Dr. Martha May Eliot, Courageous Pioneer

During her SLCH Assistant Pediatric Residency, 1919-1920

The WUSM Academic Women's Network (AWN) picks one woman a year to receive the Pioneer Woman Award.

In recent years, we have made efforts to bestow this Award on the living, for the sheer joy of hearing perspective inspiring stories from those who have lived and/or survived through them. You can check out the list of illustrious awardees here: http://wuawn.org/awards/pioneering-women/

This year, however, we picked Martha M. Eliot, a woman so illustrious that she has been called "the first lady of public health"and that there is a Martha Eliot Health Center affiliated with Boston Children's Hospital. So illustrious and yet...like many of my peers, I knew very little about her.

Thanks to the wonderful Marion Hunt, a bona fide expert on Martha Eliot and many other historical figures in the world of medicine, I was able to read up enough on our Awardee to be more or less able to say a few words about her when we hand out our yearly Awards this coming Tuesday. But, as I told Marion, I will only have a couple minutes...hardly enough for a proper homage to the extraordinary Dr. Eliot.

Hence today's blog.

Martha M. Eliot was born in 1891, a mere thirty-two years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species; to say that most still held rigid entrenched views about the order of things including the role of women in the world is a massive understatement. She was 19 and at Radcliffe College when GK Chesterton published "What's Wrong with the World" in which he argues against women's domestic emancipation with eloquent if misguided pathos: "There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not "give her best," but gives her all."

For the record, I am not an historian and there are likely more vituperous writings contemporary to the one above. But I cite what I know: I've read Chesterton who generally amuses and entertains me and tends to be very quotable.

The ghosts of past academic olympi abound in Martha's professional trajectory: Harvard (did not accept women to medical school till 1945 but she applied any way to make a point and... now there is building in her name), Hopkins (accepted her to medical school but afterwards would not give her a residency spot), Washington University (gave her a residency slot-yeah us-but then prevaricated about keeping her and from what I can tell, she took no prisoners, so she left for Yale.) At Yale she enjoyed the extraordinary successive mentorship and support of Drs. Edward Park and Grover Powers, two men who could see clearly in advance of their times.

I love that because this year we are also inaugurating a NEW award, the Pillar of Support Award and Park and Powers would have been worthy recipients.

Dr. Eliot is known for many things: her groundbreaking epidemiological research on rickets, her persistent and brave efforts to champion the rights of children to be considered within the contexts of environments that affect them more particularly. All this has been described elsewhere: (e.g., https://becker.wustl.edu/about/news/ever-widening-sphere-dr-martha-eliot and http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2bx1.htm). I will not forget those accomplishments now that I know them.

However, what I will most remember is that this is a woman who had the courage of: getting up again and again after being rejected; taking second place when she deserved first; being candid when she got an Award named after the man who refused her a residency spot at Hopkins; being relatively upfront about her relationship with the love of her life (the also illustrious Dr. Ethel Dunham); being born in wealth (the grand-daughter of William Greenleaf Eliot) and dedicating herself to others and especially children, i.e., those who could not speak for themselves; working till she was 80.

Here is to Dr. Martha Eliot, pioneer. May her courage be contagious.

Till Later, Anne

Reference: "Extraordinarily Interesting and Happy Years": Martha M. Eliot and Pediatrics at Yale, 1921-1935. Hunt, M. 1996. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 68:159-170.