175 Years, 175 Stories: Part 6
FIRSTS
90
When neurosurgery became her world
“I made it to Minnesota for residency, and before I knew it, I was a neurosurgeon. I had achieved my dream. And that’s all it was to me, because being the ‘first’ anything was never my goal. It wasn’t until I started talking to people in the community that I understood that milestone and why it was more important than I realized,” says Alexa Canady (M.D. 1975), who was the first Black woman to become a neurosurgeon in the U.S. During her career, she specialized in pediatric neurosurgery.
“Its importance was twofold. One, it was important for the children who would no longer see neurosurgery as yet another world that they couldn’t belong to. That’s the side everybody appreciates.
But there’s another side to it. For the white residents who trained under me, especially the white male residents, neurosurgery was no longer their world. It became our world.
And that was equally important in changing society’s expectations. So while being first wasn’t important to me, it was important for many others. I think that kind of impact is a big part of being ‘leaders and best.’
I’m still grateful for the start I got at Michigan. For me, it was a wonderful place. Like a thousand other little steps along the way, pursuing that scholarship changed the course of my life. I’ve been happy to give back where I can because I know Michigan is a good place, and I know that money matters. I don’t have big money, but I give what I can to support things like debate, the [Michigan] Daily, and minority scholarship programs.
Much of who we are depends on who we believe we are. But much also depends on how the world sees us. Places like Michigan help us see our own potential and then fulfill it.
They also help us show the world what we’re capable of, and they help us reshape the restraints that society places on us. Before I came through Michigan, neurosurgery was a white man’s world. A scholarship helped me find my passion and set me on the path to changing that, not just for myself, but for the people who followed in my footsteps.”
Source: “What it meant to me” Leaders & Best, February 2020
Although great breakthroughs can be done alone in a laboratory, in general you need partnerships with community organizations, the populations most affected, and industry.
91
James W. Curran (M.D. 1970, Residency 1971), former dean of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Starting in 1981, Curran led the task force on HIV/AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was one of the first scientists to recognize the infectiousness of HIV/AIDS. In the first year of the task force, Curran made dozens of trips to New York City — then the epicenter of the crisis.
Source: “Celebrating a Lifetime of Service to Public Health,” Rollins Magazine, Fall 2021; Oral history interview with James W. Curran, NIH
FIRSTS
92
Materia medica and therapeutics
Before pharmacology, instruction in the use of medicine was taught in a class called Materia Medica and Therapeutics. It was a part-time gig, usually undertaken by a clinician in another field. But that all changed in 1891, when John Jacob Abel, M.D., who was trained in scientific pharmacology, was appointed to replace the ophthalmologist who held the position previously. Abel only served until 1893, but in that short time, he instituted the instructional change from materia medica to pharmacology, essentially creating the first Department of Pharmacology in the U.S. The concept quickly spread to other medical schools across the country.
Source: 100 Years of Michigan Pharmacology (U-M, 1991)
Museum of Materia Medica, c. 1893
Photo credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
FIRSTS
92
Materia medica and therapeutics
Before pharmacology, instruction in the use of medicine was taught in a class called Materia Medica and Therapeutics. It was a part-time gig, usually undertaken by a clinician in another field. But that all changed in 1891, when John Jacob Abel, M.D., who was trained in scientific pharmacology, was appointed to replace the ophthalmologist who held the position previously. Abel only served until 1893, but in that short time, he instituted the instructional change from materia medica to pharmacology, essentially creating the first Department of Pharmacology in the U.S. The concept quickly spread to other medical schools across the country.
Source: 100 Years of Michigan Pharmacology (U-M, 1991)
93
REMARKABLE OTOLARYNGOLOGIST
John Kemink (M.D. 1975, Residency 1981) was a nationally prominent ear specialist. Under his leadership, the neurotology program at U-M became widely known as the premier academic program of its type in the world. In 1992, he was shot to death by an angry patient he was examining in the outpatient clinic.
