Dobby🇪🇺 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿💚🤍💜

Dorothy Andersen wanted to be a surgeon and was refused a surgical residency because she was a woman. She took a job in a pathology department instead and used it to identify a disease that had been killing children for centuries without a name. She had qualified at Johns Hopkins in 1926, one of eight women in her year, and she was good enough that Strong Memorial took her as a surgical intern. Then they would not keep her. In 1935 she opened up a three-year-old girl who had been diagnosed with coeliac disease. The lungs were wrecked and the pancreas was full of fibrous cysts. None of that belonged to coeliac disease. So she went through the autopsy records. She read the published literature alongside them, looking for other children whose pancreas had been found in the same state. She found 49 of them. In 1938 she published all 49 cases in detail and gave the pattern a name, cystic fibrosis of the pancreas. Until that paper those children were dying under somebody else's diagnosis. There was an old saying that a child who tasted salty when you kissed them would not live long, and nobody knew why. Andersen worked out that the disease affected these children badly in hot weather. A colleague followed that observation to the salt in their sweat, and the sweat test built on it is still how the diagnosis is made. A child born with cystic fibrosis in America now has a life expectancy of around 44 years. In 1938 the same child died young and was written up as something else. She found it by cross-checking autopsy files nobody else had bothered with. She did it in the department she had been sent to because they would not let her hold a scalpel. healthmatters.nyp.org/it-hap…