. 10. In World War I, medical women volunteered with the Red Cross, the American Women’s Hospitals, and even with the army in Czechoslovakia and Greece. For the definitive work on the Red Cross, see Kernodle, Red Cross Nurse in Action. For an example of a doctor volunteering in Canada during WWII, see “Section on War Service,” Medical Woman’s Journal (MWJ), February 1944. Dr. Lillian A. Chase, a native of Nova Scotia who interned at Woman’s Hospital in Philadelphia, was appointed captain in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, June 1943. 11. “News of the Month” (editorial), MWJ, January 1942. 12. During World War II, Julia Stimson was recalled to active service for six months (1942–43) to help recruit nurses for the army. After 1920, when Congress granted nurses “relative” rank, she became the first woman major in the U.S. Army. 13. See Stimson, Major Barbara’s Memories, 1–3, compiled by her older sister “from letters home and papers of all sorts.” Provided by Columbia University Medical Center Archives and Special Collections. 14. Lovejoy was the founder and director of the American Women’s Hospital Association and had served in World War I.

216

Notes to Pages 64–69

15. “Women Doctors Eager to Serve in War Zones,” undated and untitled newspaper article supplied by Drexel University College of Medicine (DUCM) Archives and Special Collections (formerly Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and then Medical College of Pennsylvania); Stimson, Major Barbara’s Memories, 1. 16. The names of the five who left England are unknown. Names of these seven doctors are found in “Letter to Major Craighill from Dr. Marion C. Loizeaux, Dated 17 April 1944,” Official Correspondence: Women Medical Officers, box 5, MDC Collection. 17. Stimson, “Three-and-a-Half Years in the Royal Army Medical Corps,” 47. 18. “Their Hunch Proves Good,” Montreal Daily Star, n.d., supplied by the Vassar Library, Beans’ Alumna File. 19. Stimson, Major Barbara’s Memories, 40–41. They were also issued uniforms of the RAMC with the USA flash on the left shoulder. 20. Ibid., 55. 21. Ultimately the bill would state, “Those appointed shall be commissioned in the Army of the United States or the Naval Reserve, and shall receive the same pay and allowances and be entitled to the same rights, privileges and benefits as members of the Officers’ Reserve Corps of the Army and the Naval Reserve of the Navy with the same grade and length of service.” 22. Questionnaire Response Sheets (hereafter referred to as Questionnaire) regarding service were available for 63 women, some incomplete. Information and quotes are from Loiseaux’s responses in her Questionnaire, box 30, folder 37, MDC Collection. Also see “Ten Women Doctors Named to VA Posts,” New York Times, 28 November 1946, 47; “Capt. Loizeaux First Woman Physician Commissioned in European Area,” MWJ, March 1944, 32. For more information on medical consultants, see Hall, “Untitled Document on the History of The Society of Medical Consultants.” The society was formed in 1946, and although there were no female members then, they voted to nominate Drs. Margaret D. Craighill and Marion Loizeaux. 23. Information and quotes are from Peck’s Questionnaire, box 30, folder 46, MDC Collection. Also see “Dr. Peck Honored by British,” MWJ, September 1943, 245–46. 24. “Letter to Major Craighill from Eleanor Choate Darnton, Women’s Editor,” New York Times, 23 February 1944, Histories of the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29, MDC Collection. 25. Quotes are from “Dr. Peck’s Two-Page Typewritten Letter to Major Craighill Dated 4 September 1945,” Official Correspondence, box 5, MDC Collection. 26. See handwritten comments on Pierce’s Questionnaire, box 30, folder 47, MDC Collection. Also see “Letter (Regarding Pierce) to Mr. H. B. Atkinson, Director, American Red Cross, Dated 3 July 1940,” copy supplied by Rush University Medical Center Archives, Chicago. 27. Biographical information on Pierce in “A Letter to Barbara Varro, Chicago Sun-Times, Dated 7 June 1983,” supplied by Rush University Medical Center Archives, Chicago. Comments on Pierce in “Dr. Marion C. Loizeaux’s Annual Report to Major Craighill, Dated 17 April 1944,” Official Correspondence, box 5, MDC Collection. 28. See “Dr. Marion C. Loizeaux’s Annual Report to Major Craighill, Dated 17 April 1944,” Official Correspondence, box 5, MDC Collection. Stephens’ comments from her Questionnaire, box 30, folder 60, MDC Collection. 29. Bowditch’s quotes in her Questionnaire, box 30, folder 8, MDC Collection; “Copy of Letter Sent to Dr. Craighill from Dr. Jessie D. Read, Dated 11 January, 1944,” Official Correspondence, Women Medical Officers, box 5, MDC Collection. Also see “Dr. Craig-

Notes to Pages 69–73

217

hill’s Letter to Major Sarah H. Bowditch, Dated 2 October 1945,” Official Correspondence, box 5, MDC Collection, in which she replies that she is glad to learn Sally is still happy in her job. 30. Biographical information and alumna records on Bowditch were provided by the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. 31. “Loizeaux’s Annual Report to Craighill, Dated 17 April 1944.” 32. “Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Women in Medicine no. 90 (October 1945): 7–9. 33. “Equality for Women Doctors,” Time 41, 26 April 1943, 46. She went on to be named chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1948 and remained in that position until her retirement in 1961. She committed suicide 31 December 1964. Thanks to Dr. M. J. Wright, clinical librarian, Anesthesiology Library, UAB, for supplying extensive records about Dr. McNeal. 34. “DeVore Served in Hawaii,” Section on War Service, MWJ, October 1942. 35. On 28 May 1941, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rodgers had unsuccessfully introduced in the House of Representatives “A Bill to establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States.” See Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, 18, 45, 220. In her extensive study, Treadwell does not treat the work of women doctors in the army. 36. The sixteen names appear on a list entitled “Contract Surgeons,” Histories of the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29, MDC Collection. The others (first names sometimes missing) were listed in 1942 as: Drs. Eleanor Gutman, Margaret Janeway, I. E. Fatheree, Poe-Eng Yu, Eleanor Hayden (D’Orbison), and Nita Arnold; in 1943, Effie Ecklund, Ednah Hatt, J. V. Lichenstein, M. Loving, D. Morgans, and Sophia Spitz; in 1944, Ellen Cover and Eleanor Peck. Peck was the only volunteer of four abroad who was named, but the date was incorrect as she was made a contract surgeon while in England in 1942. Names and assignments were found by cross-checking women’s assignments on this list of “Contract Surgeons” against their names in the two-page article in the n. 37. 37. “Women Contract Surgeons in World War II,” no author or date, “Histories,” box 29, MDC Collection. 38. See Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, 36. The other women were assigned as follows: Peck was sent abroad to the European Theater; Spitz to the Army Medical Museum, Cover to San Antonio Ordnance Department, Camp Stanley, Texas; and Hatt to Bradley Field, Connecticut. 39. Women doctors’ job assignments and quote in “Women Contract Surgeons in World War II,” “Histories,,” box 29, MDC Collection. Also see “Section on War Service,” MWJ, April 1943, August 1943, and October 1943, as these issues contain information about some of these women. 40. Moore comments in “Section on War Service,” MWJ, April 1943. 41. All comments in “Letter to Major Craighill from Dr. Nita Arnold Dated 17 April 1944,” Official Correspondence, box 5, MDC Collection. “Letter from Craighill to Dr. Nita Arnold, Dated 19 April 1944,” Official Correspondence, Box 5. “Speech Given at the Luncheon for the 94th Commencement of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania 16 March 1944,” by Major Craighill, “Speeches,” box 10, MDC Collection. 42. Elizabeth Garber and Eleanor Gutman were sent to the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, U.S. Army (MTOUSA). Garber, who graduated from medical school at Indiana, was commissioned as a lieutenant, and Gutman, who graduated from Yale, as a captain. Eleanor Hayden (D’Orbison) served stateside. She left a residency in pediatrics at Belle-

218

Notes to Pages 73–75

vue Hospital in New York City after the Pearl Harbor attack to organize a blood bank and was commissioned a lst lieutenant in August 1943. Thereafter, she remained in the United States working at various hospitals until she was relieved from active duty 29 March 1945. Garber, Gutman, and Hayden did not submit questionnaires to Major Craighill. For more on them, see “Section on War Service,” MWJ, September 1943 and July 1943. 43. “Major Margaret Janeway, M.C., A.U.S.,” Women in Medicine, January 1945, 15–16, 55; Janeway’s quote and other statements in her Questionnaire, box 30, folder 30, MDC Collection. Also see “Women Physicians as WAAC Medical Officers,” unsigned and undated, box 29, “Histories,” MDC Collection. One medical historian noted that Janeway filed a protest over being hired as a contract surgeon since she felt women should be commissioned. See Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” 227. 44. Quotes from “First Woman Army Doctor in Africa,” MWJ, March 1944; “Wac Doctor Finds Health Good in Overseas Corps Despite Rigors,” New York Times, 30 May 1944, 16. Janeway’s grandfather was a surgeon in the Union Army in the Civil War. 45. Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, 716. In personal correspondence, Melissa Wiford, archivist at Carlisle Army Barracks, noted they were both lecturers at the school and that Craighill was a colonel by this time. Janeway returned to serve on the staff of Lenox Hill Hospital (where she had been before the army) until her retirement in 1973. When she married later, she added her husband’s name, McLanahan, to hers. She died at age eighty-five. 46. Her mother was also a physician and her brother was the only astronomer in China with a PhD when he returned there after studying at the University of California. For quote, see “Poe-Eng Yu’s Letter to Dr. Craighill Dated 20 February 1945,” Personal Papers of Margaret D. Craighill, box 1, MDC Collection. Also see, “Women Physicians,” Women in Medicine, 90, 8. 47. The number 76 is noted in Medical Department, United States Army: Personnel in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General Department of the Army, 1963), 155, 156. Craighill mentioned that Cornelia Motley was deferred for residency to 1 July 1945—she would have made the total seventy-six. Women who served in public health are not discussed here. 48. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 329–30. 49. Marital status was determined by reviewing all the “Questionnaires” the women submitted to Craighill (box 30, MDC Collection) and then adding Craighill’s information, as she did not complete a questionnaire. One doctor, Cornelia Wyckoff, died in service in March 1945. 50. Ages noted in “Letter to Dr. Mary Jane Walters, Dated 13 October 1943 from Major Craighill,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 11. Statistics on age from “Status of Women Commissioned in AMC,” Histories of the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29. Wyckoff ’s name is found on the “List of Women Doctors Containing Date of Appointments, Rank, Classification, Assignments, and Promotions,” also in box 29, “Histories.” (Whenever age is quoted throughout this chapter, it refers to the age of the woman at the time of her commission.) 51. Walsh, 224, 224–25. Cornell quote in Morantz, Pomerleau, and Fenichel, In Her Own Words, 33. 52. Summary from articles donated by the family of Clara Raven to WIMSA. Quote in “Letter to Dr. T. L. Harvey, Chief, Professional Services, Veterans Administration, Dated 17 December 1954,” from Richard H. Young, dean, Northwestern Medical School, from

