Women contribute to medicine
by Mary Kate Woodruff
reporter

An original TCC Board member was among those recognized during a Women in Medicine presentation on NE Campus April 8.

Dr. Amy Gunter, a Weatherford surgeon, profiled women who made significant contributions to medicine in Texas.

Dr. May Owen, who served four terms as secretary of the Board of Trustees, was instrumental in the creation of the Tarrant County Junior College District in 1965 and its nursing program.

Owen, Gunter said, used her savings to establish a student loan program that funded more than 200 health professionals. TCC’s administration building bear her name.

Born to a poor family in Falls County, Owen developed polio as a child although it was years later when she diagnosed the problem herself. At 21, Owen entered high school after dropping out to support her family by picking cotton.

Owen studied chemistry at TCU and earned a medical degree from Louisville Medical School. She returned to Fort Worth and worked with the local hospital and with Terrel Industries, where she helped develop the rabies vaccine.

In the ’30s, she discovered that the chalk used on medical gloves caused scarring, adhesions and peritonitis. In 1945 Owen was the first woman elected president of the Texas Society of Pathologists.

At 87, Owen took a new job as a consultant to seven small hospitals in a 100-mile radius of Fort Worth. She died at 97.

In 1906, Claudia Potter, a founding member of the Texas Society of Anesthesiologists, became the fourth staff member of the new Temple Sanitarium. When she was hired, Dr. Raleigh White wrote a letter to his partner Dr. Arthur Scott, regarding her hiring.

“ I will be home soon, for I know you have lost your mind if you have employed a woman doctor,” he wrote.

Scott placed Potter on a probationary month-to-month basis, where she remained for her entire 41-year career in Temple.

In 1908 Potter studied gas anesthesia at John Hopkins University, returning to Texas to administer gas anesthesia for the first time in the state. During her career, she gave anesthesia to more than 50,000 patients, Gunter said.

Dr. Sofia Herzog was appointed the chief surgeon of the St. Louis. Brownsville and Mexican railway. Gunter said when officials realized Herzog was a woman, she was asked to resign. Herzog refused and served the railroad until months before her death.

Herzog loved South Texas wildlife, Gunter said, and carried a purse made from one small alligator—the feet still attached.

She gained a reputation for being available to her patients, Gunter said, and would travel by horse, wagon or handcar to get to them. Herzog built a successful hotel and a church and owned one of the first cars in the area.

Dr. Lena Edwards graduated from Howard University Medical School and began practicing in Jersey City, N. J., despite being black, female and Catholic, Gunter said. At 60, she began a mission to improve the health of babies and children in the Texas Panhandle.

Edwards used $30,000 of her savings to open a maternity hospital in Hereford, Texas.

Dr. Minnie Fisher Cunning-ham was the first woman to receive a pharmacy degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch. Gunter quoted Cunning-ham as saying her small pay forced her into the Suffrage Movement.

In 1915 Cunningham became president of the Texas Women’s Suffrage Association. In 1928 she ran for the U.S. Senate and in 1944 for Texas governor. Her epitaph reads, “Born a woman, died a person.”

Last Updated: 4/21/2004
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