Leila Denmark

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Leila Alice Daughtry-Denmark (born February 1, 1898 in Portal , Georgia ; † April 1, 2012 in Athens , Georgia) was an American medical doctor who worked as a pediatrician for almost 75 years .

Life

Leila Denmark was the oldest of twelve children by Ellerbee Daughtrys and his wife Alice Cornelia Daughtry, née Hendricks. The family was wealthy, her father was the mayor of her native city and owned a large farm on which Leila grew up.

After graduating from Tift College in Forsyth in 1922 with a Bachelor of Arts degree , she accepted a teaching post and taught at Acworth for two years . However, this work failed to satisfy them sufficiently. Since her boyfriend John Eustace Denmark, a banker she had known since childhood and later married, was sent to Java on behalf of the US State Department , she enrolled at the Medical College in Augusta . She was the only woman among 53 students, and when she received her doctorate in 1928 she was only the third woman to have earned a doctorate in that college.

On June 11, 1928, just three days later, she married her longtime boyfriend. The two went to Atlanta together , where she first worked at Grady Hospital, but moved to the newly opened Egleston Hospital for Children three months later. There Denmark became the first medical assistant. Their daughter Mary Alice Denmark Hutcherson, who remained the couple's only child, was born in 1930. A year later, Denmark opened its own practice in the Virginia-Highlands district.

Her medical research focused on whooping cough and was spurred on by the outbreak of a devastating 75-case epidemic in 1932 . She injected the blood serum that she had obtained from an adult patient, her own daughter, who had also infected the pathogen, and thereby helped her to recover. She sent the results to Eli Lilly and Company , who used them to develop a vaccine against Bordetella pertussis . For her achievements in this area she received the Fisher Award in 1935, her research documents were among others. a. in the American Journal of Diseases of Children - Studies in Whooping Cough: Diagnosis and Immunization (1936) and Whooping Cough Vaccine (1942) - and published twice in the Journal of the American Medical Association between 1932 and 1938 .

Denmark went to Sandy Springs in 1945 and practiced as a pediatrician there for forty years until she retired to an old farmhouse in Alpharetta at the age of 87 . She set up a new practice near her home and examined around 15 to 25 patients every day until 2002; only then did she have to stop because of poor eyesight. Her husband had died in 1990 at the age of 91.

Denmark has received several awards for her dedicated and professional work, including in 1953 as Atlanta's "Woman of the Year", in 1998 with the "Health-Care Heroes Award" and in 2000 with an honorary doctorate in natural sciences from Emory University . She also volunteered for a charitable children's clinic of the Presbyterian Church for 56 years from the 1930s . Denmark was also among the first medical specialists to take a stand against smoking in the vicinity of children and to publicly discourage pregnant women from consuming alcohol , tobacco , caffeine and drugs in order not to harm the unborn child. In 1971 she published the book Every Child Should Have A Chance , in which she laid out her principles of good child-rearing. It has seen numerous reprints to this day.

Leila Denmark died at the age of 114 years and 60 days.

Fonts

  • Every Child Should Have A Chance . Vantage Press, New York 1971, OCLC 1390428 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leila Denmark, beloved doctor, dies at 114 , onlineathens.com
personal data
SURNAME Denmark, Leila
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Denmark, Leila Daughtry; Daughtry, Leila
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medic
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH portal
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 2012
Place of death Athens (Georgia)