Dorothy Reed Mendenhall

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall (1874-196]) was a well known American pediatrician and discoverer of the Reed-Sternberg cell.

Biography
She did her undergraduate work at Smith College and became one of the first women to graduate from Johns Hopkins Medical School. She graduated "fourth in her class in 1900, she was awarded a prestigious internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital, serving under Dr. William Osler. The next year she became a Pathology fellow there under the direction of Dr. William Welch. During this period Mendenhall taught bacteriology, assisted at autopsies and undertook research on Hodgkin's disease. She made her best recognized contribution to medical science when she discovered the cell that is a primary characteristic of Hodgkins disease and effectively disproved the common belief that the disease was a form of tuberculosis. Mendenhall's findings, published in 1902, brought her international acclaim and the cell became known as the Reed cell (also called the Sternberg-Reed and Reed-Sternberg cell)."

Next she accepted the first internship in pediatrics at the Babies Hospital in New York (now the Babies & Children's Hospital - part of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center). She worked under the direction or L.E. Holt, MD. He was a pioneer of pediatrics, author of the first major textbook on the subject and author of "The care and feeding of children".

She left to marry Charles Mendenhall who had been hired as a member of the faculty of the department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

They had four children, the first of which (a daughter) died one day after birth, the second (a son) died at age one year old in an accident. Her son John "Blackjack" Mendenhall became a renowned surgeon and taught at UW Medical school. The youngest son Thomas C. Mendenhall, became a professor of History at Yale and served as the sixth President of Smith College.

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall died of heart disease July 31, 1964, age eighty-nine.