Notes to Pages 76–80

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alumna records supplied by Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago. 53. See “Memorandum to the Director, WAAC from Col. R. W. Bliss, Dated 29 July 1943,” which details responsibilities with the WAC, “Personal Papers,” box 1, MDC Collection; job duties were also defined in a memo approved by General Bliss entitled, “Consultant for Women’s Health and Welfare, Dated 2 November 1944,” “Histories,” box 29, folder 1. On WAC screenings, see Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, Special Studies, 178. 54. The figures comes from Clara Raven, “Achievements of Women in Medicine: Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Military Medicine, October 1945, 7. She does not, however, list any names—which were compiled here by checking the medical schools against the names of women doctors listed in “War Service,” MWJ, February 1945, 39. Quote from “Craighill’s Letter to Brig. General W. L. Sheep, Dated 7 July 1944,” “Histories,” box 29. 55. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 77. 56. Names and biographical materials supplied by DUCM Archives and Special Collections, formerly WMCP. 57. Comments are from “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 35. See “Dr. Leibfried, MCP Professor,” Germantown Courier, 29 September 1982, and Howe’s responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30. 58. Ages and ranks from the “List of Women Doctors Containing Date of Appointments, Rank, Classification, Assignments, and Promotions,” “Histories,” Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29. Four female medical students from Hopkins “also served as nurses at Naval Hospital Brooklyn, New York,” in 1898 in SAW. See Grog Ration, 2:2 (March/April 2007), published by BUMED. 59. From the University of Wisconsin: C. Wood Martin (Lt., 27); Katharine Jackson (Capt., 43); Mae Josephine O’Donnell (Lt., 34); Elvira Clara Seno (Lt., 34). From College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University: Drs. Margaret Janeway (Maj., 47); Eleanor Peck (Lt., 36); Jean Henley (Lt., 34); Jean Henderson (Capt., 38). From the University of Michigan: Theresa T. Woo (Lt., 33); Poe-Eng Yu (Capt., 35); and Agnes Hoeger (Capt., 33). From the University of Texas: Clyde Adams (Capt., 42); Joyce Morris (Capt., 39); and Mary Mulloy (Lt., 26). From the Long Island College of Medicine: Jessie Read (Capt., 40), Ida Holzberg (Capt., 46); and Celia Ragus (Capt., 49). 60. Only women who came in larger groups are named individually here; however, their names are listed on Craighill’s “List of Women Doctors,” “Histories,” box 29. 61. “Women Medical Officers, AUS,” “Histories,” box 29. Quotes are from “Memorandum for Director, Historical Division: (Subject) Logistics of World War II, Dated 26 September 1945,” from Lt. Col. Craighill, Official Correspondence: Memorandums from the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 3, MDC Collection. 62. “Letter to Dr. Martha L. Crandall, Dated 13 April 1944 from Major Craighill,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 3; for more on uniforms see “Women Medical Officers, AUS,” “Histories,” box 29; and for comments on straps, see Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, 533. 63. V-12 program in Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” 230; “Memorandum to General Bliss, Dated 6 October 1943,” from Major Craighill, Training, box 18, folder 4. MDC Collection. 64. “Letter to Maj. Craighill, Dated 2 October 1943,” from F. D. Dobel, Training, box

220

Notes to Pages 80–85

18, folder 4, and “Letter to Mr. F. D. Dobel, Dated 6 October 1943,” from Major Craighill, Training, box 18, folder 4. MDC Collection. 65. “Speech Given at a Vocational Conference, Bryn Mawr College, 12 January 1944,” by Major Craighill, Speeches, box 10, MDC Collection. 66. “Dr. Craighill’s Letter to Dr. Reginald Fitz of the Massachusetts State Committee, Dated 8 September 1943,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 11. 67. Quotes are from Janeway’s responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 30 and from Besick’s responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 6. MDC Collection. 68. “Extract from Adele C. Kempker’s Letter Dated 16 August 1944,” Histories of the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29; “Letter to Major Craighill from Capt. Sano Dated 3 July, 1944,” “Histories,” box 29. 69. Quotes are from Hurianek’s responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 28. For Capt. Holzberg, see her “Letter to Major Craighill, Dated 15 March 1944,” Histories of the Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29, and her responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 26. 70. “Letter of Capt. Gladys Osborne, Dated 20 January 1944 to Major Craighill,” Official Correspondence, box 5. “Letter to Capt. Gladys H. Osborne, Dated 25 February 1944,” from Major Craighill, “Histories,” box 29. 71. “Letter to The Honorable David Walsh (U.S. Senate) Dated 23 August 1944,” from Elliott C. Cutler, MC, chief consultant in surgery, ETO, “Histories,” box 29. 72. Extract from Public Law 421, 75th Congress (Chapter 407, 2D Session) (H.R. 1506): An Act To Amend Further the Pay Readjustment Act of 1942 (Approved 7 September 1944). 73. “Speech Given by Major Craighill, 16 March 1944,” Speeches, box 10, MDC Collection. For problems that WAC officers faced, see Holm, Women in the Military, 65–67. 74. Ibid., Craighill speech; Harte’s responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 20. 75. From Hayes’s responses, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 21; “Letter to Major Craighill, Dated 22 August 1944, from lst Lt. Amar, Official Correspondence, box 5. 76. All quotes from “Memorandum for Chief, Personnel Service, Dated 24 June 1943,” from Major Craighill, “Appointment and Biographical Information,” box 2, MDC Collection. 77. Drs. Graber, Gutman, Shedrovitch, and Yu joined Janeway, but by 24 July 1945, only the first three were still overseas; Yu had returned to stateside duty, and Janeway was then in the Surgeon General’s Office. Also see Gladys H. Osborne, folder 44, in which she names ten sites, and Marjorie Hayes, folder 21, in which she lists nine different facilities, both in box 30. 78. While in France the 239th General Hospital was distinguished by being chosen as an Infectious Hepatitis Center. The results of the clinical and laboratory studies were the subject for subsequent publications. Dates of service for the women in England/France from the “List of Women Doctors Containing Date of Appointments, Rank, Classification, Assignments, and Promotions,” “Histories,” box 29. For Elvira C. Seno’s quotes, see “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 58. 79. “Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Women in Medicine, October 1945, 8–9. Marion Loizeaux was also sent to Germany. See “Martha E. Howe’s Alumna Record,” in which she mentions her wartime work, supplied by DUCM Archives. See Osborne’s Questionnaire, where she mentions her various assignments in nutrition in Europe, box 30, folder 44. 80. Quoted in “Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Women in Medi-

Notes to Pages 85–91

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cine, October 1945, 9. Seven women from the Pacific area are named here. Assignments and dates are taken from information provided on “List of Women Doctors Containing Date of Appointments, Rank, Classification, Assignments, and Promotions,” “Histories,” box 29. Quotes in Hayes’ Questionnaire, box 30, folder 21, (italics mine). At Honolulu with the 318th General Hospital, Capt. Mae O’Donnell was chief of the cardiovascular section. 81. See “Memorandum for Chief, Personnel Service, Dated 24 June 1943,” from Major Craighill, “Appointment and Biographical Information,” box 2, MDC Collection. 82. “Questionnaire,” box 30: Ida Holzberg, folder 26; Catherine McGregor, folder 38; Celia Ragus, folder 48. 83. Grace Fern Thomas, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 63. 84. Comments of Dr. Audrey Bill and Dr. Anna C. Besick, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folders 37, 6, respectively; “Gladys Osborne’s Letter to Major Margaret Craighill, Dated 19 February 1945,” Official Correspondence, “Histories,” box 29, folder 2. 85. Peck’s “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 46, MDC Collection. 86. Marjorie Hayes, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 21. 87. Treadwell, United States Army in World War II, 611. 88. “Questionnaire,” box 30: Louella Liebert, folder 36; Mary E. Mulloy, folder 42; Zdenka Hurianek (Moore), folder 28. 89. “Questionnaire,” box 30: Bernice Joan Harte, folder 20; Catherine McGregor, folder 38; Trinidad M. Ramos, folder 49. 90. “Letter to Major Margaret Janeway, Dated 12 September 1944,” from Jean Henderson, Official Correspondence: Women Medical Officers, box 5; “Poe-Eng Yu’s Letter to Major Craighill, Undated,” “Personal Papers,” box 1, MDC Collection. 91. “Major Margaret Janeway’s Letter to Captain Dorothy L. Vohr, 13 January 1945,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 13, MDC Collection. “Questionnaire,” box 30: Dissatisfied comments from Patton, folder 45; Elizabeth L. Bryan, folder 10; and Elizabeth Khayat (on nurses), folder 32. Satisfied comments in “Questionnaire” from Eleanor B. Hamilton, folder 18, and Isabella Harrison, folder 19. 92. From “Questionnaire,” box 30: Jean Henderson, folder 22; Josephine Bremner, folder 9; and Elizabeth Bryan, folder 10. 93. From “Questionnaire,” box 30: Stephens’s responses, folder 60, and Khayat’s responses, folder 32. 94. See “Questionnaire,” box 30: Marjorie Hayes, folder 24; Elvira C. Seno, folder 58; and Clara Raven, folder 50. 95. “Letter from Anna C. Besick, Dated 26 December 1944,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 13, MDC Collection. 96. See Perkins, “Preventive Psychiatry During World War II.” Also see Brown and Williams, Neuropsychiatry and the War, which contains abstracts of the North American, European, Russian, and Australian literature on military psychiatry from the World War I era. For more on combat exhaustion in WWII, see Swank, “Combat Exhaustion.” 97. “Women Medical Officers, AUS,” “Histories,” box 29. Fourteen neuropsychiatrists are named in “Women Medical Officers,” undated and signed by Maj. Margaret Janeway, Assistant, Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, “Histories,” box 29. 98. “Letter to Dr. Mary Jane Walters, Dated 13 October 1943 from Major Craighill,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 11; Walters’ Questionnaire, folder 64. 99. See “Questionnaire,” box 30 for Bremner and Kempker, folders 9 and 31. Adams’s quote also in box 30, folder 4. For D’Aguiar, Poe-Eng Yu, and Koppel, see folders 15, 66, and 33, respectively; quotes are from D’Aguiar’s Questionnaire. For more on history of