94
MEDICAL SCHOOL FOUNDER
Zina Pitcher, M.D., was a two-time mayor of Detroit who helped found the U-M Medical School. According to an undated letter written by Pitcher’s wife, Emily Backus Pitcher, to then U-M president, James Burrill Angell, Pitcher was responsible for selecting Ann Arbor as the site of the U-M campus.
Source: Bentley Historical Library profile
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
FIRSTS
95
National nursing leadership
Before she came to U-M in 1981, Rhetaugh Graves Dumas, Ph.D., was deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health. She was the first woman, the first African American, and the first nurse to hold that position. She also was the first African American woman dean at the University of Michigan, leading the School of Nursing until 1994 when she became vice provost for health affairs and the Lucille Cole Professor of Nursing. She was known as an advocate for nursing research and rigorous scholarship and for her commitment to under-served populations. “From infancy, I was told that when I grew up, I was going to be a nurse. Not just an ordinary nurse, mind you, but one who would be admired by people all around the country … for her contributions toward improving the welfare of others,” she told Columbia University health sciences graduates at a 2003 commencement address.
Sources: U-M Staff Memoirs and Memories, Washington Post obituary
Photo credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
96
CHILD PSYCHIATRY EXPERT
Elissa Benedek (M.D. 1960, Residency 1964, Fellowship 1965) is adjunct professor of psychiatry at U-M. She specializes in child and adolescent psychiatry and forensic psychiatry and has published several books and articles on those subjects. In 1990, Benedek became the second woman to serve as the president of the American Psychiatric Association. Benedek continues to mentor medical students, residents, and fellows at Michigan Medicine.
Source: Forensic Psychiatric Associates
97
KETAMINE FOR PAIN
In 1965, Edward F. Domino, M.D., professor of pharmacology (along with his colleague Guenter Corssen, M.D., professor of anesthesiology), published results of the first human trial using ketamine as an anesthetic. The 20 subjects had good blood pressure, respiration rate, and other vital signs. And the risk of death was significantly lower compared to other general anesthetics available at the time. The subjects of the study were people incarcerated at Jackson State Prison. The study was overseen by an ethics committee, and in 2017 Domino said, “To this day, NIH guidelines for prison research are based on what happened here.” Domino and Corssen also collaborated on the first clinical trial of ketamine. They published results in 1966 showing ketamine was a safe anesthetic in the 130 subjects undergoing surgery. Because of its short-acting pain-relieving properties, ketamine became a widely used battlefield anesthetic in the Vietnam War.
Source: Medicine at Michigan, Summer 2023
Photo Credit: Leisa Thompson
While medical students see patients, examine them, take histories and so on, they don’t really have much responsibility for them. That’s what the intern year is about; learning to take responsibility for others. My internship seemed to me the most demanding year of my life, and was complicated by the Vietnam War, a Sword of Damocles dangling over every recently graduated physician at that moment.
98
Richard Rapport (M.D. 1969) is professor emeritus of neurology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He’s written three non-fiction books on medical topics and more than 50 essays on death and dying, ethics, and more.
Source: UW Medicine Alumni Association
It was clear that as the only [historically Black medical] school west of the Rockies, it is Drew’s responsibility to take the lead in initiating meaningful legislation to improve the quality of life for the underserved on the West Coast as well as … forging a national agenda regarding medical education for the underserved.
99
Gus Gill (M.D. 1969) wrote about his meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus in 1978 to discuss health care problems of underserved communities. Gill chaired the Department of Otolaryngology at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science for 27 years. It is one of four historically Black medical schools in the U.S.
100
CONNECTIVE TISSUE DISCOVERY
C. William Castor (M.D. 1951) was a Michigan man his entire professional life. His training was interrupted by World War II where he served with the Army as an X-ray technician on a hospital ship. Castor joined the U-M faculty in 1954 and was known for arthritis care. In granting Castor emeritus status in 1996, the U-M Regents said, “His early research was some of the first to use cell culture methods to study the human synovium [connective tissues]. The application of cell culture techniques to examine the mechanisms of inflammatory activation responsible for joint destruction in arthritis was ground-breaking and has subsequently become central to almost all investigation of cellular mechanisms underlying arthritis inflammation.”
