When my parents met in 1929, Dad was in his final year of medical training and Mom in her first year of medical school. As I tell in my memoir, Whispers from the Valley of the Yak, they married after a whirlwind courtship and left in 1930 for China and medical missionary work. 

My father, Dr. John E. Lenox, MD, was appointed by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Board to the medical faculty of West China Union University in Chengdu. My mother, Cora C. Lenox, was fiercely determined to become a doctor, and my father was her staunchest ally in that effort. If he hadn’t supported her, she might have refused to marry him. 

Upon arriving in Chengdu, they first completed two years of language study as all classes were conducted in Chinese. Then Dad began teaching and Mom entered the medical school to complete her studies. In 1936, Dr. Cora C Lenox, MD, became the first foreign graduate of a Chinese medical school. Over the next decade she held various campus positions, including the physician to women students and the head of the tuberculosis unit.

 My mother’s trait of fierceness came partly from her resolve to control her life’s destiny, having witnessed her authoritarian father’s domination of her mother. Her dogged determination came to the fore at other times in her life and career also. 

In the latter 1930s, as invading Japanese forces assumed control over China’s eastern provinces, five universities evacuated faculty and students to the Chengdu campus. My father had always helped with household tasks. But his administrative duties expanded with the crowded campus, limiting his capacity to help with household duties, especially after my birth in 1942. 

My parents’ letters home from that time indicate my mother feared her career was being relegated to “optional.” When I was three months old, my family spent several summer months in the mountains near an outlying mission hospital. My father had certain duties in the hospital while there. He offered on several occasions, and she agreed, to switch roles with my mother, allowing her to care for hospital patients for several days or more while he watched my sister and me. 

Upon returning to the US in 1945, our family, now including my brother, settled in a small town in northcentral West Virginia. My parents had searched for an opportunity for both of them to work, and they found it in a regional medical clinic, where Mom handled pediatrics. As far back as I can remember, she always worked.

  In 1959, the year I went to college, Mom left home to take a residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. For two busy physicians, the 115-mile drive each way meant my parents had only occasional weekend get-togethers. 

Mom returned home after her three-year residency and opened a solo practice. But after a year, she closed her office and returned to Pittsburgh to take a fellowship in pediatric cardiology. 

After completing the fellowship, she was offered a position as the second staff physician in the new pediatric cardiology division of Children’s Hospital. She readily accepted. 

Later, I learned my mother had been harassed by a physician in the West Virginia clinic. He had questioned her medical decisions and made demeaning remarks. The harassment continued during her solo practice, which prompted her to take the fellowship. Dad then resigned his clinic position in West Virginia and moved to Pittsburgh so they could be together. He took some dermatology refresher courses and later found opportunities of his own to practice and teach at the university medical center.

My mother was in her early sixties at the time she accepted the pediatric cardiology appointment—an age many people think of retirement. But she was entering her most productive years and would go on to serve another three decades at Children’s Hospital.

In the early 1990s I began visiting my aging parents more often and for longer periods of time. In one conversation, Mom shared that her domineering father had physically abused her as a child. This heartbreaking story helped me understand her need to focus on career over family. 

Perhaps my mother’s greatest contributions to medicine came in her coordination of the Children’s Hospital heart museum. The museum is a repository of abnormal hearts donated for research purposes by the parents of children who died because of those abnormalities. As well as describing and cataloguing each heart, she authored or co-authored numerous journal articles based on her research and knowledge of the museum hearts. She also gave weekly lectures to medical students, residents, nurses, and more.

On the day she died, just shy of ninety-one years old, Mom was scheduled to give her weekly lecture on cardiac morphology (the formation of the heart). But she never made it. Arising at 5:00 am, she had a massive brain hemorrhage and passed away several hours later.  

To the patients she served throughout her long career, but especially to those infants and children with life-threatening heart abnormalities, Dr. Cora, as everyone called her, gave fully of herself. This I’ve learned most recently in reading once again the many letters of condolence that poured in following her death. 

I am immensely proud of what my mother accomplished in a profession that was still mostly closed to females when she began her career. She was part of the cadre who followed in the pioneering footsteps of women who had demanded entry to medical schools in the late 1800s. It fell to my mother’s cohort to open the doors to equal opportunity for women to pursue specialty training. 

Dr Cora C Lenox, MD, ended her career as a respected and lauded pediatric cardiologist, a researcher who contributed to a broader understanding of abnormal hearts, and a professor emerita and a vocal member of medical academia. 

Well done, Mom!