222

Notes to Pages 91–97

treatment issues in psychology, see Ludy T. Benjamin and David B. Baker, From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology (Belmont, Calif.: Thomas/Wadsworth, 2004). 100. See “Questionnaire,” box 30: Woo, folder 65; Hoeger, folder 24; and Patton, folder 45. DUCM Archives also supplied pictures of Anna Patton. 101. See “Questionnaire,” box 30: Dunham, Taylor, and Bill, folders 16, 62, and 7, respectively. Margaretta Kotrnetz (Lt., age 37) was assigned along with Taylor at Lawson, but she did not return her questionnaire; her service is mentioned in “Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Women in Medicine 90 (October 1945): 9. 102. Quotes in More, Restoring the Balance, 54–55; Khayat, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 32. 103. For their comments, see Morris, Raven, and Sano “Questionnaire,” box 30, folders 41, 50, and 57, respectively. 104. “Letter to Lt. Cornelia Wyckoff, Dated 12 January 1945,” from Maj. Margaret Janeway, “Histories,” box 29. She is the only woman known to have died in service (March 1945); the cause is unknown. See Howe, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 27; for Carter, see “Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Women in Medicine 90 (October 1945): 7. Janeway notes women were assigned as radiologists but does not say how many or who they were in “Women Medical Officers,” undated and signed by Maj. Margaret Janeway, assistant, Women’s Health and Welfare Unit, box 29, “Histories.” 105. Medical Department, United States Army, 155. 106. D’Aguiar noted in Women in Medicine 90 (October 1945). 107. See “Women Physicians in the Army of the United States,” Women in Medicine 90 (October 1945): 7–9; from information supplied by the Ravens family. 108. For Mills, see her “Officer’s and Warrant Officer’s Qualification Card copy,” “Histories,” box 29, folder 17. 109. “Craighill’s Letter to Major Sarah H. Bowditch, Dated 2 October 1945,” Official Correspondence, box 5, folder 1, MDC Collection; “Ten Women Doctors Named to VA Posts,” New York Times, 28 November 1946, 47. After spending many years practicing as a psychiatrist, another WMCP graduate, Dr. Zdenka A. Hurianek (Moore), chose to end her career in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Phoenix working part-time. 110. Craighill information summarized from materials provided by DUCM, from Army Surgeon General Biographical Files, RG 112, 390/18/33/6–390/18/34/7, National Archives, College Park, MD, and from materials provided by Carlisle Army Barracks, Pennsylvania. 111. Bowditch’s biographical material provided by Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. 112. Elizabeth Khayat, “Questionnaire,” box 30, folder 32.

Chapter 4 1. The Naval Appropriations Act of 1916, which established the United States Naval Reserve Force (USNRF), did not specify “men” but rather “citizens” and “persons.” As a result, women were authorized in the navy. Eventually they became eligible for various veterans’ benefits, but not without a fight. To make certain no future women could claim veterans’ benefits from future wars, Congress passed the Naval Reserve Act of 1925, which limited membership in the reserves to “male citizens.” This act impacted women physicians in WWII who wanted to volunteer in the navy. See Godson, Serving Proudly, 84–85. 2. For influenza epidemic, see Godson, Serving Proudly, 59–71. She notes that when

Notes to Pages 97–101

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women first entered the navy as yeomen, no one was quite certain what to call them, as the navy did not designate the gender of new recruits. To clarify the situation, the navy dubbed the women “reservists yeomen (F),” the “F” for female. She attributed “whiskey” quote to an interview with Anna Hagen Etzler, 22 August 1981. For “break up American homes,” ibid., 100. 3. Unlike women army doctors, they never served on contract. 4. “Oral History of Dr. Hulda Evaline Thelander,” University of California–San Francisco Archives. “Oral History Transcript of Dr. Lucy Ozarin, March 2, 2005,” WIMSA. 5. For more on uniforms, see Godson, Serving Proudly, 124. “Oral Interview with Dr. Marcelle Thomasine Bernard,” 2005, WIMSA. Since a war was going on, Bernard was allowed to enter the navy immediately after completing her internship in 1945. Thelander’s “Oral History,” University of California–San Francisco Archives. 6. “Women Physicians Desiring Appointment in the Medical Corps of the United States Naval Reserve,” Medical Woman’s Journal (MWJ), December 1943, 305. 7. Feder noted in MWJ, August 1944, 33; Gaskill in MWJ, December 1943, 303; Weber in MWJ, April 1944, 35. 8. “Women Physicians Desiring Appointment,” MWJ, December 1943, 305. While the ages of most army doctors can be determined because they listed their ages on army questionnaires, no similar documents were available for navy doctors showing their birthdates. 9. Healy noted in MWJ, July 1944, 31. 10.See “Requirements for Commissions,” Women in Medicine, October 1943, 9–10. Age was also related to rank, i.e., age thirty-eight for lieutenant commander. 11. New York Times, 11 August 1943. 12. “Medical Women of the Navy,” MWJ, August 1943, 199. 13. Information was gathered from the “List of 57 Women Physicians in the Navy,” box 29, folder 20, MDC Collection, hereafter referred to as “Official List.” The list of fifty-seven included the women’s original rank and date, medical college, home address, and specialty. In many cases the women listed more than one specialty. For example, Dr. Ellen McLeod listed pathology and bacteriology. 14. Graduation dates were determined from the individual data entries on the “Official List” for the fifty-seven women listed. In a few instances, a woman did not list the date of her graduation. 15. For graduates from WMCP, see table 7. From the University of Michigan: Meldon Ada Everett, Anna Luvern Hays, Mary Catherine Magee, and Irene Osgood Thomas; from the University of Minnesota: Catherine Burns, Louise Mary Paul, and Hulda Evaline Thelander; from New York Medical College: Marcelle Thomasine Bernard, Lucy Dorothy Ozarin, and Frances Beatrice Richman; from Johns Hopkins, see table 7; and from Canada: Hazel M. Grainger. 16. Gaskill attended Cornell, but her name does not appear on the official list of fifty-seven navy women physicians. 17. Quotes are from “Memorial,” supplied by Vassar College, and “Sketch of Achsa M. Bean,” supplied by the Alumni Office University of Maine at Orono. 18. Family quote from unidentified newspaper clipping dated 2 February 1965, supplied by Vassar Library, Vassar College. “Under fire” quote from press release, Headquarters of the Commandant, Third Naval District, New York, 10 October 1945, from Vassar Library. 19. Quote from Herald Tribune, n.d. Biographical information from “Bean’s File,” Vassar Library, Vassar College.

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Notes to Pages 101–104

20. See Bean’s original “Application for Commission in U.S. Naval Reserve” and copy of her “Appointment in Naval Reserve” supplied by the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery History Offices, U.S. Navy, hereafter referred to as BUMED. “Waiver of physical defect for appointment in the U.S. Naval Reserve” is with these papers. 21. Bean’s “Letter to the Chief of the Bureau of Personnel, Dated 10 November 1943,” BUMED. She was appointed Lt. Comdr. W-V (S) (MC) USNR 14 January 1944, box 29, folder 20, MDC Collection. See WMJ, December 1943, p. 303 for a picture of her in uniform. 22. See press release, 10 October 1945, Public Information Office, Headquarters of the Commandant, Third Naval District, New York, NY, supplied by Vassar Library. 23. As noted above, the list was undated. 24. See “Seven Waves Doctors Await Navy’s Call when the Commissioning Bill Is Signed,” New York Times, 14 April 1943, 19. Grainger would later become one of forty-three naval reserve officers to found the Naval Reserve Officers Association in 1954. 25. “Drs. Thelma Harmon, Mary Rehm, Laura E. Weber, Coletta Swaney, and Marcelle Thomasine Bernard,” cited in New York Times, 14 April 1943, 19. 26. “Oral Interview with Dr. Marcelle Thomasine Bernard,” WIMSA. 27. Kane, Famous First Facts. See Thelander’s “Appointment in Naval Reserve Dated 29 March 1944,” in her personnel file, BUMED. She was named “Woman of the Year” by the American Medical Women’s Association and “San Francisco Woman of the Year”; see “A Life of Healing Children Ends,” San Francisco Examiner, 19 February 1988. She later served as clinical professor on the staffs of the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF) and Stanford Medical School. Also see UCSF “Campus Oral History Series.” Thelander’s account is there entitled, “A Woman Physician’s Perspective on Pediatrics and Medical Education.” 28. All quotes from Thelander’s “Oral History” provided by the University of California– San Francisco Archives. 29. “Letter to Commander Hulda E. Thelander, Medical Corps, Dated 2 July 1953,” on her retirement, personnel file, BUMED. 30. Walsh, 226. 31. See table 7. Four WMCP women not discussed: Davis was an internist and pediatrician who was commissioned Lt. (jg) W-V (S) (MC) USNR11–4–42; the USN BUMED Retired Records Section notes that she was trained for two months at Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health 2–13–43 before serving at the Naval Training School in Cedar Falls, IA, the U.S. Naval Dispensary in Washington, and the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, MD. Ruby, Lt. (jg) 9–13–43, listed no specialty. Wenner, Lt. (jg) 9–30– 42, listed general practice and diabetes; Lt. Slack, Lt. (jg) 8–27–43, no specialty. Slack was employed by the Department of Health in Washington, D.C., and after a protracted illness died at age fifty of an overdose of barbiturates, self-administered. 32. See Arakelian, Doc. Utica, NY: North Country Books, 2000, 198–99. 33. Stone’s information at Archives and Special Collections, DUCM. See her “Questionnaire to Alumnae of WMCP,” dated April 1944 and completed by her husband. She died 13 June 1977, class of 1934. Her original rank and date of commission is on untitled and undated “List of Women Physicians in the Navy,” box 29, folder 20, MDC Collection. 34. Quotes from “Woman Doctor First to Wear 4 Stripes,” unidentified newspaper clipping from Saraniero’s alumnae file, DUCM. Hematology quote in her “Application for Commission or Warrant in the U.S. Navy, Dated 28 April 1943,” in her personnel file, BUMED.