Source: University Record, Ann Arbor News obituary
Credit: Photo: Castor, © 1969 MLive Media Group/The Ann Arbor News. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
The southeast corner of the Medical Campus overlooks the Peony Garden at U-M Nichols Arboretum. Photo: Connor Titsworth, courtesy VP Communications, Regents of the University of Michigan
101
PARALYMPIC HIGH JUMPER
On Christmas Eve, 2011, Sam Grewe (M.D. 2025) at age 13, learned that the fist-size growth attacking his femur was osteosarcoma. His fight hospitalized him for two years. He elected to have his leg amputated using a rare procedure called rotationplasty, which would help him keep doing sports.
When Grewe left the hospital for the final time, he realized he wanted to become a physician. “I really got a good glimpse into what it means to be a good doctor,” he says. He wanted to help someone else through the experience. Before he came to the Medical School to make that dream a reality, he became a Paralympian, earning a gold medal in Tokyo in 2021 and making it to the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris as well.
Source: “A Paralympian medical student feels grateful for unexpected gifts,” Medicine at Michigan, Summer 2023
FIRSTS
102 & 103
Petticoat junction
In a part of St. Louis known as Scab Row, Mary Hancock McLean (M.D. 1883) and Bertha Van Hoosen (M.D. 1888) rented a room in a home where the landlady’s children used the front entrance as a toilet. This was their last resort. They’d been banished everywhere else, deemed unfit by 46 other landlords across the city who worried they’d adversely affect property values or ruin a home’s reputation. They were, after all, women in the medical field. Van Hoosen was working to pay for her medical education, and McLean was a doctor trying to set up private practice.
“In my initiation into medicine, Dr. McLean opened my eyes to the prejudice, the discrimination, the lack of confidence, and paucity of opportunities that had to be reckoned with before success could be secured,” Van Hoosen wrote years later in her memoir, Petticoat Surgeon.
McLean and Van Hoosen had met at U-M when McLean was a medical student and Van Hoosen was an undergraduate. At a time when women doctors were largely relegated to “practical help” for other women, children, and the poor, McLean became one of the first practicing female surgeons in the country. By 1893, McLean and a colleague had opened the Evening Dispensary for Women to help working women get treatment after their shifts had ended.
Van Hoosen spent most of her career as a gynecological surgeon in Chicago, including being the first woman in the world to chair an obstetrics department at a co-educational medical school when she joined Loyola University. Several years earlier, the U-M Medical School had rejected her as a professor of obstetrics and gynecology because she was a woman. She performed her last surgery at age 88 and died a year later, in 1952.
Source: “Petticoat Junction,” Medicine at Michigan, Spring 2018, “LSA Women in History: Bertha Van Hoosen”
Photo credit: Van Hoosen, U-M Bentley Historical Library
FIRSTS
102 & 103
Petticoat junction
In a part of St. Louis known as Scab Row, Mary Hancock McLean (M.D. 1883) and Bertha Van Hoosen (M.D. 1888) rented a room in a home where the landlady’s children used the front entrance as a toilet. This was their last resort. They’d been banished everywhere else, deemed unfit by 46 other landlords across the city who worried they’d adversely affect property values or ruin a home’s reputation. They were, after all, women in the medical field. Van Hoosen was working to pay for her medical education, and McLean was a doctor trying to set up private practice.
“In my initiation into medicine, Dr. McLean opened my eyes to the prejudice, the discrimination, the lack of confidence, and paucity of opportunities that had to be reckoned with before success could be secured,” Van Hoosen wrote years later in her memoir, Petticoat Surgeon.
