In the history of medicine, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Dorothy Reed Mendenhall as American pediatrician (1874–1964).
Dorothy Reed Mendenhall was born at Columbus in 1874. Her recorded nationality is United States. She trained at Smith College and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
The test of medical work is whether practice changed, not whether the argument was elegant.
That the work was done from United States matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
Dorothy Reed Mendenhall died in 1964, aged 90. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
