The Early Women Physicians at Henry Ford Hospital
In 1943 Henry Ford Hospital integrated women into the Departments of Internal Medicine and Surgery during World War II. The Department of Surgery Annual Report documents that Roy D. McClure, M.D. stated, "Women interns were accepted for the first time in the history of the hospital owing to the shortage of male interns. This radical departure from previous procedure has so far been very satisfactory."
One of these early women was Magda E. Puppendahl, M.D., who entered the Department of Surgery in 1943. She came to the United States in 1936 from the Netherlands with her brother Rudolf Puppendahl, who later became a noted healthcare administrator, to escape the regime of Adolf Hitler. When Dr. Puppendahl began at Henry Ford Hospital, she was part of a second year rotating group that assisted in groundbreaking surgical research under Dr. Conrad R. Lam. Dr. Puppendahl was a noted researcher in early experiments on the use of tantalum mesh implants and other scientific studies. In the surgical research report of January 1945, Dr. Lam described her work, along with that of Dr. William J. O'Neal, as a collaborative effort between the two residents.
In the surgical laboratory, physicians were allowed to rotate off clinical services so that their time could be spent in scientific investigation. With Dr. Lam, Dr. Puppendahl studied the use of the pyruvic acid method to remove burn slough. The study was approved for publication by the Committee on Medical Research of the National Research Council and the resulting article, "The Pyruvic Acid Method of Burn Slough Removal," was published in the Annals of Surgery, 1945:121(6),866-871. Her research on tantalum gauze resulted in an article co-authored with Drs. Lam and D. Emerick Szilagyi. The article, "Tantalum Gauze in the Repair of Large Postoperative Ventral Hernias," was published in the August 1948 issue of the Archives of Surgery.
Dr. Puppendahl left Henry Ford Hospital in October 1945 for a position at the Chrysler Medical Department. Several other women on the medical staff departed soon after, however not before leaving their mark on the history of the hospital. They included A.K. MacMillan, M.D. and Edna I. Gordon, M.D. from the Department of Neuro-Psychiatry; Elvina Anger, M.D. from Internal Medicine; Louisa J. Piccone, M.D. from Gynecology; and Dorothy Finley, M.D. from the Department of Surgery. In the 1946 hospital Annual Report it was noted that, "We began the year with forty-two young men in training," without any mention of the women on the roster. It is not clear if hospital policies changed after the war, but women did not resurface on the medical staff lists until the mid 1950s.