Dorothy Reed Mendenhall

Physician

• Born: September 22, 1874
• Birthplace: Columbus, Ohio
• Died: July 31, 1964
• Place of death: Chester, Connecticut

American physician and scientist

Best known for her medical research identifying the cell responsible for Hodgkin’s disease, Mendenhall spent most of her career as a physician interested in maternal and child health. As one of the first doctors employed by the U.S. Children’s Bureau, she merged social welfare and preventive health strategies as the best approach for reducing maternal and infant mortality and morbidity.

Areas of achievement Medicine, physiology, science, social reform

Early Life

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall (MEHN-dehn-hahl) was the youngest of three children born to Grace Kimball and William Pratt Reed. Her mother, described by a family chronicler as a woman who had something of the air of a grande dame, was a descendant of the Talcott and Kimball families, seventeenth century English immigrants to New England. Dorothy’s father, a successful Columbus shoe manufacturer, was also descended from a prominent New England family. He died in 1880 when Dorothy was only six.

Following her father’s death, Dorothy, her mother, and her sister Elizabeth (“Bessie”) spent summers at a family residence in Talcottville, New York. As did many young men of the time, the Reeds’ only son went West and was never heard from again. From 1887 to 1890, Grace Reed lived in the winters with her daughters in Berlin, Germany, while Bessie studied music. Although William Reed had provided well for his widow and children, Grace’s lifestyle threatened to deplete the family funds. Dorothy eventually relinquished her own inheritance to her mother and in 1894 took over the management of her mother’s financial affairs, which she continued to manage until Grace’s death in 1912. In 1903, Bessie died of spinal meningitis, leaving behind a distraught husband, two daughters, and a son. The children’s father had little money. Consequently, Dorothy also accepted the financial responsibility for the education of her nieces and nephew. These experiences taught Dorothy to be a skillful investor and an independent wage earner.

Life’s Work

In 1891, eighteen-year-old Mendenhall entered Smith College. Educated as a child by her maternal grandmother and later by a hired governess, Mendenhall graduated from Smith in 1895 with a B.L. degree. At first she was interested in journalism, but she changed her mind and entered Johns Hopkins University Medical School in the fall of 1896. There she achieved two important firsts. In 1898, she and another student, Margaret Long, became the first women to be employed by the U.S. Navy when they spent a summer assisting in the operating room and bacteriological laboratories at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital. Earning her M.D. in 1900, Mendenhall then served an internship at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and received a fellowship in pathology. This position enabled her to teach at the medical school and conduct research on Hodgkin’s disease. As part of her work, she became the first researcher to identify a peculiar blood cell, thereafter called the Reed cell (or sometimes the Sternberg-Reed or Reed-Sternberg cell), present in every Hodgkin’s disease victim. This was a significant finding because it contradicted the scientific thought of the time, which assumed that Hodgkin’s disease resulted from a bacterial infection similar to tuberculosis.

Although she was at one of the few medical schools in the United States that accepted women, Mendenhall refused an extension of her fellowship at the end of the academic year because she believed that there were limited opportunities for women at Johns Hopkins. This proved to be a significant career choice because it changed Mendenhall from a medical researcher to a health care practitioner. Beginning in June, 1902, she worked as a resident at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. This led to a job as the first resident physician at the newly organized New York Babies’ Hospital. In this position, Mendenhall became involved in the popular Progressive Era infant welfare movement. Like many female physicians of the era, Mendenhall found that pediatrics and obstetrics were fields in which women doctors could practice with greater autonomy and respect than they could in the more traditional medical specialties.

Unlike many other professional women of her generation, Mendenhall was able to combine career and marriage. A woman who described herself as good-looking and was identified by her colleagues as strikingly beautiful, Mendenhall married Charles Elwood Mendenhall, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, on February 14, 1906. The couple had four children. Their firstborn, Margaret, died only a few hours after her birth in 1907. Margaret’s death resulted primarily from poor obstetric care, which also left Dorothy with permanent injuries and puerperal fever. This unhappy experience furthered Mendenhall’s interest in child and maternal health care. The couple’s second child, Richard (b. 1908), died in 1910 from fatal injuries received in a fall. Thomas (b. 1910), their third child, lived to adulthood and served for a time as president of Smith College. The family’s last-born, John (b. 1912) became a professor of surgery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

After spending eight years as a full-time mother, Mendenhall returned to her professional career as a field lecturer on infant and maternal care for the University of Wisconsin’s home economics department. Besides providing needed and desired information to women throughout Wisconsin, her work also led to the collection of statewide data on infant and maternal mortality rates. In 1915, working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a variety of women’s volunteer associations, she organized the state’s first infant welfare clinic in Madison. Part of the larger national baby-saving movement, Mendenhall’s work served as an example for other cities to copy. By 1937, Madison had the nation’s lowest infant mortality rate.

