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Mendenhall, Dorothy Reed (1874-1964)
A lecturer and instructor at UW in child and maternal health from 1916 to 1945, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall had a distinguished medical background. She completed her undergraduate studies at Smith College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning her ML from Smith College in 1895. She then received an MD from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1900. In 1901-02 she was the first woman to win a fellowship from Johns Hopkins. And in 1902, she identified the cell nucleus that characterizes Hodgkin's disease (now called the Reed-Sternberg cell nucleus), demonstrating the identity of the disease as separate from tuberculosis. But as a woman in medicine, Mendenhall faced much gender bias. Her family did not support her decision to attend medical school; some relatives even referred to her as having gone South for the winter rather than reveal that she was attending Johns Hopkins. Mendenhall finished fourth in her class, and another woman finished second. These rankings would normally have meant a residence in medicine for both, but they were told that it would be embarrassing to have two women as medical interns. Mendenhall insisted, and was finally given the residence. Mendenhall's first love was pathology, but she soon realized that her chances for advancement in that field were limited. In June 1902, she became a resident at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, and from 1903 to 1906 she was a resident at Babies Hospital in New York. In 1906 she married Charles Elwood Mendenhall and came with him to Madison after he was appointed to the physics department. During the second decade of the century she once again took up work in the field. She worked as a physician in Madison for ten years and established the Madison Child Health centers, a series of free clinics for children. Beginning in 1913, she gave lectures on pre-natal care for UW Extension, she wrote several extension pamphlets, including "What to Feed the Children," and she developed the curriculum for correspondence courses in child welfare. During the First World War, when her husband was called to Washington for war duty, Mendenhall worked with the Children's Bureau in Washington, during which time she wrote the widely circulated publication "Milk, the Indispensable Food." She also published articles in journals such as the Johns Hopkins Hospital Report and the American Journal of Medical Science. In a paper published in 1929, she advocated greater reliance on midwifery based on studies she had made of Danish childbirth practices. Mendenhall continued her work until her husband's illness forced her to resign. In 1945, the UW made her emeritus lecturer in home economics. |
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