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Hospital ship quote, “Navy Corps Accepts First Woman Doctor,” New York Times, 5 September 1943. 35. All quotes are from Lopate, Women in Medicine, 120. 36. Lopate, 126, 127. 37. Other women, however, listed anesthesia as their second specialty, i.e., Eleanor Holman McCoy, who also claimed pediatrics, and Louise Mary Paul (Rad), who listed general practice. 38. Walters’ records were supplied by DUCM and WIMSA. Her first husband, Lt. Herbert N. Walters, whom she met after she went into the navy, was killed aboard the carrier Wright in April 1950. She later married Dr. Harry Nordstrom, a navy surgeon, so she is sometimes referred to by this name in later records. Quote is from “Military Urged to Sign More Doctors-in-Skirts,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Walters’ alumnae file, DUCM. After she left the navy, she practiced anesthesiology in Hawaii, and she lived there with Nordstrom until her death on 10 February 1975. 39. See More, Restoring the Balance, 55; Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 156. 40. The other six psychiatrists were Edith Michael Buyer and Agnes Conrad (both from Johns Hopkins), Catherine Louise McCorry, Grace Victoria Young, Marie Nielsine Simonsen (psychiatry and surgery), and Lois E. Taylor (with general practice). 41. “Oral History Transcript of Dr. Lucy D. Ozarin, Commander USN, 1943–46,” interviewed 2 March 2005, WIMSA. Ozarin was ninety years old at the time of this interview. 42. Information supplied in personal communication by Buyer family. 43. All quotes are from Ozarin’s “Oral History.” Trust Territory: islands around Guam that were taken over from Japan by the United States as trust from the United Nations. 44. Information from unidentified newspaper clipping, “Dr. Frances Willoughby Navy’s lst Woman Doctor,” supplied by WIMSA Registration. Also see “Brief Biography of Dr. Frances Lois Willoughby,” American Medical Woman’s Association. 45. “Information from American Forces Press Service/Command Post 1997,” WIMSA. 46. “Letter to a Friend, Dated Christmas 1961 From Frances L. Willoughby,” provided by WIMSA Registration. She died of a heart ailment 13 May 1984 at the age of seventy-eight in New Jersey. 47. “List of 57 Women Physicians in the Navy,” box 29, folder 20, MDC Collection. Healy in “Section on War Service,” MWJ, July 1944, 31. 48. Feder actually came from California and worked at the Los Angeles County General Hospital. Her father was Dr. Eugene W. Posnjak of the National Research Defense Council of the Carnegie Institute. 49. For Stebbins, see “Section on War Service,” MWJ August 1944, 33. Marion C. Josephi, “Medical Women in the Navy,” Women in Medicine, July 1943, 9–10. 50. Hays was also a breeder of championship cocker spaniels and kept two of her dogs with her while serving on active duty; in notes provided by WIMSA Registration. 51. Notes on Furtos from WIMSA Registration. 52. Doctors who were commissioned in the U.S. Public Health Service during WWII are not discussed here. 53. “Oral History Transcript of Dr. Lucy D. Ozarin, Commander USN, 1943–46,” WIMSA. 54. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 348–49. Jefferson Medical College, the last all-male medical school in the United States, began to admit women in 1961, eight or nine years before WMCP began to admit men. This suggests that Craighill was way ahead of her time in 1946.

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Notes to Pages 111–121

55. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 350. 56. Marion Josephi, “Medical Women in the Navy,” Women in Medicine, July 1943, 10.

Chapter 5 1. Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply,” 245. 2. Douglas Larsen, “Open Field for Women,” Clearfield (PA) Progress, 29 August 1945. Interestingly, this pay differential did not apply to physicians in the military, who were paid according to rank and the number of years served rather than by specialty. A woman captain in the Army Medical Corps, for example, earned the same amount of money as a male captain. This advantage, however, did not appear to encourage women doctors to apply for commissions. 3. Ghajar, “The Juxtaposition of Ambivalence and Need,” unpublished paper, Conference of Army Historians, Arlington, Va., 2004 (historian’s files, Women in Military Service to America Memorial Foundation, Arlington, Va.). 4. Ghajar; Walsh, 243. 5. Ghajar. 6. “Woman Has a Place in Medicine, Doctors Say,” Hopewell (NJ) Herald, 11 February 1953, 4. 7. “Why Do Brilliant Women Run into So Much Resentment?” Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, 17 August 1962. 8. Patricia McCormack, “More Women Emerging on Medical Scene in America,” Los Angeles Times, 19 September 1968, E10. 9. Chicago Tribune, 21 June 1967. 10. Grace Lichtenstein, “At Downstate Center Too Few Women Medical Students, Too Few Men in Nursing,” New York Times, 23 May 1971, BQ84. 11. More, Restoring the Balance, 217–18. 12. Pauline Garber Clark, Registration # 372284, Women’s Memorial Foundation, Arlington, Virginia; “U.S. Women at Nagoya,” New York Times, 24 November 1945, 21. 13. Ghajar. 14. Margaret Craighill Papers, Survey of Women Army Physicians, 1945, Hamilton’s answer sheet, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. 15. Poe-Eng Yu, letter to Maj. Margaret Craighill, 20 February 1945, Correspondence, Margaret Craighill Papers, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. 16. Yu file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial Foundation, Arlington, Virginia. 17. “Chinese Named Senior Physician at Hospital,” Joplin (MO) Globe, 8 February 1948. 18. “She Wouldn’t Take No for An Answer,” photocopy of newspaper clipping, n.d., Clara Raven File, Historian’s Files, Women in Military Service Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 19. Sakin file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. New York Times, 12 September 1960, 29. 23. Malvina Lindsay, “More Medical Preparedness,” Washington Post, 10 August 1950; Bess Furman, “Army Issues Call for More Nurses,” New York Times, 10 August 1950. 24. “Navy Rank Offered to Women Doctors,” Washington Post, 19 October 1948, 20. 25. New York Times, 13 August 1949, 13; New York Times, 3 June 1950, 16. 26. The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948. 27. “Woman Doctors Sought,” New York Times, 28 July 1950, 4.

Notes to Pages 121–137

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28. Cowdrey, Medics’ War, 145. 29. Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Journal 2004/5 edition, 163. 30. Raven, “Achievements of Women in Medicine, Past and Present,” 110. 31. Ibid. 32. Woo file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 33. Church file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 34. Ghajar. 35. “Three Women Interns Accepted by Army,” New York Times, 26 April 1952. 36. Recruiting Service Note 59–53, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Navy Personnel, 11 March 1953; Memorandum, Subject Appointment of Women in the Medical Dental and Medical Service Corps of the Navy, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 21 January 1953; Memorandum, Appointment of Women in the Medical, Dental, and Medical Service Corps of the Navy, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 2 December 1952; Memorandum, Appointment of Women in the Medical, Dental, and Service Corps, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Naval Personnel, October 1952; Memorandum, Appointment of Women in the Medical, Dental, and Medical Service Corps of the Navy, 20 November 1952; Memorandum, Request of Mr. Charles Ducander, Counsel, House Armed Services Committee, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 25 March 1952, Historian’s Files, Women in Military Service Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 37. “Navy Helicopter Runs Amok, Kills 2 Aboard Carrier,” Washington Post, 6 April 1950. 38. “Military Urged to Sign More Doctors-In-Skirts,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, 23 November 1952. 39. Walters file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 40. Report of Separation, Walters file. Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 41. “Woman Doctor Finds Life in the Navy No Different Than Other Professions,” Daily Courier, Connellsville, PA, 23 September 1951. 42. Assorted newspaper clippings, Elias file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 43. Letter from Edward J. Kendricks, BG, USAF, to Capt. Dorothy Elias, 3 November 1952, Elias file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 44. USUHS Report 2004/5, 163. 45. The Society of Medical Consultants to the Armed Forces by Robert M. Hall MD, www.smcaf.org/History.htm. 46. Interview with Fae Adams, MD, 12 November 2003, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection. 47. Renee Gearhart Levy, “From Missionary to the Military,” SUNY Upstate Medical University Alumni Journal, Winter 2002. 48. All Haycock material from interview with Christine Haycock, MD, 22 February 2005, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection. 49. “Couldn’t get into the program” quote from Michael Parks, “Col. Bowen Says Army More Uptight Over Her Sex than Her Race,” Baltimore Sun, 23 March 1971, p. B1. Bowen file, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial, Arlington, Virginia. 50. Interview with Janice Mendelson, MD, USA MC (Ret.), 31 January 2006, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection. 51. Frances Willoughby, MD, USN MC, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection.

228

Notes to Pages 137–149

52. Ibid. 53. Officer Biography Sheet, Gioconda Saraneiro, 13 March 1956, Historian’s Files, Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Washington, D.C. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Washington Star, 19 January 1956. 58. Elizabeth Toomey, “Navy Doctor Is Fond of Frilly Things,” Coshocton Ohio Tribune, 8 January 1956. 59. Officer Biography Sheet, Gioconda Saraneiro, 13 March 1956, Historian’s Files, Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Washington, D.C.; “First Woman Captain in the U.S. Navy’s Medical Corps Retires,” U.S. Navy Medical News Letter 48, n0.4, Drexel University College of Medicine Archives and Special Collections, Philadelphia. 60. Fitness Report, Gioconda Saraneiro, 15 April 1964, Historian’s Files, Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Washington, D.C. 61. Memorandum, Subject: Capt. Gioconda Saraneiro, MC, USN, 1 May 1964, Historian’s Files, Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Washington, D.C. 62. Memorandum, Subject: Capt. Gioconda Saraniero MC, USN, 7 May 1964, Historian’s Files, Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. 63. Interview, Jonathan Sparks, MD, conducted by Jan Herman of the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in 2004, BUMED. 64. New York State Education Department, Office of Professional Licenses. 65. Knabe, “Reserve Flight Surgeon’s Career,” 15. 66. Interview with Diane Colgan, MD, 30 March 2005, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection. 67. “Vietnam War Spurs Army to Recruit Women Doctors,” New York Times, 7 May 1966, 2. 68. Ibid. 69. Interview, Christine Haycock, MD, 22 February 2005, Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection. 70. “Dr. Anna Brady Returns from Duty in VN,” Gettysburg Times, 2 August 1969; Roslyn Barbarosh, “Medic Says Vietnamese Not Educated to Medical Care; Multiple Births Bad Luck,” Gettysburg Times, 26 November 1969. 71. Clotilde Bowen, “A Different War, Another Time,” Denver Post, 21 November 2001. 72. Ibid. 73. Cheryl Fitzgerald, “The Colonel Is Ready For Action,” Washington Post, 12 September 1977, B14. 74. Col. Clotilde Bowen, MD, U.S. Army, Medical Corps, Number 146474, 20 April 1994, Women’s Memorial Register. 75. Michael Parks, “Col. Bowen Says Army More Uptight Over Her Sex Than Her Race,” Baltimore Sun, 23 March 1971, page B1. 76. Ibid. 77. Cheryl Fitzgerald, “The Colonel Is Ready for Action,” Washington Post, 12 September 1977, B14. 78. Feller and Moore, Highlights in the History of the Army Nurse Corps, 51. 79. “Only Female Surgeon, Certified, Now Heads Military Blood Agency,” SGO/R&D News, 19 January 1973. 80. Interview with Janice Mendelson, MD, 31 January 2006, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection.