McLean and Van Hoosen had met at U-M when McLean was a medical student and Van Hoosen was an undergraduate. At a time when women doctors were largely relegated to “practical help” for other women, children, and the poor, McLean became one of the first practicing female surgeons in the country. By 1893, McLean and a colleague had opened the Evening Dispensary for Women to help working women get treatment after their shifts had ended.
Van Hoosen spent most of her career as a gynecological surgeon in Chicago, including being the first woman in the world to chair an obstetrics department at a co-educational medical school when she joined Loyola University. Several years earlier, the U-M Medical School had rejected her as a professor of obstetrics and gynecology because she was a woman. She performed her last surgery at age 88 and died a year later, in 1952.
Source: “Petticoat Junction,” Medicine at Michigan, Spring 2018, “LSA Women in History: Bertha Van Hoosen”
Photo credit: Van Hoosen, U-M Bentley Historical Library
104
KAISER PERMANENTE LEADER
Clifford H. Keene (M.D. 1934, Residency 1936 and 1939) became a journeyman ironworker after high school and was a dues paying union member until he finished medical school at U-M. After serving as an Army surgeon in World War II, he was medical director for the Kaiser-Frazer automobile company in Willow Run, Michigan. Keene moved on to more leadership roles in the Kaiser health care system in California, building Kaiser Permanente into the largest nonprofit health care provider in the U.S. His work helped shift the country from the fee-for-service model to prepaid care in managed health plans.
Source: New York Times obituary
105
VASCULAR RESEARCH EXPERT
William W. Coon, M.D. (Residency 1956) joined the U-M Department of Surgery as an intern in 1949. His residency was interrupted while he served as chief of surgery at the U.S. Army Hospital in Germany from 1953 to 1955. Coon completed his postgraduate training in 1956 and joined the faculty as professor of surgery. His early clinical practice and research on venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and anticoagulation resulted in more than 100 publications on those topics. Towards the end of his career, he had been involved primarily in caring for patients with cancer, especially those with breast cancer and melanoma.
Source: Obituary, The University Record
My training in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Michigan [Medical School] provided a robust foundation for my tenure as FDA Chief Scientist and subsequently Principal Deputy Commissioner, the no. 2 role at FDA. It empowered me with scientific expertise and problem-solving acumen to tackle critical public health challenges and advance regulatory science.
106
Namandje Bumpus (Ph.D. 2008) is a pharmacologist who served as principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in 2024. In 2016, she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Source: Michigan Medicine Office of Development
107
Nobel Winner
Decades before he received the Nobel Prize, Stanley Cohen (Ph.D. 1948) spent his evenings collecting worms on the campus green at U-M. His thesis concerned the metabolism of earthworms, and he recalled collecting over 5,000 of them. But it was at Washington University in St. Louis where his work with Rita Levi-Montalcini earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for the isolation of nerve growth factor (NGF) and the discovery of epidermal growth factor (EGF). Their work has helped researchers better understand tumor progression as well as developmental malformations, degenerative changes in senile dementia, and delayed wound healing. NGF and EGF were the first growth-regulating signal substances discovered, and they led to further research into cancer cures.
Sources: Michigan Alum magazine; Nobel Prize committee
Representation of the epidermal growth factor protein of a mouse
108
WOMEN'S MEDICAL EDUCATION PIONEER
Mary “Minnie” A. G. Dight (M.D. 1884) was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1860. She was an accomplished musician who graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston before attending medical school. After graduation, she practiced medicine for a year before getting married, but, unhappy in her marriage, she decided to continue her medical education in Paris and Vienna. She eventually divorced her first husband and married Charles Dight, who had been a professor at the Medical School when she was a student. After seven years, she and Dight divorced. Throughout her career, she was a proponent of social reforms. She was in charge of the Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia and pioneered the establishment of a women’s medical college in New Orleans.
Note: During her marriage to Charles Dight, Mary Dight was a supporter of eugenics. (See "The wrong side of history," for more on eugenics.)
