Dr. Marcella DiVenuto Wood ’49 achieved prominence in the field of pediatrics despite being clinically deaf. She graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in 1953, spent her residency at Crawford Long and Egleston hospitals in Atlanta, and entered private practice where she worked from 1957-1974. She also spent several years working as a Head Start consultant for the DeKalb County Public Health Center. Married to a doctor and the mother of five children, Marcella had a distinguished career fulfilling her desire to administer to children. In 1967, successful ear surgery restored Marcella’s hearing. Dr. Rosalie Voigt Johnson ’56 said she was called at the age of ten to the life of missionary work, and by the age of thirteen she had made her decision to become a physician. At such a young age, Rosalie couldn’t have known that her decisions would lead her to spend twenty-four years in Zimbabwe. Her missionary service began in 1961 after graduating from Emory University School of Medicine in 1960. When she and her husband, Dr. Morgan Johnson, were deported in 1975 from then Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), she worked for a year as a resident doctor at Grady Hospital in Atlanta. She returned to Africa and worked for six years in Zambia before returning to Zimbabwe at the end of 1982. In recent decades, doors into the medical profession have continued to open for women. Regina Suzanne Bland ’76 grew up in an area of West Virginia with few doctors. Her father was a coal miner who retired early because of health disabilities, including black lung disease and severe arthritis caused by two separate mining accidents that crushed his spine and pelvis. When Regina was twelve, the family moved to Ft. Pierce, Florida. By then, Regina knew she wanted to be a physician. Because she completed high school at the age of sixteen, her parents felt that a smaller women’s college would be the proper setting for Regina to begin her college experience. A summa cum laude graduate with a double major in chemistry and biology, Regina went on to earn her medical degree from the
University of Florida College of Medicine in 1980. Regina said, “My medical school class at the University of Florida was about twenty percent female. There was intense bonding amongst the class. There were isolated professors who appeared to hold some male bias, but overall I did not feel discrimination.” During her first job interview, however, she was questioned about her career, marriage, family intentions, and her commitment to the organization. “I was initially stunned but recovered enough to respectfully and thoughtfully demonstrate my value as a physician. My success in the organization led to a change in their hiring practices, and more women physicians were brought into the practice.” Though health issues have required her to limit her patient load, Regina still practices general pediatrics with her husband, C. Valentino Wynne, Jr., volunteers with several national organizations, participates in grant reviews, and is contemplating adding writing as a complement to her medical career. When Laura Taylor Pridemore ’87 was growing up in the small Georgia town of Tennille, her father was the only doctor in town. He insisted that Laura and her younger sister attend some type of graduate school so they would have a “marketable skill and be self-sufficient.” Immediately after graduating from Wesleyan with a degree in business administration, Laura entered law school at Mercer University and earned her J.D. three years later. She loved the challenge of law school, applied herself, and did well, serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Mercer Law Review 1989-1990. She graduated from law school in 1990 and began practicing with the Atlanta firm Troutman, Sanders, Lockerman, & Ashmore as an associate lawyer in the firm’s corporate division. Laura quickly realized that the day-to-day practice of law was very different from law school. “I was miserable. I was in the corporate area doing banking work. Research and drafting loan documents were not for me. Too much paperwork and not enough people interaction,” she said. While working in Atlanta, Laura began
volunteering at Egleston Hospital. “That was it,” she said. “I realized I wanted to go back to school and become a doctor.” Laura returned to Macon in 1994 to attend Mercer University School of Medicine. Today she works three days a week in a private pediatric practice in Charlotte, NC, job-sharing with another female pediatrician. For now, the parttime job-sharing allows Laura time to take care of her patients and time to spend with her family. Today, thirty-four percent of all U.S. physicians and surgeons and almost fifty percent of all medical students are women, and the acceptance rate of Wesleyan graduates into top medical schools is stronger than ever. Many Wesleyan alumnae credit opportunities to participate in faculty research for giving them the edge students at other institutions may not have. While studying at Wesleyan, Nigerian native Ihunanya Mbata ’06 was selected for the 2003 Summer Medical Education Program at Yale University School of Medicine, and the following summer she was selected for the Gateways to the Laboratory Program sponsored by the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/SloanKettering Tri-institutional MD-PhD program. “The latter program kindled my interest in research, and in my third year at Wesleyan I worked with Dr. Barry Rhoades investigating the effects of photostimulation on neurogenesis in crayfish deutocerebrum. In my senior year I worked with Dr. Holly Boettger-Tong on the effects of all-trans retinoic acid on proliferation in human myometrial cells. I was fortunate to present both projects at the Georgia Academy of Science,” Ihunanya said. She won best presentation at both meetings. Ihunanya graduated from Duke University School of Medicine in 2012. While at Duke, she had several opportunities to experience tremendous personal growth that clarified her professional goals, including brief outreach work in Port-auPrince, Haiti, and a year–long research project as an NIH-Fogarty Scholar in Gaborone, Botswana. In Botswana, Ihunanya conducted a population genetics study investigating the role of innate immunity factors in controlling the
Wesleyan WesleyanMagazine MagazineSummer Summer2012 2013