Notes to Pages 149–164

229

81. Janice Annette Mendelson, MD, Vita, Historian’s Files, Women’s Memorial Foundation. 82. J. A. Mendelson, “Topical Mafenide Hydrochloride Aqueous Spray,” 135–37. 83. Interview with Joan T. Zajtchuk, MD, 29 March 2006, Women’s Memorial Foundation Oral History Collection. 84. Chronicle Telegram, Elyria, Ohio, 2 July 1966. The first woman physician to volunteer and be accepted into the Army Medical Corps under this program was Dr. Beverly P. Wood, whom the army sent to Korea with her physician husband. 85. Susan C. Nicol, “Retiring Colonel Gets Kiss and Salute from the General,” Frederick Post, Frederick, Maryland, 21 September 1996. 86. Interview with Zajtchuk. 87. American Medical Association, Physician Characteristics and Distribution in the United States. 88. USUHS Journal, 164.

Chapter 6 1. Oral history interview with Capt. Sandra Yerkes, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 1 March 2006. 2. Ibid. 3. Oral history interview with R. Adm. Connie Mariano, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps (Ret.), 3 April 2006. 4. Oral history interview with Col. Praxedes Belandres, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps (Ret.), 20 June 2006. 5. Oral history interview, Col. Susan Dunlow, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006. 6. Mariano interview. 7. Yerkes interview. 8. Oral history interview with Col. Linda Lawrence, MD, U.S. Air Force, 10 May 2006. 9. Oral history interview with Capt. Briana Hill, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 18 April 2006. 10. Oral history interview with Maj. Barbara Cooper, MD, U.S. Air Force, 5 May 2006. 11. Oral history interview with Col. Joan Zajtchuk, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps (Ret.), 29 March 2006. 12. Oral history interview with Col. Mary Maniscalco-Theberge, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006. 13. Oral history interview with Lt. Cmdr. Tracy Bilski, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 13 April 2006. 14. Oral history interview with Col. Renata Engler, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006. 15. Oral history interview with Lt. Sonovia Johnson, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 17 April 2006. 16. Yerkes interview. 17. Christine Lehmann, “Navy Gives Psychiatrist Unique Assignments,” Psychiatric News 39, no. 11, 4 June 2004, 13. 18. Oral history interview with Cmdr. Elise Gordon, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 11 April 2006. 19. Johnson interview. 20. Anne Marie Cepeda, MD, Medical Officer USS Yosemite, Memorandum 22 May

230

Notes to Pages 164–180

1980 and Memorandum 6 March 1980, Historian’s Files, Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, Inc. 21. Oral history interview, R. Adm. Christine Hunter, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 2 March 2006. 22. Mariano interview. 23. Gordon interview. 24. Oral history interview with Cmdr. Deborah Hinkley, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 9 May and 22 June 2006. 25. Zajtchuk interview. 26. Oral history interview with Col. Doris Browne, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps (Ret.), 17 July 2006. 27. Mariano interview. 28. Gordon interview. 29. Mariano interview. 30. Oral history interview with Col. Elizabeth Jones-Lukacs, MD, U.S. Air Force Reserve, 15 August 2005. 31. Cecily David, MD, Colonel, U.S. Army Medical Corps, Questionnaire, 18 February 2005. 32. Lehmann, “Psychiatrist Soars to Rewarding Air Force Career,” 10. 33. Rhonda Cornum, MD, Major, U.S. Army Medical Corps, as told to Peter Copeland, She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story, (Novato, Cal.: Presidio Press, 1992), 102. 34. Oral history interview with Capt. Sybil Tasker, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 13 June 2006. 35. Hill interview. 36. Oral history interview with Cmdr. Lisa McGowan, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 26 May 2006. 37. Oral history interview, Col. Shirley Lockie, MD, U.S. Air Force Medical Corps, n.d. 38. Oral history interview with Cmdr. Denise Peet, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 16 May 2006. 39. Oral history interview with Col. Paula Underwood, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 17 February 2006. 40. Oral history interview, Cmdr. Janine Danko, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 31 March 2006. 41. Oral history interview with Col. Susan Dunlow, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006. 42. Oral history interview, Cmdr. Catherine Christenson, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 19 April 2005. 43. McGowan interview. 44. Gordon interview. 45. Underwood interview. 46. Cooper interview. 47. Lawrence interview. 48. Peet interview. 49. Johnson interview. 50. Bilski interview. 51. Jones-Lukacs interview. 52. Oral history interview with Lt. Col. Moira Burke, MD, U.S. Air Force Reserve, 4 March 2005.

Notes to Pages 181–197

231

53. Oral history interview with Col. Marjorie Mosier, MD, U.S. Army Reserve (Ret.), 16 March 2006. 54. “DO Grandmother served in Persian Gulf with 82nd Airborne,” DO, February 1992, 37. 55. Cornum, She Went to War, 14–15, 21–41, 106, 124. 56. “Conquered Iraqis Get U.S. Assistance,” Capital, 2 April 1991. 57. Underwood interview. 58. Oral history interview with Col. Paula Underwood, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 17 February 2006. 59. Yerkes interview. 60. Oral history interview with Col. Kimberly May, U.S. Air Force Medical Corps, 25 April 2006. 61. Yerkes interview. 62. Bilski interview. 63. Oral History interview with Lt. Rachel Umi Lee, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 2 May 2006. 64. Oral history interview with Capt. Sybil Tasker MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, June 13, 2006. 65. Mosier interview. 66. Bilski interview. 67. Oral History interview with Maj. Mary Krueger, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, n.d. 68. David Blymire, “Doc Battles Bureaucracy in Iraq,” Sentinel, Carlisle PA, 23 August 2005. 69. Engler interview. 70. Oral history interview, Col. Renata Greenspan, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006. 71. Cornum, She Went to War, 199–200. 72. Hunter interview. 73. Underwood interview. 74. Jones-Lukacs interview. 75. Gordon interview. 76. May interview. 77. Krueger interview. 78. Lee interview. 79. Lawrence interview. 80. Tasker interview. 81. Oral history interview, Col. Praxedes Belandres, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006. 82. Johnson interview. 83. Greenspan interview. 84. Gordon interview. 85. Thomas interview. 86. Jones-Lukacs interview. 87. Engler interview. 88. Greenspan interview. 89. Underwood interview. 90. Maniscalco-Theberge interview. 91. Mariano interview.

232

Notes to Pages 198–203

92. Bilski interview. 93. Military Women Veterans—Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow website. http://userpages .aug.com/captbarb/firsts3.html. 94. Marcia Triggs, Sgt. 1st Class, U.S. Army, “Army Gives Women Increased Job Responsibilities,” Army News Service, 20 April 2004; “Chief of Europe’s Medical Care System to Receive Second Star,” Stars and Stripes, European edition, 18 June 2006.

Epilogue 1. “Letter Written to Dr. Mary Walker,” 28 August 1865, from Dr. Ann Preston, Preston Papers, DUCM. 2. For Toland, see Fernandez, “Fifty Years of Irene Toland School.” Cowan’s account is in an undated handwritten “Memoir” housed in the Bass Collection, Tulane University Medical Center. 3. Mary Sotir, “Woman Doctor Seeks Equal Pay For War,” Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1964, C44. 4. “Statement of Dr. Ruth Ewing,” in Hearings, 82; Quote “lost interest” in More and Greer, “American Women Physicians in 2000.” 5. More, Restoring the Balance, 186. 6. “Woman Has a Place in Medicine, Doctors Say,” Hopewell (NJ) Herald, 11 February 1953, 4. 7. Interview with Col. Renata Greenspan, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006, Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection; Interview with Maj. Nicole Thomas, MD, U.S. Air Force, 19 May 2006, Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection. 8. Interview with Col. Susan Dunlow, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 20 June 2006, Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection. 9. Interview with Col. Paula Underwood, MD, U.S. Army Medical Corps, 17 February 2006, Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection. 10. Interview with Capt. Sybil Tasker, MD, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, 13 June 2006, Women’s Memorial Oral History Collection.

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Bibliography Coshocton Ohio Tribune Davenport Democrat and Leader Decatur Illinois Daily Review Denver Post Evening State Journal and Lincoln Daily News Gettysburg Times Joplin Globe, Joplin, Missouri Iowa Press Citizen Los Angeles Times New York Herald Tribune New York Sun New York Times Observer Pasadena Daily News Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Sandusky Star Journal San Francisco Examiner Stars and Stripes, European Edition Sunday Star Syracuse Herald, Syracuse, New York The Advocate Newark, Ohio The Chronicle Telegram, Elyria, Ohio The Davenport Democrat and Leader, Davenport Iowa The Hopewell Herald, Hopewell, New Jersey The Sentinel, Carlisle, Pennsylvania Washington Post Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune

243

INDEX

Aberdeen Proving Grounds, 169 Acute Male Service, 86 Adams, Clyde, 90 Adams, Fae M., 122–123, 127–130, 132–133 Adams, George Worthington, 21 Aeromedical Research Laboratory, 181 Air Force Academy, 173 Air Force Institute of Technology, 141 Air Force Medical Corps, 120, 141, 168, 173 All-Volunteer Force, 5–6, 126, 152, 154, 202 Amar, Delores B., 77, 83 American Academy of Pediatrics, 68 American Board of Preventive Medicine, 68–69 American Board of Radiology, 93 American Board of Surgery, 135 American Civil War; army contract assistant surgeons and, 2; Carded Service Records and, 206n6; Eastern medical schools and, 23; experiences of women in, 9–10, 30, 206n9, 207n15; list of women phsicians in, 13; number of doctors and, 1; number of women physicians and, 8; reinforcing Victorian notions of women and, 10, 14; rigidly defined sex roles and, 18–19, 27, 29 American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 56 American College of Radiologists, 75, 92 American College of Surgeons, 135 American Medical Association, 58–59, 61–62, 73, 98, 116 American Medical College, 23 American Medical Women’s Association,

