March is a month-long celebration of Women’s History, a time to highlight the contributions of women to events in history and society and to reflect on women's importance in our department's history and current fabric.
Our first physical therapy class in 1943 had four students, two of whom were women. Helen Kaiser, PhD, was the first Director of the Graduate Program in Physical Therapy at Duke (1943-1970) and was nationally recognized for her work. In recognition of her accomplishments, we award a scholarship and a student graduation award in her name. Four of our seven PT program leaders have been women. The DPT program’s lectureship celebrating the graduating class is named after Eleanor Branch, PhD, a Duke physical therapy faculty member and Director of Graduate Studies for the PT program.
In 1983, Dr. Jacqueline Fogarty was the first woman to graduate the orthopaedic residency at Duke. It was another nine years until we graduated our second group of female residents. The first woman orthopaedic surgeon on our faculty at Duke, Alison Toth, MD, joined in 2001. In July, we will have ten orthopaedic surgeons who are women on our faculty, with our proportion of women orthopaedic surgeons being twice the national average. In building towards the future, a quarter of our residents are women (38 percent in our PGY 1 through 3 classes).
In the early 2000s, we had women cross-appointed to orthopaedic surgery with primary appalments in other departments who held NIH funding for their research. Now, nearly half of the personnel in our department conducting research are women. In the 2022 NIH Blue Ridge funding rankings in Orthopaedic Departments, our department's two highest NIH-funded faculty are women – Shyni Varghese, PhD (ranked first in funding) and Christine Goertz, DC, PhD (ranked seventh).
In 2019, our department started an occupational therapy program. Barb Hooper, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA, was selected as the inaugural lead. We welcomed the program’s beginning cohort of 40 students three years later, in August 2021.
Please join me in recognizing the women who played pivotal roles in the history of orthopaedics, OT, and PT at Duke. Our department, Duke, our community, and the populations we care for are better because of the contributions of these individuals.