Women’s History Month: Breaking ground in the 1940s

Anna Gray brewed up some tea at her home outside Philadelphia and invited a few friends to join her for a cup. But she had more on her mind than friendly conversation.

The year was 1933, and the Great Depression gripped the country. But Gray, a mover and shaker in Philadelphia society, wasn’t looking for help. Instead, she was hoping to give it: to a friend, oncologist Stanley P. Reimann.

Gray had learned that Reimann’s Lankenau Hospital Research Institute for the Promotion of Cancer Research was nearly penniless, and if something wasn’t done soon, years of painstaking study to find a cause and cure for cancer would crumble with it.

In 1947, a hospital created by Quaker philanthropist Anna Jeanes sold some of its land to the institute that would one day become Fox Chase Cancer Center. Now, more than 70 years later, Jeanes’s vision of a cutting-edge facility dedicated to compassionate care for cancer and other long-term diseases is coming to full fruition as Fox Chase and Jeanes Hospital continue to reintegrate as part of the Temple University Health System.

Anna Thomas Jeanes was born April 7, 1822, in Philadelphia. Her family was devoutly Quaker and gained its fortune primarily through its ownership of coal-rich lands. None of her siblings had children, so as the youngest, Anna inherited the entire family’s wealth.

Anna Jeanes was a small woman—less than 100 pounds—with little formal education, but she had a strong passion: to help those less fortunate. Working with Booker T. Washington and others, she dedicated more than $1 million to support rural schools.

Besides being regal in manner, Mary Woodard Lasker, who died last week at 93, undertook benevolent projects on a scale fit for royalty:

In 1943, Mrs. Lasker and husband, advertising mogul Albert Lasker, launched a campaign that in effect created the American Cancer Society on the foundation of an organization of physicians many of whom were reluctant to take up the cause of cancer research.

Having created a mammoth voluntary organization, the Laskers forced into lobbying for increasing federal funding of research. This led to an unprecedented boost in funding of National Institutes of Health. Subsequently, Mrs. Lasker’s lobbying led to the enactment of the 1971 National Cancer Act and subsequent increases in funding for the cancer program.

The Laskers also established an award whose recipients frequently go on to win the Nobel Prize. Altogether, 51 scientists who won the Lasker award became Nobel laureates.

Eva Bateman had more than one reason to celebrate in 1939 when she graduated from the School of Nursing at Buffalo’s E. J. Meyer Memorial Hospital. She was the first person of African descent to achieve that distinction, and she ranked first academically in a class of 100. 

But when she and her date entered the dining room of the Park Lane Hotel for the graduation dinner-dance, they didn’t get far. A line of waiters moved toward them and quickly ushered them out, advising them that the hotel did not serve African Americans.

In 2009, at age 90, Eva Bateman Noles shrugged at the memory. “If you’ve been hurt all your life, you get used to another hurt,” she said.

Helen Coley Nauts, the founder of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), was a high school-educated housewife and mother who, from the time of her father’s death in 1936 until her own passing in 2001, would go on to fundamentally change the fields of cancer research and immunology.

Her determination and perseverance in the face of constant resistance from the medical establishment of her day laid the foundation for cancer immunotherapy as it is known today. For her contributions, Helen was named Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Merite by French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, and received the Gold Medal for “distinguished service to humanity” from The National Institute of Social Sciences in 1997—the first woman in the medical field to do so since the honor was bestowed upon Marie Curie in 1921.