31, 61, 108; 201, 211n12, 212n35, 224n27, 201 American Psychiatric Association, 94, 108 American Public Health Association, 29 American Society for Marriage Counselors, 56 American Woman Suffrage Association, 20 American Women’s Hospitals, 34 American Women’s Medical Association, 7, 55 Andrews Air Force Base, 168, 170, 173, 179–180 Andrews, Orianna Moon, 12, 15, 19 anesthesia, 38, 40, 43, 46, 49, 58, 70, 91, 93, 99, 104, 200–201, 225n37 Ansell, S. T., 33 anti-Semitism, 51 Arlington National Cemetery, 29 Armed Forces Central Medical Registry, 149 Armed Forces Health Professional Scholarship Program (HPSP), 5, 155, 191, 198 Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Medical Museum, 155 Armed Forces Physicians’ Appointment Residency Consideration Program, 126 Army Board of Corrections, 30 Army Chemical School, 128 Army Institute of Pathology, 92 Army Medical Corps, 33, 60, 68–69, 72, 75–76, 82, 95, 112, 117–122, 128, 131, 135, 149–150, 156, 166, 170, 176 Army Medical Corps Reserve, 129 Army Medical Department, 21, 34, 84, 149

246

Index

Army Medical School, 91 Army Medical Services, 85 Army-Navy Nurses Act, 117, 119 Army Nurse Corps, 22, 28, 33, 43, 63, 131, 148 Army Nurse Corps Reserve, 122, 130 Army Relief Society, 57 Army School of Nursing, 63 Army Service Forces, 76 Army Surgeon General’s Office, 68 Arnold, Nita, 72 Associated Anesthetists of the United States and Canada, 58 Association for Voluntary Sterilization, 56 Atlanta Ordnance Depot, 81, 86 Babcock, Myra, 43, 58 bacteriology, 45, 52–53, 75, 223n13 Baird, Ollie Prescott, 43, 46, 55 Baker, Lucy; career after the war and, 56 Baker, Lucy Honora, 49, 51, 56 Baker, Newton, 36 Baltimore Sun; Bowen interview and, 148 Barringer, Emily Dunning, 62–63 Baruch, Bernard, 55 Baylor University College of Medicine, 122 Bean, Achsa, 64–66, 100–102 Belandres, Praxedes, 156, 195 Bellevue Base Hospital, 39 Bellevue Hospital, 11, 51, 73, 91, 93 Bellevue Institute of Physical Medicine and Research, 135 Benedict, Jay L., 57 Bennett, Christopher, 56 Berg, Jennifer, 162 Bernard, Marcelle Thomasine, 98, 102 Berry, Frank B., 126 Berry Plan, 121, 126, 142, 152, 154 Besick, Anna C., 81, 89 Bethesda Naval Hospital, 120, 143–144, 161 Bill, Audrey, 91 Bilski, Tracy, 160, 178, 185, 187, 198 Bioterrorism Education Project, 171 Blackwell, Elizabeth; 205n1, 207n18; admission to Geneva Medical College, 1; legacy of, 4, 8; passed over for promotion and, 31; training programs for nurses and, 11; treatment of, 7

Blanton, DeAnne, 20 Bliss, Raymond, 117 Blouin, Francis, 121 Bolling Air Force Base, 170, 173 Boston City Hospital Training School, 23 Boston Cooking School, 26 Boston University Medical School, 46 Botsford, Mary; anesthesia and, 46; background of, 43; career after war and, 58 Bowditch, Sarah, 64, 66, 68–69, 78, 94 Bowen, Clotilde, 134–135, 142, 145, 147–148 Bowers, Paul, 47 Bowers, Rose, 47 Brady, Anna, 146 Bremner, Josephine, 88 British Emergency Medical Services, 64, 68–69, 71 British Ministry of Health, 66 Brooke Air Force Base, 168 Brooke Army Medical Center, 136 Brooklyn Naval Hospital, 98 Brooks Air Force Base, 149 Brown, Caroline, 11 Brown, Edna W., 53–54 Browne, Doris, 166 Brown, John, 14 Brown, Suzanne W., 120 Bryan, Elizabeth, 78, 88 Buckel, C. Annette, 12 Buckel, Chloe Annette, 9, 14, 16, 19, 206n7, 208n36, 209n43 Burdon, Minnie, 49–50 Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 99, 137–140, 168, 172 Burnett, Anne, 48 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 156, 167 Bush, George W., 156, 168 Bushnell, G. E., 33 Buyer, Edith Michael, 100–101, 106–107 Cameron, Simon, 22 Camp Atterbury, 119, 122 Camp Carson, 118 Camp Crowder, 118, 127 Camp Cuba Libre, 27–28 Camp Doha, 186 Camp Drake, 133 Camp Grant, 42, 47

Index Camp Las Casas, 46 Camp Lejeune, 106 Camp McCoy, 130 Camp Merritt, 52 Camp Pendleton, 171 Camp Pike, 53 Camp Rhino, 178, 187 Camp Sibert, 91 Carter, Jimmy, 155 Carter, Melson Barfield, 92 Case Western Reserve’s School of Medicine, 110 Castle Thunder, 9, 18 Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, 171 Cepeda, Anne Marie, 163–164 Chadwick, Sarah, 17 Charity Hospital, 54 Chelsea Navy Hospital, 102 Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, 12, 48 Chicago Medical School, 48 Chicago Presbyterian Hospital, 70 Chicago Society of Pathologists, 58 Chicago Tribune; appointment of Loretta Maher and, 49; vaccine for measles and, 58 Child Guidance Center, 48 Children’s Hospital of San Francisco, 43 Children’s Medical Center, 121 Christ Child Nursery, 41 Christenson, Catherine, 175 Church, Ruth E., 122 Cincinnati General Hospital, 42 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 116 Civil War. See American Civil War Clapp, Henry, 20 Clapp, Sarah Ann Chadwick, 2, 17–20 Cleveland Medical College, 17 Clinton, William J., 156, 167–168 Clinton, Catherine, 8, 206n6 Coalition Joint Civil Military Operations Task Force, 188 Coast Guard SPARs, 3 Cold War; 1964 Civil Rights Act and, 116; careerists and, 127–142; Higher Education Act and, 116; service during Korean War and, 121–126; Vietnam War Era

247

and, 142–153; Women’s Armed Services Integration Act and, 119–120 Colgan, Diane, 143–144 College of Physicians and Surgeons, 46, 57, 78 Collins, Mary Steinheimer, 129–130, 142 Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, 73 Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, 64 Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, 63, 88 Columbia University Medical School, 32, 52–53, 57 Committee of Women Physicians, 37– 38, 47 Committee on Women Physicians of the Council of National Defense, 36 Connor, Angie, 77, 85, 94 Conrad, Agnes, 101 contract physicians; marriage histories and, 55; psychiatry and, 47; status of, 3 contract surgeons; anesthesia and, 38, 40, 43; Attending Surgeon’s Office and, 49; Civil War and, 17, 20, 22; official regulations for, 34–35; overview of, 34–36; postwar careers of, 55–59; progress for, 70–74; unexpected repercussions and, 3; War Emergency Dispensary and, 51; World War I (list of), 44–45 Cook County Hospital, 49, 75 Cook, Lauren M., 20 Cooper, Barbara, 158, 176 Copeland, Peter, 183 Cornell Medical School, 39, 53, 75, 198 Cornell University Medical Center, 32 Cornum, Rhonda, 171, 179, 181–183, 190–191 Cowan, Isabel, 23, 26, 29, 200, 210n61 Craighill, Margaret, 61, 73–74, 76, 79–80, 82–83, 86, 89–90, 92, 94, 111, 118–119, 215, 216n16, 216n22, 218n45, 222n109 Crane, George, 114–115 Cumberland Hospital, 137 Dabbs, Ellen, 23, 27–28 D’Aguiar, Alcinda, 91, 93 Danko, Janine, 174 Dartmouth Medical School, 51 Dassell, Margaret, 43

248

Index

Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), 22 David, Cecily, 169–170 Davis, Harriet Josephine, 101 De Aguiar, Alcinde, 121 Detroit Animal Shelter, 58 DeVore, Louise, 70 District Woman Suffrage Association, 20 Dix, Dorothea, 11, 22 Donohue, Julia, 48 Duke University Medical School, 51, 75, 125 Dunham, Jean L., 75, 91, 93 Dunlap, Troy, 182 Dunlow, Susan, 156, 174, 202 Eastern Virginia Medical School, 159 Eastman Kodak Company, 57 Eclectic Medical College, 41 Edgewood Arsenal, 135–136 Edson, Susan, 11–12, 31 82nd Airborne Division, 181 Eisenhower Army Medical Center, 159 Elias, Dorothy Armstrong, 125–127, 141 Elias, William E., 125 Ellms, Evelyn Blanche, 108 Elmendorf, Grace Mering, 43 Emergency Medical Services, 100 Engler, Renata, 161, 190, 197 Ensign 1915 Program, 143 European Regional Medical Command, 199 Everett, Meldon Ada, 108 Ewing, Ruth E., 63, 201 Famous First Facts (Kane), 102 Feder, Ellen W., 98, 108 Female Medical College of Philadelphia, 8 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, 187 Finnegan, Edward R., 3 1st Armored Division, 184 Fisher, C. Irving, 52 Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, 122, 129, 148, 152, 159, 193 Fitzsimons General Hospital, 148 Fort Belvoir, 196–197 Fort Benjamin Harrison, 134, 148 Fort Bragg, 135–136, 181

Fort Campbell, 136, 149, 151 Fort Des Moines, 83 Fort Devens, 86, 128 Fort Dix, 145 Fort Douglass, 50 Fort Drum, 145 Fort Gordon, 159 Fort Jay, 130 Fort Knox, 83 Fort Knox Station Hospital, 86 Fort McClellan, 127 Fort Mead, 129 Fort Oglethorpe, 53, 68, 69, 81, 88–89, 94 Fort Ord, 180 Fort Riley, 197 Fort Rucker, 181, 191 Fort Sam Houston, 136, 149 Fort Sheridan Army Hospital, 3 48th Combat Surgical Support Hospital, 187 440th Airlift Wing, 141 4th Infantry Division, 190 Frankfort Hospital, 146 Furtos, Norma Catherine, 110 Garber, Elizabeth, 71, 73 Garber, Pauline, 117–118 Garfield Memorial Hospital, 37 GAR [Grand Army of the Republic], 20 Gaskill, Cornelia Jane, 98, 100 Geissinger Medical Center, 158 Geneva Medical School, 7 George Washington University Medical School, 98 G.I. Bill, 113, 122, 127 Gilmore, Emma Wheat, 36–39; notes on Dr. Baird and, 46; notes on Kleegman and, 51 Gordon, Elise, 162, 164, 167, 175, 193, 196 Gorgas, William, 33, 36 Grainger, Hazel M., 102 Gray, Isabelle, 40, 42 Green, Edith, 116 Green, Mary Elizabeth, 2, 23, 25–26, 29–30 Greenspan, Renata, 191, 196–197, 202 Guantánamo Bay, 161 Gutman, Eleanor, 73

