REFLECTIONS FROM THE EDITOR
JULIA ST. PETERY, M.D. – A LIFE DEDICATED TO HELPING CHILDREN By Frank Skilling, M.D. No act of kindness is ever wasted, or so we have been taught. At times we doubt this is true. Julia St. Petery, M.D. never worried about wasting kindness: it was built into her nature. It was not a sign of weakness; kindness was her strength. Judy, as she was always known, was born in Dothan, Alabama in 1943. She was adopted as a newborn by Elizabeth and Alton Revell, a childless couple from Tallahassee. She never knew her birth parents, nor did she care about discovering who they were. When she was asked by children how her parents found her, she said that they went to Moon’s Jewelry Store and picked her out of the display case. Judy always had a tender spot in her heart for adopted or abandoned children, and this feeling propelled her into medicine and, eventually, pediatrics. At the age of ten she was found to have a heart murmur, probably by George Palmer, M.D., the first board-certified pediatrician in Leon County. Dr. Palmer had trained at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), and he was familiar with its program for surgical correction of congenital heart disease that was pioneered there by Alfred Blaylock, M.D. Judy was referred to Helen Taussig, M.D., a pioneer in the treatment of children with cardiac conditions, and later the first female president of the American Medical Association. After the diagnosis of congenital coarctation of the aorta was made, Judy underwent corrective surgery at JHU. Had she been born ten years earlier, she probably would have died in childhood from the coarctation. For many years afterwards, Judy’s mother drove her to Jacksonville where they caught the train to Baltimore for her follow up appointments at JHU. Judy attended public schools in Tallahassee and graduated from Leon High School in 1961. She spent her first college year at FSU but transferred to the 12
CAP SCAN - A CAPITAL MEDICAL SOCIETY PUBLICATION
University of Florida for the next three. She graduated in 1965 with a degree in biology before matriculating into the medical school at UF. During her first week in medical school, she was assigned to dissect a human cadaver. Because the assignments were alphabetical, she was placed next to Louis St. Petery, and they soon fell in love. After dating for two years, they were married at Blessed Sacrament Church in Tallahassee between their second and third years in medical school. Judy had been raised in the Methodist Church, but she converted to Catholicism for Louis’s sake. She later said that the main motivation for conversion was that the Catholic Church allowed alcohol. As a tradeoff for her conversion, Louis agreed to move to Tallahassee to practice pediatrics. They both completed residencies in pediatrics at UF, and Louis entered a pediatric cardiology fellowship while Judy performed outreach supervision for the rural family medicine clinics staffed by UF. During their residencies in Gainesville, they had three children: Elizabeth, Leigh and Louis. The State of Florida was just developing Children’s Medical Services (CMS), and they took turns running the newly established bureau in Tallahassee under the tutelage of Gerold Schiebler, M.D. She served as the statewide director of CMS during her first year as a pediatrician in Tallahassee in 1974. Judy and Louis practiced together in Tallahassee for forty years. Judy was the generalist pediatrician, and Louis the cardiology consultant for North Florida. He also helped with night coverage of the emergency department, the most challenging part of any practice. It was rare to see them apart during those years. Judy had an immediate rapport with children. Small in stature, she could look at them eye to eye on the exam table. She was always friendly, but she was firm and serious at the same time. Her no-nonsense attitude made her an attraction for parents and children, and the families she cared for still remember her insight and compassion.
