Women's History Month: Jane C. Wright
Jane C. Wright was a pioneering oncologist who made significant contributions to chemotherapy treatment options and by 1967, was the highest-ranking African American woman in a United States medical institution.
Wright was born in New York City in 1919 to a medical dynasty. The first medical member of her family was Dr. Ceah Ketcham Wright, who was born into slavery and after the Civil War earned a medical degree at Meharry Medical College. Her stepfather, Dr. William Fletcher Penn, was the first black person to graduate from Yale Medical College. Lastly, her father was Dr. Louis T. Wright, who was one of the first black students to earn an M.D. from Harvard. Her father founded and directed the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation.
Wright went to Smith College and originally tried to stray from the family’s medical legacy by pursuing a degree in art, but her father convinced her to switch her studies to pre-med. Wright earned a full scholarship to New York Medical College and three years later, graduated top of her class in 1945. After medical school, she completed her residencies at Bellevue Hospital and Harlem Hospital. In 1949, she joined her father in research at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center, succeeding him as director after his death in 1952.
During her time at the research institute, she and her father became interested in making chemotherapy more accessible for everyone. In the 1940s, chemotherapy was a new development, so it was not a well-known or well-practiced source for treatment. It was seen as a last resort and the drugs that were available, along with their dosage, were not well defined. They were the first groups to report the use of nitrogen mustard agents and folic acid antagonists as cancer treatments. In 1951 with the help of her team she was the first to identify methotrexate, one of the foundational chemotherapy drugs, as an effective tool against cancerous tumors.
Wright later pioneered combinatorial work in chemotherapeutics, focusing not simply on administering multiple drugs, but sequential and dosage variations to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy and minimize side effects. She was successful in identifying treatments for both breast and skin cancer, developing a chemotherapy protocol that increased skin cancer patient lifespans up to ten years.
In addition to research and clinical work, Wright was the only woman among seven physicians who helped found the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 1964, and in 1967 she was appointed associate dean and head of the Cancer Chemotherapy Department at New York Medical College. This made her apparently the highest-ranked African American physician at a prominent medical college at the time, and certainly the highest-ranked African American woman physician. 1971, she was the first woman elected president of the New York Cancer Society.
Wright retired in 1987 and passed away on February 19, 2013 at 93.
Sources:
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_336.html/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_C._Wright
https://www.nymc.edu/faculty/directory/in-memoriam/jane-cooke-wright/
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/health/jane-c-wright-pioneering-oncologist-dies-at-93.html