Index gynecology, 20, 22, 37–38, 47, 51, 56, 77, 81, 84–86, 89, 92–94, 100, 109–110, 116–117, 127, 156 Haines, Frances Edith, 38, 49; anesthesia and, 40; Base Hospital Unit No. 13 member, 3 Hall, Molly, 170–171 Hamilton, Eleanor, 117 Hanes, Edith, 200–201 Harlem Hospital, 106, 134 Harper’s Weekly; female graduates and internships, 75 Harris, Fidelia Rachel, 14 Harrison, Isabel, 78 Harte, Bernice Joan, 83 Harvard Medical School, 121 Harvard School of Public Health, 68–69, 94, 107 Harwood, Jr., T. E., 71 Haverfield, Addie, 23, 28 Hawks, Esther Hill, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 31 Hawks, Milton, 15 Hawley Army Community Hospital, 134 Hawley-Boland, Carla, 199 Hawley Medical Center, 148 Haycock, Christine, 122, 129–135, 142, 145– 146 Hayden, Eleanor, 73 Hayes, Marjorie, 78, 85–86 Hays, Anna, 109 Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP), 5, 152 Healy, Mildred Miller Templeton, 98, 108 Healy, Steven, 98 Heekin Fresh Air Farm, 41 Henderson, Jean, 87–88 Hickam Air Force Base, 173 Higher Education Act, 116 Hill, Briana, 158, 171 Hill, Gershon, 48 Hill, Julia, 47–48 Hill’s Retreat Hospital, 47–48 Hocker, Elizabeth Van Cortlandt, 35, 40; career after war and, 58; World War I service, 41 Hoeger, Agnes, 91 Holzberg, Ida R., 81

249

Horn, Dora, 40, 42–43 Hospital for Special Surgery, 56 Howell, Ellen Woodward, 23, 27, 29 Howe, Martha E., 77–78, 84, 93 Hughes, Laura Ann Cleophas, 23, 26 Hunkley, Deborah, 164–165 Hunter, Christine, 164, 191–192, 199 Hurianek, Zdenka Alda, 77, 81, 87 Illinois Department of Public Health, 122 Indiana Hospital, 17 It’s Never Too Late to Love (Kleegman), 56 Jackson, Katherine, 93 Janeway, Margaret, 73–74, 81, 84, 88, 92 Jefferson Medical College, 111 Johns Hopkins Medical School, 7, 37, 57, 77–78, 83, 85, 88, 100–101, 103, 106–107, 110 Johns Hopkins University, 22 Johnson, Hazel W., 148 Johnson, Sonovia, 161–162, 178, 195 Joint Medical Education Committee, 165 Jones, John Paul, 98 Jones-Lukacs, Elizabeth, 168–170, 179, 192– 193, 197 Josephi, Marion, 102, 109, 111 Kane, Joseph Nathan, 102 Kankakee Hospital for the Insane, 48 Karpeles, Kate Bogel; career after war and, 55; family background and, 51; Volunteer Medical Services Corps and, 37; War Emergency Dispensary and, 51 Karpeles, Simon R., 37 Kean, Jefferson R., 38 Keller Army Hospital, 169–170 Kempker, Adele C., 77, 90 Kendricks, Edward, 125–126 Kennedy General Hospital, 81 Khayat, Elizabeth, 77, 89, 92 Kingsport Community Hospital, 54 Kleegman, Anna; career after the war and, 56; War Emergency Dispensary and, 51 Koppel, Hilde J., 91, 117 Korean War; difficulty recruiting doctors and, 116; need for women doctors and, 4; service during, 121–126

250

Index

Kratz, Esther Cumberland; background of, 49; career after the war and, 57; flu epidemic and, 50 Krueger, Mary, 187–190, 194 Laura Memorial Women’s Medical College, 40–42 Lawrence, Linda, 158, 177–178, 194–195 Lawson, Ellen, 23 Lawson General Hospital, 79, 81, 87 Lee, Rachel Umi, 185, 194 Leibfried, Jane M., 77, 94 Leonard, Esther Edna Hill, 40–42 Letterman General Army Hospital, 46 Letterman General Hospital, 93 Lewis, Dean DeWitt, 39 Liebert, Luella, 81 Lockie, Shirley, 173 Loizeaux, Marion, 64, 66, 68–70 Long Binh Jail, 152 Long Island College of Medicine, 78, 130 Los Angeles General Hospital, 98 Los Angeles Times; popular attitudes toward women physicians, 115 Lovejoy, Esther, 64 Loyola School of Medicine, 106 Lozier, Clemence, 12 Magee, James C., 63 Maher, Loretta; Attending Surgeon’s Office and, 51; background of, 49; career after the war and, 57 Mainbocher, fashion designer, 97 Malcolm Grove Memorial Hospital, 180 Mallory Institute, 125 Maniscalco-Theberge, Mary, 159–160, 195, 197 Mariano, Connie, 155, 157, 164, 166–168, 197–198 Marine Corps Air Station, 161 Mason General Hospital, 94 Massachusetts State Department of Health, 94 Massillon State Hospital, 49 The Mature Woman (Kleegman), 56 May, Kimberly, 184–185, 193–194 Mayo Clinic, 46 McAfee, Loy, 54

McAvoy, Eileen, 122 McCann, Gertrude Fisher, 52–53, 57 McCann, William S., 53, 57 McCormick Institute for Infectious Diseases, 53, 58 McCorry, Catherine Louise, 106 McGee, Anita Newcomb, 2, 9, 21–23, 29, 31, 35–36, 202, 206n10, 209n49, 209n50, 210–211n65, 211n66 McGee, John, 25 McGowan, Lisa, 172, 175 McGregor, Catherine Gordon, 75, 85 McLeod, Christie Ellen, 109 McNeal, Alice, 70 McNeal, Theresa, 94 Medical College of Indiana, 54 Medical Field Service School, 66 Medical Missionary Board, 48 Medical Reserve Corps, 62 Medical Women’s National Association (MWNA), 61 Mendelson, Janice, 135–136, 142, 145, 148– 149 Mendenhall, Jean C., 51, 57–58 Menninger School, 94 Mercy Hospital, 135 Michigan Humane Society, 58 Midas, John, 166 Middlesex Medical College, 79 Miller, Arthur, 17 Miller, Ruth, 122 Mills, Miriam, 94 Ministry of Health Hospital for Sick Children, 66 Moldow, Gloria, 10 Moore, Mary, 71 More, Ellen S., 116, 205n5 Morris, Joyce, 92 Morton, Oliver, 16 Morton, Rosalie Slaughter, 38 Mosier, Marjorie, 179–181, 186–187 Mulloy, Mary E., 87 Murphy Army Hospital, 122 Murphy, John B., 53 National Homeopathic Hospital, 56 National Naval Medical Center, 98, 102, 106, 157, 197

Index Naval Aerospace and Operational Medical Institute, 162 Naval Air Station Oceana, 163 Naval Appropriations Act of 1916, 96 Naval Medical Research Institute, 139 Naval Medical School, 137 Naval War College, 172 navy doctors; characteristics and background of, 100; comparing to army doctors, 110–111, 110; first volunteers and, 100–103; specialties and, 105–110; specialties listed for, 104 Navy Medical Corps, 4, 60, 96, 108, 112, 119, 120, 137, 155, 185 Navy Nurse Corps, 96 Navy’s Flight Surgeon Training Program, 162 Navy Special Forces, 187 Nell, Patricia, 141–142 neuropsychiatry, 85, 87, 89–90, 99, 221n96 New England Female Medical College, 15 New England Hospital for Women, 20 New England Hospital for Women and Children, 12 New York Infirmary for Women and Children, 63 New York Medical College, 100, 102, 106, 110 New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, 12 New York State Health Department, 134 New York State Hospital for the Insane, 29 New York Times; Navy Medical Corps and, 96 97th General Hospital, 119 Nixon, Richard, 146, 168 Northington General Hospital, 119 Northwestern Medical College, 48 Northwestern University Medical School, 75 Nottingham City Hospital, 68 obstetrics, 18, 37, 44, 51, 56, 77, 81, 84, 86, 89, 92–94, 100, 109–110, 114, 116–117, 127, 156–157, 174 Occupational Therapists Association, 48 O’Donnell, Mae Josephine, 117, 219n59

251

Ohio State University Hospital, 135 Ohio State University Medical School, 88, 134 101st Airborne Division, 181 Operation Desert Shield, 153, 173, 179 Operation Desert Storm, 153, 173, 176, 182– 183 Osborne, Gladys, 81, 84, 86 Osler, William, 7 Ozarin, Lucy Dorothy, 97, 106–107, 111 Painter, Hettie K., 13, 14, 16, 19 Pasadena Regional Hospital, 86 Patent Office Hospital, 30 pathology, 45, 53, 57, 89–92, 99, 104, 109, 118, 122, 132–133, 137, 155, 191 Patton, Anna M., 77, 88 Pax River Naval Air Station, 162, 164, 175– 176 Pay Readjustment Act of 1942, 82 Pear, Patricia, 124–125, 127 Peck, Eleanor, 64, 66–67, 70, 86 pediatrics, 6, 44, 47, 68, 86, 92, 102, 104– 106, 109–110, 114–116, 120–121, 129–130, 137, 141, 158, 170, 217n42 Peebles, Martha, 40 Peebles, Martha Jane, 40, 43 Peet, Denise, 173–174, 178 Pendergast, Hannah H., 120 Penn Medical University, 16 Pennsylvania Relief Association of Philadelphia, 16 Percy Jones Hospital, 119 Pettit, Mary, 128 Phelps, Orra Almira, 101, 103 Philadelphia General Hospital, 146 Philadelphia Naval Hospital, 108 Pierce, Mila, 64, 68, 69 Pinero, Dolores, 43, 46, 56 Planned Parenthood Association, 56 Plattsburg Air Force Base, 141 Plattsburg Barracks, 48 Port of Embarkation Laboratory, 52 Potter, Bonnie B., 198 Presbyterian General Hospital of Chicago, 3 Presbyterian Hospital, 53, 130 Preston, Ann, 11, 200