In 1917, Mendenhall and her children moved to Washington, D.C., where her husband, Charles, was already involved in war work. Retaining her position at the University of Wisconsin and developing a correspondence course for the Department of Agriculture entitled the “Nutrition Series for Mothers,” Mendenhall also accepted a job as a U.S. Children’s Bureau physician. The Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 in the Department of Commerce and Labor as a part of Progressive Era reform, was headed by Julia C. Lathrop, an Illinois social worker and the first woman to head a federal agency. Lathrop welcomed Mendenhall because her medical credentials and international reputation as a researcher lent credibility to the largely female-led and social work-oriented Children’s Bureau. Infant mortality was the first field study undertaken by the agency. The work of Mendenhall and another female doctor, Grace L. Meigs, highlighted the need for good medical care as well as social welfare reform as the best means to reduce the nation’s high infant mortality rate. The Children’s Bureau had found that the 1913 U.S. rate of 132 deaths per 1,000 live births ranked behind seven comparable nations. Mendenhall’s 1918 Children’s Bureau publication “Milk, the Indispensable Food for Children” was a widely read and significant contribution in the effort to save babies’ lives. Informational bulletins such as Mendenhall’s and those produced by other Children’s Bureau employees, such as Mary Mills Wests’s “Prenatal Care” (1913) and “Infant Care” (1914), served as how-to books for many American women who were anxious about the inadequate medical care then available for themselves and their children.

During the agency’s Children’s Year (1918-1919), Mendenhall was instrumental in the preventive health care effort, setting standards of height and weight for every American child. In 1919, also as part of her responsibilities for the Children’s Bureau, Mendenhall represented the United States at an International Child Welfare Conference and conducted a survey of war orphanages in Belgium and France. She also examined the nutritional levels of children in England. These studies served twenty years later as models for work completed by the Children’s Bureau on English and French refugee children fleeing Nazi aggression. In 1921, Mendenhall coauthored with other bureau staff members the agency’s seminal publication “Child Care and Child Welfare: Outlines for Study.” Another of her most influential publications appeared as the bureau’s 1929 “Midwifery in Denmark,” which compared infant and maternal mortality rates in the United States and that European country. Mendenhall’s research proved to be controversial with the American Medical Association because she concluded that higher mortality rates in the United States were partly the result of unnecessary intervention by doctors during delivery. She also observed a lack of affordable and accessible medical care for many American mothers and babies. Acknowledging the successful use of professional midwives in Denmark, Mendenhall recommended the training of midwives to serve in remote and poor American communities. The American Medical Association also condemned this suggestion. In addition, Mendenhall wrote the useful “What Builds Better Babies” (1925).

During the 1920’s, Mendenhall also became active in the social hygiene movement, an effort to reduce high rates of venereal disease, which often contributed to infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. For example, infants born to mothers with syphilis risked blindness unless silver nitrate was administered to the babies’ eyes immediately after birth. Mendenhall continued her association with the Children’s Bureau until 1936. After her husband’s death in 1935, she spent some time traveling in Central America and Mexico, and “retired” in Tyron, North Carolina. She eventually moved to Chester, Connecticut, where she died in 1964 of heart disease.

Significance

In her unpublished autobiography and her cousin’s published memoirs, Mendenhall reveals the many obstacles facing women who sought a professional medical career in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Even members of her own family believed that such activity was inappropriate. Attending medical school also involved other challenges for women. For example, during Mendenhall’s second year at Johns Hopkins, a throat and nose specialist gave a lecture on some disease of the nose. Apparently trying to offend her, from the beginning he included the “dirtiest stories” as part of his presentation. Women students were also subjected to “unpleasant practical jokes.” As evidence of her strong-willed determination, Mendenhall reported that she dealt with such harassment by deciding that she “would never object to anything that a fellow student or doctor did to me in my presence if he would act or speak the same way to a man.” Regarding anyone who discriminated against her because of her gender, she “would crack down on him by myself or take it up with the authorities if he proved too much for me alone.”

Such was the impact Mendenhall had throughout her life. She was a dedicated professional who combined career and family at a time when most Americans believed these choices to be unacceptable. She is best known for her discovery of the blood cell indicating Hodgkin’s disease, but her significant contributions to the development of preventive maternal and infant health care policy should not be overlooked. Mendenhall’s work at the Children’s Bureau helped to pioneer the notion that both good medical care and social welfare reforms are needed to help save the lives of mothers and babies.

Bibliography

Ladd-Taylor, Molly. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. An informative overview of the effort by social workers and doctors, including those in the Children’s Bureau, to train mothers on how to care for their babies.

Meckel, Richard A.“Save the Babies”: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Although this work contains nothing specific to Mendenhall, it offers a good overview of the Progressive Era infant and maternal welfare movement.

Mendenhall, Dorothy Reed. “A Case of Acute Lymphatic Leukaemia Without Enlargement of the Lymph Glands.” American Journal of Medical Science (October, 1902). A seminal report on Mendenhall’s Hodgkin’s disease research.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Milk: The Indispensable Food for Children.” Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918. Probably the most widely distributed informational pamphlet written by Mendenhall.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “On the Pathological Changes in Hodgkin’s Disease with Especial Reference to Its Relation to Tuberculosis.” Johns Hopkins Hospital, Reports 10, no. 3 (1902): 133-196. A technical report on Mendenhall’s research on Hodgkin’s disease conducted at Johns Hopkins.

Parry, Manon. “Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, 1974-1964.” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 5 (May, 2006): 789. An informative obituary of Mendenhall.

“Personal Fulfillment and Professional Excellence.” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 5 (May, 2006): 788-790. An excerpt from a study, “What Is Happening to Mothers and Babies in the District of Columbia?” published by Mendenhall in 1928.

Wilson, Edmund. Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. These memoirs of Mendenhall’s mother’s cousin include information on Mendenhall in the fifth and sixth chapters.