Source: A Woman of the Century (Charles Wells Moulton, 1893)
FIRSTS
109
First Black graduate
Born in Virginia to a father who was enslaved, William Henry Fitzbutler (M.D. 1872) escaped to Canada with his family via the Underground Railroad. After graduating from the Medical School, Fitzbutler practiced medicine for many years in Kentucky. He helped found the Louisville National Medical College and published the African American newspaper Ohio Falls Express. He and Sophia B. Jones are the namesakes for the Fitzbutler Jones Alumni Society, an organization that Black alumni established in 1997 to provide financial support to students and faculty at the Medical School.
Source: Michigan Medicine history timeline
Photo credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
FIRSTS
109
First Black graduate
Born in Virginia to a father who was enslaved, William Henry Fitzbutler (M.D. 1872) escaped to Canada with his family via the Underground Railroad. After graduating from the Medical School, Fitzbutler practiced medicine for many years in Kentucky. He helped found the Louisville National Medical College and published the African American newspaper Ohio Falls Express. He and Sophia B. Jones (see p. XX) are the namesakes for the Fitzbutler Jones Alumni Society, an organization that Black alumni established in 1997 to provide financial support to students and faculty at the Medical School.
Source: Michigan Medicine history timeline
Photo credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
110
PATHOLOGY LEADER
A. James French, M.D. (Residency 1941), chaired the Department of Pathology from 1956 to 1980. Under his leadership, the diagnostic services of the department grew rapidly and included the consolidation of U-M’s clinical laboratories. The A. James French Society of Pathologists (now U-M Pathology Alumni Society) was established in 1987 to honor French’s lifelong commitment to teaching and guidance of residents and his leadership in the field of pathology. In 1995 the French Society helped establish the A. James French Endowed Professorship.
Sources: U-M Pathology Department; U-M Pathology Alumni Society
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
111
EMERGENCY MEDICINE PIONEER
When John G. Wiegenstein (M.D. 1960) began practicing medicine, emergency departments were not staffed by emergency medicine specialists. In fact, when Wiegenstein was hired as the nighttime emergency physician at Beyer Hospital in Ypsilanti, he was still a medical student, shocked that he’d been given so much responsibility. He also witnessed what he called a “terrible situation,” where doctors without emergency medicine training who had been assigned to staff the ED overnight would sequester themselves in the call room, afraid of not being able to meet the needs of patients. In the late 1960s, Wiegenstein advocated for an emergency medicine specialty and helped found the American College of Emergency Physicians. He was the first chair of the ACEP. The work Wiegenstein did helped emergency medicine become an officially recognized specialty in 1979.
I want to emphasize that it’s the people in the lab, most of whom are outstanding graduate students, who are so important. The research environment here [at U-M] is very good. I have outstanding colleagues and the department is very supportive.
112
Kun-Liang Guan, Ph.D., won the MacArthur “genius grant” in 1998 while he was a professor in the U-M Department of Biological Chemistry. His research has helped explain how cells regulate internal processes, such as division, and how they respond to external conditions, such as infection. He’s now a professor at Westlake University in China.
Source: U-M Kellogg Eye Center
Aldred Scott Warthin
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
113
FATHER OF CANCER GENETICS
During his lifetime, Aldred Scott Warthin (M.D. 1891, Ph.D. 1893) achieved renown as the world’s leading authority on the pathology of syphilis. He also made significant contributions to the pathology department at U-M: after taking charge of the pathology laboratory in 1896, he requested all specimens from clinics be sent to him for diagnosis, establishing a close relationship between pathology and clinical medicine. But it was a chance encounter in 1895 that set in motion the work he is best known for today. A seamstress acquaintance told him about the cancer deaths in her family, and he was so intrigued that he researched her family’s medical history and followed the family for many years. The paper he published on “family G” in 1913 was one of the first to assert that cancer in humans could be inherited. It would be decades before the scientific community accepted that fact, but the finding earned Warthin the title “father of cancer genetics.”
Note: Warthin was a proponent of eugenics. (See "The wrong side of history," for more on eugenics.)
