Dorothy Reed Mendenhall

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall , nee Dorothy Mabel Reed (born September 22, 1874 in Columbus , Ohio , † July 31, 1964 in Chester , Connecticut ) was an American doctor.

youth

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall was the third child of the shoe manufacturer William Pratt Reed (1839-1880) and his wife Ellen Grace Kimball (1845-1911). Her siblings were William Kimball and Elizabeth Adeline. She was one of a long line of prominent members of families of the time. All four great-grandparents of the Mendenhall family, the Kimballs, Reeds, Talcotts and the Temples traced their origins back to 1630 in the New England states. They had documents that traced their ancestry back to this year and proved that they had made a contribution to the development of the new states of the future USA.

She spent Dorothy Reed Mendenhall's early childhood with her grandmother, attended art classes at Columbus Art High School and, in the late 1880s, took private lessons from Anna Gunning. Her first officially recognized education began in 1891 when she attended Smith College , from which she graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Law degree. During her final year of college, her family suffered financial problems, and Dorothy took on an increasingly important role in family funding.

Scientific work

For financial reasons, she decided to attend the newly opened Johns Hopkins University Medical School. This was one of the first to accept female candidates. Here she started a medical career. Between 1895 and 1896 she spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to complete her education , before moving to Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1896. From the summer of 1898 they worked for the US Naval Hospital , where they looked after war wounded from the Spanish-American War in the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital . Dorothy Mabel graduated fourth in her class and then worked at the Johns Hopkins Hospital under Dr. William Osler .

The following year she joined William Henry Welch as a pathologist . During this time she gave lectures on bacteriology , supervised autopsies and did research in the field of Hodgkin's disease . In doing so, she recognized the first signs of the disease and her results showed that this disease was a form of tuberculosis . Her work was published in 1902 and gained international recognition. The affected cell type was named after its Reed cell or Sternberg- Reed or Reed-Sternberg cell.

During her time at Johns Hopkins Hospital , she had a very tumultuous relationship with pathologist Dr. William MacCallum, which she broke off after a while. This development seems to have been the trigger that she moved to the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and became the first pediatrician at Babies Hospital in New York .

Dorothy's sister Elizabeth died in January 1903 and she also took on the financial support of their children William, Dorothy, and Henry Furbish, who were nine, seven, and six years old.

Family life

On February 14, 1906, she married in Talcottville, New York, the doctorate scientist Professor Charles Elwood Mendenhall (1872-1935), son of the recognized physicist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall and his wife Susan Allen Marple. His ancestors were Quakers from Pennsylvania and Founding Fathers from Delaware. Its roots can also be traced back to the founding time of colonial New York. After her honeymoon in Europe, Charles continued to work as a physicist at the University of Wisconsin , while Dorothy discontinued her work due to her pregnancy.

Their first child, Margaret, was born on February 19, 1907, but died shortly after birth. Dorothy continued to suffer from psychological damage for a long time. Their second child Richard survived the birth but died at the age of two when he fell from the roof of the family home in November 1910. However, the death of her two children and the unexpected demise of her mother made Dorothy partially depressed .

Two other children, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall II (* 1910) and John Talcott Mendenhall (* 1913), grew up healthy. Thomas later studied at Harvard , John at Yale University .

Second career

In 1914 she continued the second step in her career. She received a position as a lecturer in the Home Economics department at the University of Wisconsin. Triggered by the fate she had suffered herself, she dedicated her work to the health of young mothers and newborns. The focus was on prenatal care, but the nutrition of the newborns was also the focus of her work. Her classes were soon having an impact, and Madison became the US city with the lowest infant mortality rates at the time. In recognition of her work, she received appointments from the University of Chicago and the Utah State Agricultural College .

During the Second World War Dorothy's husband worked for the US government in Washington, Dorothy herself was recruited by the US Childrens Bureau . From 1917 to 1936 she carried out research on war orphans in Belgium and France. There were also studies on the diet of children in England.

In 1926 she visited Denmark and intended to compare the infant mortality in Denmark with that in the USA. Inspired by the results, she became an advocate of childbirth without the need for medical intervention.

When Dorothy's husband died in August 1935, she became lonely and repeatedly accused her children of neglecting them. However, Thomas and John took her into their family, while Dorothy continued to work, but at the same time retained her dominance in the family, in some cases even expanded it.

Her health deteriorated in the early 1960s. Despite numerous hospital stays, she remained independent until 1963.

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall died of heart disease on July 31, 1964 in Chester, Connecticut .

literature

• Dorothy Mabel [Reed] Mendenhall, Elva Lucile Bascom (Eds.): Child Welfare: Selected List of Books and Pamphlets . American medical association, 1918.

Web links

• Biography in English