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After high school, I attended Oberlin College. I lived at home, but ate dinners in the dormitory for sociability. I took a Chemistry-Pre-Med major (watered-down chemistry) and sang in the Musical Union. After sophomore year, three of us from chemistry class got some medical experience as technicians in the clinical labs at Elyria Memorial Hospital until we graduated. Interestingly, the 3 of us spent some time together again at the University of Chicago in the 60's.
Medical School Days
After graduating from Oberlin College (1956), I went to Harvard Medical School. I had wanted to be a doctor since I was a little girl, maybe in part because I had an aunt who was a missionary doctor (whom my family talked about but I never met) in the Congo. Other reasons elude me. When I arrived at the medical school in the Fall of 1956, I found that I was one of 5 women in a class of 150. We weren't allowed to live in the men's dormitory that was close to school, but fortunately 4 of us roomed together on the top floor of a rooming house in Brookline, about a one-mile walk from the school. Being together helped us to adjust to the new life. In addition to being in a minority group, the customs of a large number of our classmates from Eastern men's schools were alien to a coed from Oberlin. The dress code was jackets and button-down shirts, and of course, they dated women from Eastern girls' schools on weekends. They had peculiar views about studying. It was something one did in secret and didn't own up to, but yet they knew what they were supposed to know and more and would slip it into dinner conversation. Again, I adjusted.
After my course in pathology during the second year, I decided that pathology was for me. I then applied for a summer job as an assistant in the morgue of one of the medical school hospitals but was told that I couldn't have the job because I was a woman. I never forgot that slight when I subsequently hired several very competent women to be morgue assistants.
We girls were accepted by our classmates and most of the professors, but had to put up with sexist jokes during lectures. In an anatomy lecture on the muscles of the back, we were shown a frontal picture of Rita Hayworth entitled "Rita's Back," which does get points for cleverness, but also illustrates the humor used in medical school teaching. I have vivid memories of the early '70's at the University of Chicago when indignant women students protested these jokes. They completely disappeared from then on, throughout the country, I think.
One of the couples that lived on the first floor of our rooming house was a medical student, and her husband was a physicist. During my junior year he fixed me up with one of his physics friends, and we were married just before my senior year.
After graduation, we moved to Seattle where I began to learn about anatomic pathology--diagnosing both surgical and autopsy specimens. We were in the fog of Seattle for some months before I realized that the design of the campus was centered around Mount Ranier, which appeared in the far distance down beyond a central mall with a pool and fountain.
Chicago Days
After 2 years, we moved to Chicago (Bob's choice) where I took a residency position at the University of Chicago. We lived in Hyde Park in a row of new townhouses near the campus and stayed there for a total of 16 years. My husband taught physics at Illinois Institute of Technology. Despite humid summers and frigid winters when we brought the car battery inside (no garage), it was a good place to find help for child care, and it had good schools (run by the university) and a liberal atmosphere. City politics were interesting: the precinct captain knew everyone, and always told us to pull a single lever for all of the Daley political candidates. Splitting a ballet would spoil it, she claimed. The intellectual environment was very stimulating at the University, and the medical students were hard working and bright.
After my training was complete, I was told by the Chair to become a pulmonary pathologist: specialization was important and the department needed one. So I duly attended all the lectures of the master visiting pulmonary pathologist (Averill Liebow) and tried to go from there. At about the same time, asbestos was getting a bad rap, and I began work on asbestos-related diseases by measuring the burden of asbestos in people's lungs. So, from then on I became interested in occupational diseases, as well as emphysema, asthma, and vascular diseases of the lung. It was a pretty mysterious organ at that time because radiology and lung biopsy were not nearly so important in diagnosis as they have now become. We had to learn about disease mainly by studying postmortem specimens. I spent a lot of time in the morgue. (It is the one shown briefly in "The Fugitive.")
As to discrimination against females in academic medicine, I pretty much ignored it, but it was always there. The one time it clearly surfaced was the day in the 70's that the department chairman came to my office (not a usual place to discuss such matters), shut the doors and said that the National Institutes of Health had directed him to give me a larger salary. He never indicated that I deserved it though. I clearly remember that day, but I have no idea how much the raise was.
San Francisco Days
Because I needed laboratory equipment not available at Chicago, I (my choice, this time) took a job at the University of California at San Francisco in 1978. California was another culture shock equaling the East Coast, but different. I won't go into details. The no-season climate was easy to adjust to. Our niche averages temperatures in the 60's all year round and has lots of fog, but we're on bedrock. My husband did physics at Berkeley and then at Stanford.
Our laboratory was analyzing the asbestos fiber burden of lungs of asbestos workers and relating the burden to disease. We worked closely with the coroner's office in a shipyard area nearby. That work interested the local lawyers also, and I had lots of depositions taken and appeared in court several times.
At the same time I was director of the autopsy service and co-director of the year-round medical student pathology course. By 1989, I was ready to give up that life and try another. I retired and became an Emerita Professor (thanks to Mrs. Kelly). Everyone else refers to me as Emeritus.
For the next 11 years I restricted my pathology practice to pulmonary pathology and taught pulmonologists about pathology. That was a rewarding time for me. I produced a teaching CD and a web site devoted to pulmonary diseases. Finally, in 2001 I stopped my consultations and teaching and now stay home most of the time. In general, I loved the work, mainly the problem-solving nature of it.
Travel
After my first trip to Europe biking and youth hosteling with my two brothers in the summer of 1951, I always had an urge to travel. My husband attended meetings in various places, and I usually accompanied him. We arranged sabbatical years together in Europe. Besides the usual tourist spots in Europe, we toured the Soviet Union in 1989 (Bob's meeting was in Novosibirsk in Siberia, and we visited Moscow, Leningrad, and several Central Asian cities). We also visited China and Japan, and did the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan. We spent 7 months in Trieste, Italy, in 1967 (I had my second child there, and we had side trips to Yugoslavia and prewar Lebanon). We had sabbaticals in London and Amsterdam. The nicest spots were Capri and the Costa Brava of Spain. We always took the children, and they have done a fair amount of traveling on their own. We have also traveled in the U.S. to meetings and for pleasure. When the boys were still at home (and we were young), we went on camping trips, but now we stay in more comfortable places, like the cabin we rent yearly in Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada.
Family
My parents moved to Chicago about the same time that we did, so we kept in touch. My mother kept up with her piano playing, and my father still did some watch repair. My mother passed away in 1989 and my father in 1995. My brother David taught art history at the University of Virginia. He and his wife Willa have two children. The boy, an archeologist, is married and has one child and the girl teaches computer science in Denmark. Gilbert and his wife Sally taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Gilbert taught classics and is interested in Latin teaching in high schools. They had two boys, both married with children. I had two boys, born in 1963 and 1967. The younger is a geologist who married a piano teacher. They live in Fort Collins, CO and have a new baby boy. The older is a retired .com founder whose company was bought. He purchased a greyhound bus that was converted to living quarters and plans to tour the country while dreaming up a new company.
Personal
My health remains good. I exercise modestly (no sports). I've mostly given up drinking coffee and have only a glass or 2 of wine a week. I read, take piano lessons, travel, and periodically try to learn Spanish. I expended my grandmotherly hobbies as a child. I haven't crocheted, knitted, or sewed except for mending bed sheets and lost buttons since then. About 12 years ago, when we got our first VCR, I began to record operas and now have a collection of over 100 tapes. We used to attend the San Francisco Symphony concerts regularly, but now we go to concerts at the nearby San Francisco Conservatory instead. I still have to do house work.