Antonia Novello

Antonia Novello was born August 23, 1944 in Puerto Rico. She suffered from abnormal colon issues throughout her childhood, which made life hard for her on several occasions. She didn’t receive treatment for this condition until she was eighteen years old, but experience complications and was forced to travel to the United States to seek help at the Mayo clinic. 

 Antonia then achieved her Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of San Juan in 1970. She began working in Pediatrics and married a man named Joseph Novello. In 1979, she joined the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, and eventually became Deputy Director of the area. 

 Following this, George W. Bush named Antonia Surgeon General in 1990. She was the first woman and the first Latin American to be selected to such a position. She addressed the health problems of young adults and was pretty popular during this time. She left this position in 1993 to work in the United Nations Children Health Organization for several years. Antonia used her culture to care for those who needed it and gave them all equal attention. She has made quite a large impact on the medical world. Recently, however, Antonia has faced charges for using a state-employed driver for personal business, but plans on returning to her work.

 Info from: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/nov0bio-1

Alice Hamilton

Alice Hamilton was born February 27, 1869 in New York. She attended and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1893. She did her medical internships in hospitals located in Minneapolis and Boston. After this, she began studying at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Alice also became active in the Hull House effort with Jane Adams. She also became more interested in social happenings during this time.

 In 1910, Hamilton was appointed to investigate occupational diseases by the governor of Illinois and was able to prove that lead was dangerous to the health of individuals. She continued to live in the Hull House for a little over twenty-two years, and helped fight for workmen’s compensation and other rights concerning women during her time there. She was even included in the group of women that was referred to as “hysterical pacifists” by Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1919, Alice Hamilton became the first woman to be appointed to the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and did studies on pollution for the government and United Nations during this period as well. Her efforts caused changes in the medical field and are appreciated by those women it has impacted/or will impact because of her work at the Hull House as well.

 Info from: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhamiltonA.htm

Helen Rodriguez-Trias

Dr. Rodriguez-Trias wanted to be a physician because medicine “combined the things I loved the most science, and people. I understood that medicine would give me more direct and independent ways to contribute to society, not through organizations or abstract studies, but acting directly on the individual.” 

 Dr. Rodriguez-Trias obtained her medical degree in 1960. During her residency, she established the first center for the care of newborn babies in Puerto Rico. Under her direction, the hospital’s death rate for newborns decreased 50 percent within three years. When she returned to New York in 1970, Dr. Rodriguez-Trias decided to work in community medicine. At Lincoln Hospital, which serves a largely Puerto Rican section of the South Bronx, she headed the department of pediatrics. She lobbied to give all workers a voice in administrative and patient-care issues. She also tried to raise awareness of cultural issues in the Puerto Rican community amongst health care workers at the hospital.  

Throughout the 1970s she was an active member of the women’s health movement. After attending a conference on abortion at Barnard College in 1970, she focused on reproductive rights. Rodriguez-Trias joined the effort to stop sterilization abuse. Poor women, women of color, and women with physical disabilities were far more likely to be sterilized than white, middle-class women. Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse. She testified before the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for passage of federal sterilization guidelines in 1979. The guidelines, which she helped draft, require a woman’s written consent to sterilization, offered in a language they can understand, and set a waiting period between consent and the sterilization procedure. Also, in the 1980s, she served as a medical director of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute, where she worked on behalf of women with HIV. In the 1990s, she focused on reproductive health as co-director of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health, which was a nonprofit research and advocacy group dedicated to improving women’s well-being worldwide. Rodriguez-Trias was a founding member of both the Women’s Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus of the American Public Health Association and the first Latina to serve as president.

Info from: http://nwhn.org/helenrt;
http://www.workers.org/ww/2002/helen0117.php

Virginia Apgar

Virginia was inspired by her father’s scientific hobbies and her eldest brother’s early death from tuberculosis, and another brother’s chronic childhood illness. After graduating from high school she attended Mt. Holyoke College. In 1929 she graduated with a major in zoology. 1929 Apgar entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. She graduated fourth in her class in 1933. Dr. Alan Whipple discouraged Apagr from continuing her career because other women he had trained in the surgical field failed to establish successful careers. Because anesthesiology was not recognized as a specialty until the mid-1940s, Apgar struggled to find a training program. Despite this Apgar continued with her career in surgical residency. She trained with Dr. Ralph Waters for six months at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1938, Dr. Apgar returned to Columbia University as the director of the division of anesthesia and as an attending anesthetist. She had trouble recruiting physicians to work for her, because they didn’t accept anesthesiologists as equals. In 1949, when anesthesia research became an academic department, Dr. Apgar was appointed the first woman full professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. 

 She began to studying obstetrical anesthesia, which are the effects of anesthesia given to a mother during labor on her newborn baby. She made her greatest contribution to the field with the Apgar Score. This was the first standardized method for evaluating the newborn’s transition to life outside the womb. There are five points-heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, reflex response, and color-are observed and given 0,1 or2 points. The points are then totaled for the baby’s score. The score was presented in 1952 at a scientific meeting and published in 1953. Eventually, the one- and five-minute Apgar Score became the standard procedure used for newborns. In 1959, while on leave, Apgar earned a master’s degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins University. She decided not to return to academic medicine, she devoted herself to the prevention of birth defects through public education and fund-raising for research. She became the director of the division of congenital defects at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes). 

Info from: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blapgar.htm;
http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/CP/