252

Index

psychiatry, 2, 6, 29, 44–48, 53, 72, 74, 85, 89–94, 104–108, 111–118, 122, 134–136, 147–148, 158, 162, 169–170, 221n96 Queens Medical Center, 134 radiology, 78, 84, 89–93, 98, 104–105, 108 Ragus, Celia E., 85 Ramos, Trinidad M., 87 Raven, Clara, 75, 76, 84, 89, 92, 93, 117–118, 121, 218n52, 219n54, 226n18 Read, Jessie, 84 Red Cross, 34, 38, 57, 63–64, 68, 81, 119, 182 Rehm, Mary, 98 Rehm, Robert, 98 Reid, Rachel Harris, 15–16, 19 Reine de Las Angelas; hospital ship, 26 Resnick, Bronislava, 84 Reynolds, Belle, 207n15 Rhein–Main Air Force Base, 141 Richman, Frances Beatrice, 100 Riyadh Air Base, 182, 192 Robbins, Jane E., 27–28 Rochester General Hospital, 56 Rockefeller Institute, 53 Rogers Bill, 70 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 97 Roosevelt Hospital, 191 Rosenthal, Bernice Gertrude, 101 Rost, Alice, 77 Royal Army Medical Corps, 3, 65, 68–69, 100 Ruby, Sylvia, 101 Ruddock, Agnes Scholl, 52, 58 Rush Medical College, 53–54, 79, 110 Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center, 68 Russian Medical Corps, 63 Russo-Japanese War, 29 Sakin, Genia Ida, 84, 117–119 Sampson Air Force Base, 125 San Antonio Military Pediatric Center, 170 Sano, Machteld Elisabeth, 77, 81, 92 Saphier, Jacquest C., 98 Saraniero, Gioconda Rita, 101, 104, 137– 140, 142 Schick General Hospital, 87

Schofield Barracks, 147 Schweitzer, Dina, 190 Seal, John R., 139–141 Selective Training and Service Act, 64 Seno, Elvira, 84 7310th Medical Squadron, 141 sexual harassment, 190–198 Shedrovitch, Belle, 84 Sheller, Mona, 122 She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story (Cornum), 183 Shirlock, Margaret Elva, 77, 94 Slack, Louise Wetherill, 101 Sloan-Kettering Hospital, 191 Smith, Edith Stir, 40 Smith, Florence Stir, 41–42 Southgate, Jessie, 40, 42 Spanish-American War, 8–9; creating nursing opportunities and, 2; medical statistics for, 21; Personal Data (PD) cards, 10; physician selection process and, 23; sex-role expectations and, 200; typhoid and, 25, 31; women physicians (list of), 24 Spanish influenza, deaths from, 49 Sparkman Johnson Act of 1943, 97 Sparkman-Johnson Bill, 3, 66, 83, 118 St. Albans Naval Hospital, 124, 137 Stanford University Medical School, 49, 190 statistics; accpeting women interns after World War I, 58; dismissal rate for women physicians and, 113; rise in proportion of women physicians, 152; specialties of women physicians and, 105; survey of women doctors interested in wartime service, 38; women doctors and (AMA), 61 St. Barnabus Hospital, 134 Stebbins, Margaret, 109 Steinheimer, Mary, 129–130, 142 St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, 48 Stephens, Josephine, 64, 68–69, 88 Sternberg, George M., 2, 21 Sternberg Hospital, 27 Sternberg, William, 98 Stimson, Barbara, 63–66, 101 Stimson, Julia, 32–33, 63

Index Stir, Edith Florence, 41 St. Johns Hospital, 134 St. Joseph Hospital, 135 St. Lawrence Hospital, 136 St. Luke’s Hospital, 73 St. Thomas Hospital, 135 Stone, Elizabeth Alice, 101, 104 Strike, Tactical Test, and Evaluation Squadron, 162 sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), 93 Sullivan, Carolyn, 183 Sunni Triangle, 190 Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, 188 Syracuse University Medical School, 15, 129 Tasker, Sybil, 171, 185–186, 195, 203 Taylor, Gwendolyn E., 91 Thelander, Hulda E., 97, 98, 102, 103, 114– 115, 201, 223n15, 224n27 3rd Field Hospital, 152 Thomas, George H., 18 Thomas, Grace Fern, 85 Thomas, Mary Frame Myers, 9, 11, 14–16, 20, 23 Thomas, Nicole, 196, 202 Thomas, Owen, 15 Thompson, Mary Harris, 12 344th Army Reserve Unit, 145 Tilden, Mary W., 120 Tilton General Hospital, 86 Tjomsland, Anne, 38–39 Tokyo Army Hospital, 127 Toland, Irene, 23, 26, 31, 200 Townsend, Eleanor Winthrop, 109 Travis Air Force Base, 158, 178 Travis City State Hospital, 108, 136 Triboro Hospital, 134 Tripler Army Hospital, 129 Tripler Army Medical Center, 147 Tripler General Hospital, 117–118 Tri-Service Military Blood Program Agency, 149 Truman, Harry, 122 Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), 107 Tufts Medical School, 78, 109 Tunnicliff, Ruth, 53, 58

253

279th Station Hospital, 119 229th Aviation Brigade, 183 Underground Railroad, 14 Underwood, Paula, 174, 176, 179, 184, 190, 192, 197, 203 UNICEF, 188 Uniformed Services University, 173 Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences (USUHS), 5–6, 152, 155, 157–158, 162, 171, 173, 177–178, 197 urology, 132, 151, 163 U.S. Agency for International Development, 151 USAID’s Vietnam Medical School Project, 151 U.S. Army Medical Corps, 65, 72, 131, 136, 150, 156, 166, 170, 176 U.S. Hospital Corps, 16 U.S. Military Academy, 170 USS Comfort, 184 USS Consolation, 110, 123–124 USS Hunley, 164 USS Northern Pacific, emergency call from, 52 USS Prairie, 164 USS Wright, 123 USS Yosemite AD-19, 163–164 Valley Forge Army Hospital, 134–135 Valley Forge General Hospital, 74, 117–118, 136 Vanderbilt Medical School, 84 Van Hoosen, Bertha, 7 Venereal Disease Control Office, 94 Veterans Administration, 94 Veterans Administration Facilities (VAF), 85 Vietnam Medical School Project, 151 Vietnam War; creation of All-Volunteer Force, 202; drafting of women physicians, 116; recruiting physicians and, 142; Tet offensive and, 147 Vignipiano, Andre, 138 Volunteer Medical Services Corps, 37 Wakeman General Hospital, 87 Walker, Barbara, 179, 181

254

Index

Walker, Marie Winchell, 47 Walker, Mary Edwards, 14–19, 29–30, 206n9, 208n2, 209n37; Civil War doctor, 2; Medal of Honor and, 9; signing MD after her name, 10 Walker, Mary Eloise, 9–10, 23, 26 Walter Reed Army Hospital, 94, 122, 123, 127, 130, 133 Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 68–69 Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 131, 156, 159–160, 165, 174 Walters, Bernice Gertrude Rosenthal, 105, 123–124 Walters, Herbert, 123 Walters, Mary J., 75, 90 War Emergency Dispensary, 51 War Industries Board, 55 Washington, George, 1 Washington Post; Isabelle Gray article and, 42 Washington Star; Saraniero article and, 138 Washington Times; Mariano article, 168 Weber, Laura E., 98 Wenner, Pauline Kathryn, 101 Wesley Hospital, 42 West, Sterling, 193 While, Priscilla, 80 “Why Do Brilliant Women Run Into So Much Resentment?,” Crane article, 114– 115 Wilford Hall, 193 William Beaumont Hospital, 130 Williams, Richard, 183 Willoughby, Frances Lois, 106–108, 120, 136–137, 142 Winslow, Caroline Brown, 12 Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia, 11 Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 8, 11, 76–78, 84–85, 91, 93–94, 100–101, 103, 111, 127–128, 130, 137, 143, 146, 150, 200, 210n61, 216n15, 217n41 Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), 3, 97, 106, 120– 121, 123, 136–137 women physicians; accommodating pregnancy, 174–179; admission quotas and, 75, 113, 150, 152; being fired to make

room for male doctors, 112–113; careers and family accommodations, 168–174; child care and family-related problems, 6, 54, 70, 82, 174, 202–203; Civil War (list of), 12–13; dealing with deployment and, 179–190; duty assignments and, 83–90; first assignments and, 160–165; gender discrimination and, 8, 15, 19, 30, 55, 58– 61, 91, 135, 142–145, 148, 151–154, 159, 169; general officers and, 198–199; military mentors and, 165–167; nineteenth century demographics of, 10; Orthodox medical schools and, 8; pioneer women doctors in 1940s, 63–70; selecting a specialty, 156–159; sexual harassment and, 190–198; surgery as “man’s field” and, 105; surgery as specialty and, 159–160; utilization of between WWII and Korean War, 117–121 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, 4, 97, 108, 119, 120, 123, 137 Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), 65, 70–74, 79, 84, 97, 117–118 Women’s Army Corps (WACs), 3, 66, 68– 71, 76, 79, 82–89, 93–94, 110, 128–129, 132, 201 Women’s Central Relief Association (WCRA), 11 Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 20 Women’s Equity Action League, 116 Women’s Medical Association, 133 Women’s Medical Specialist Corps, 117 Women’s Naval Reserve, 4 Woo, Theresa T., 77, 91, 121, 219n59 World Health Organization, 107, 188 World War I; anesthesia and, 58; contract surgeons (list of), 44–45; need for women physicians and, 2; overview of contract surgeons, 34–36; physician anesthetists and, 43; psychiatry and, 29, 47 World War II; anesthesia and, 38; doctors from Johns Hopkins and, 78; duty assignments in the army and, 83–89; experiences of women physicians and, 70–74; internship hospitals and women applicants, 59–60; medical officers and,

Index 72–83; relegating women physicians to contract status, 3; women army doctors from WMCP, 77; women doctors in specialty areas and, 89–93 Wright- Patterson Air Force Base, 141, 158, 170, 193–194 Wyckoff, Cornelia, 92 X-rays, 53, 91, 92, 93, 99, 104, 105, 108

255

Yerkes, Sandra, 155, 157–158, 161, 184–185 Yu, Poe-Eng, 73–74, 77, 88, 91, 117–118, 217n36, 218n46, 220n77 Zajtchuk, Joan Tracz, 149–152, 159, 165–166, Zajtchuk, Russ, 149–150 Zakrzewska, Marie, 11–12