Sources: CA, November/December 1985; Aldred Scott Warthin Papers, U-M Bentley Historical Library
If we only heard loud sounds, we would not have to take the trouble to listen carefully. You can’t expect your patients to go around with sirens on them.
114
George Dock, M.D., professor of internal medicine from 1891–1908, on the proper use of a stethoscope.
FIRSTS
115
Elevating nursing education
In 1955, Rhoda Reddig Russell became the University of Michigan’s first female academic dean when she was named to lead the School of Nursing. She was instrumental in raising the professional standards of nursing education, and under her leadership, the School of Nursing began its first master’s programs, including a Master of Science in medical-surgical nursing, the first of its kind in the U.S.
Source: U-M School of Nursing and The University Record
116
WHEN NATURE MEETS MEDICINE
While out on walks with his young sons in the 1970s, Irwin J. Goldstein, Ph.D., would collect seeds or flowers that he thought might be possible sources of lectins, the carbohydrate-binding proteins that were the focus of his groundbreaking research as a biochemistry professor at U-M. His laboratory isolated scores of these proteins and fostered their biochemical and biomedical application. Goldstein’s group isolated and characterized concanavalin A — a plant lectin originally extracted from the jack bean — which led to its adoption in biomedical laboratories around the world, where it is widely used to study immune regulation and to characterize glycoproteins and other sugar-containing entities on the surface of cells. Goldstein’s half-century at U-M included 12 years as associate dean of research and graduate studies at the Medical School. The U-M Department of Biological Chemistry holds an annual glycobiology lectureship in his name.
Sources: “Obituary — Irwin J. Goldstein,” The University Record; Department of Biological Chemistry
117 & 118
Giants of human genetics
During his 39-year career in the Medical School, James V. Neel, Ph.D., established one of the first clinics to evaluate and counsel people with hereditary diseases, as well as the first academic department of human genetics in the country. He discovered the gene that causes sickle cell anemia and examined the genetic consequences of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neel also studied the genetic characteristics of isolated tribes in the Amazon rainforest. In 1974, he was awarded the National Medal of Science “for pioneering achievements in creating the science of human genetics and discovering the genetic basis of several human diseases.”
“Dr. Neel was the father of the field of human genetics. He was the first to introduce a long list of bedrock principles, which we now take for granted,” says Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and of the National Institutes of Health. Collins was in the East Room with President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on June 26, 2000, when they announced the completion of the mapping of the entire human genome.
During his time at U-M, Collins and his research team, in collaboration with researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, isolated the gene for cystic fibrosis. They had identified a faulty protein the gene produced that they believed was responsible for the development of the disease. This discovery paved the way for the research field known today as gene therapy.
Sources: The University Record “Long line of genetics,” “A disease’s gene is discovered,” the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation, Remarks by President Clinton & members of the Human Genome Project
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?
Francis S. Collins on the Human Genome Project
In pediatric orthopaedic surgery you establish relationships that are long term. After surgery is done, it’s only really the beginning. And I was in practice for about 20 years in Boston and still hear from some of our patients. I got a graduation announcement from a boy who graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy who had a club foot. I got a call from a grandfather whose grandson we treated in the neonatal ICU for a club foot who won a medal in skiing. So this kind of thing keeps you going.
119
Clifford Craig (M.D. 1969) is associate professor emeritus of orthopaedic surgery in the U-M Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Source: University of Michigan Health
Philip Zazove, M.D., is pictured with Ellie Barron, a patient of his who is now a recent graduate of Michigan State University.
120 & 121
KNOWING THE PATIENT'S LANGUAGE
Making sure a patient understands what you’re telling them is a key priority for doctors. But for patients who use American Sign Language, sometimes the message is lost in translation. At the U-M Deaf Health Clinic, two physicians have improved patient experiences by using ASL. Philip Zazove, M.D., professor emeritus of family medicine, worked at the clinic before his retirement in 2022, and Michael McKee, M.D., professor of family medicine, is director of the clinic. Both physicians are deaf and understand the importance of being able to communicate directly with a health care provider. They also understand the barriers that many patients who are deaf or hard of hearing face in accessing good care. “I think Mike and I are the only two physicians in Michigan who sign,” Zazove said in 2019. “People come to us from all over the state.”
