Interview, May 29, 2007

Creator:

Halperin, Edward C.

Scope and content:

This oral history interview was conducted with Dr. Edward Halperin on May 29, 2007 by Jessica Roseberry.
Duration: 00:47:51
Dr. Halperin discusses Duke Medicine's beginnings as a coeducational institution; Duke as influenced by the Abraham Flexner Report on medicine; Flexner as supportive of women's medical education; Duke's initial faculty as being from the coeducational institution, Johns Hopkins; Sir William Osler (an important influence on Wilburt Davison, the first dean of Duke Medical School) as favoring medical education for women; Dr. Davison's thoughts on this matter as being unknown to Dr. Halperin; Bessie Baker as the first dean of the Duke School of Nursing; stratifications of nursing by race; the building of Lincoln Community Hospital; Dr. Susan Dees; women's roles in medicine in the 1950s; Dorothy Beard assisting her husband Dr. Joseph Beard in his laboratory; Dr. Halperin as a one-time physician to Dorothy Beard in her later years; Bess Cebe, administrative assistant to former Department of Medicine chair, Dr. Eugene Stead; women physicians typically being only in certain specialties in earlier times; Dr. Grace Kerby; specialties women were more involved in; Susan Lowenthal, an early resident in psychiatry; culture for women medical students; pornographic images of women used in an anatomy text produced by three Duke professors in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the national boycott of the book; changes in medical culture for women over time; policies at Duke to change the culture for women in medicine; his own role in setting up an adoption leave policy; his establishment of the Butler-Harris chair in the Division of Radiation-Oncology, which can only be held by a woman or minority; Dr. Sara Dent, anesthesiologist; Zelda Fitzgerald as a patient at Duke-owned Highland Hospital; and Mary Semans. Includes a master and use CD and an analog and electronic transcript. The transcription of this interview was made possible by a grant from the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation.

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