Source: Medicine at Michigan, Winter 2019
Credit: Courtesy of the Detroit Jewish News
TRANSFORMATIVE PHILANTHROPY
Harry Towsley talks with Willie Effinger Jr. age 4 — The UM Hospital Star, July 1971
122
Champion of continuing medical education
Harry A. Towsley (M.D. 1931, Residency 1934) was professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases and of postgraduate medicine at the Medical School. He led the effort to help practicing physicians across Michigan update their knowledge and skills throughout their careers. He and his wife, Margaret, contributed much of the funding for the Towsley Center for Continuing Medical Education, which opened in 1969. The Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation continues to support areas within the Medical School and across the University of Michigan.
Source: “Harry Towsley had enormous impact on U, leaves many legacies,” University Record
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
HOMEOPATHIC SCHOOL The state legislature tried to pressure the Medical School to hire a professor of homeopathy in the 1860s, but they refused. The Regents were compelled to open a homeopathic school when the legislature made an appropriation contingent upon it in 1973. The school existed from 1875–1922. This photo is of the Homeopathic School Nose & Throat Clinic.
Amanda Sanford Hickey (center left) sits with Eliza Mosher (center right) and members of Hickey’s family in 1894. See #56 for more about Mosher, who also graduated from the Medical School.
FIRSTS
123
First woman graduate
Amanda Sanford (M.D. 1871) was the first woman to graduate from the Medical School. When she walked forward to receive her diploma with honors, she was heckled by men in the balcony. Her doctoral thesis on puerperal eclampsia was based on studying more than 800 cases in New England, and she likely knew more about the condition than any other scholar of the time. She was a very successful obstetrician and gynecologist in her own private practice as well as in hospitals in the U.S. and Europe.
Source: “A Dangerous Experiment”: Women at the University of Michigan, U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Photo credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
FIRSTS
Amanda Sanford Hickey (center left) sits with Eliza Mosher (center right) and members of Hickey’s family in 1894. See #56 for more about Mosher, who also graduated from the Medical School.
123
First woman graduate
Amanda Sanford (M.D. 1871) was the first woman to graduate from the Medical School. When she walked forward to receive her diploma with honors, she was heckled by men in the balcony. Her doctoral thesis on puerperal eclampsia was based on studying more than 800 cases in New England, and she likely knew more about the condition than any other scholar of the time. She was a very successful obstetrician and gynecologist in her own private practice as well as in hospitals in the U.S. and Europe.
Source: “A Dangerous Experiment”: Women at the University of Michigan, U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Photo credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
124
RADIOLOGY RESEARCHER AND TEACHER
Fred Jenner Hodges, M.D. (Residency 1954), chaired the U-M Department of Radiology for more than three decades. He researched radiological measurements of the heart in normal and diseased states, and he envisioned a treatment for cancer with radioactive material produced by a cyclotron. During his career at U-M, he taught the intricacies of radiology to 34 successive classes of medical students. After his death in 1977, a group of friends, colleagues, and former students created the Fred Jenner Hodges Professorship in Radiology.
Source: U-M Department of Radiology
125
BLACK REPRESENTATION IN MEDICINE
James Curtis (M.D. 1946) entered the Medical School in 1943 as the only Black student in his class. He went on to pursue specialty training in psychiatry at a time when less than 100 African American physicians in the U.S. had trained for a specialty. Later, he wrote several books on the experiences of Black Americans in medical training and efforts to increase the training of physicians of color. In one, he wrote that his was the last class in which U-M’s Black medical students had to travel out of state to do their clinical clerkships in obstetrics and gynecology because they could not practice at the whites-only hospital in Detroit where U-M’s clerkship was held at the time.