Edyth Hull Schoenrich '41
Students who head to college primarily to
prepare for a career could learn a lot from someone like Edyth
Hull Schoenrich. She’s had five of them at least, not counting
marriage and motherhood—or her recent passion for ballooning.
At eighty-three, she finds that the word “retirement” has
yet to enter her vocabulary. Currently, she is an academic administrator
at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore,
where in 1996 a chair was named in her honor.
She works as an adviser to students and applicants for the master
of public health program and helps assess the curriculum to make
sure it is adequately preparing students for the challenges they
will face—no small task when public-health officials must
deal with everything from outbreaks of strange new diseases to
threats of bio-terrorism. It’s the kind of multi-faceted
job best filled by someone with Schoenrich’s flair for seeing
the big picture and forging connections between knowledge and practice.
This latest career flowed from her previous ones—all of them
connected to medicine, a field she first aspired to as a sixth-grader
in Cleveland, marveling at the wonders of tadpoles turning into
frogs and seeds turning into sprouts in Miss Hyde’s nature-science
classroom.
Schoenrich arrived at Duke in the fall of 1937, well before the
civil-rights movement. But, even then, she showed a disregard for
artificial barriers, racial or otherwise. She recalls one memorable
train trip to Durham: “I was having a very interesting conversation
with a young black man, a sailor. When the train got to Lynchburg,
a conductor told me to move to another car. I refused.” The
train stopped for a long while. She was asked again to move and
again refused. “Finally, it started up, and we continued
our conversation”—making her, at least briefly, something
of a Rosa Parks in reverse.
After graduating, she began a master’s program in psychology,
and married Carlos Schoenrich, a doctoral candidate in the same
field. When World War II took him to the South Pacific, she applied
to medical schools, ending up at the University of Chicago, where
she earned her M.D.
She and Carlos headed to Baltimore in June 1948. He established
a distinguished career in psychology, and she began her residency
at Johns Hopkins, beginning a connection with the university that
has continued in one form or another ever since. She specialized
in internal medicine, became a chief resident (then rare for a
woman), and held post-doctoral fellowships in oncology and hematology.
Clinical practice was rewarding, Schoenrich says, but, after her
two children were born, she no longer seemed to need “the
emotional charge that comes when a patient grabs your hand and
says, ‘You saved my life.’ ” She says she began
to think, instead, about ways of preventing illness and, when the
opportunity presented itself, signed on with the state of Maryland
to run adult preventive services.
She had the medical expertise for the job, but not other essential
tools such as knowledge of epidemiology. So she went back to Hopkins
part-time and received her M.P.H. in 1971, joining the faculty
soon afterward to teach health policy and management.
Then in 1977, D.A. Henderson, the man who led the World Health
Organization’s campaign to eradicate smallpox, was named
to head the public-health school and tapped her as his top academic
dean. She left the post upon turning sixty-five, but Henderson
was on the phone the next morning asking her to come back and develop
master’s programs for people already working full-time in
public health.
And there she remains, when she and her husband are not floating
among the snow-covered Alps—“almost a spiritual experience,” she
says—or embarking on some other ballooning adventure.
— Sara Engram
Engram is a freelance writer in Baltimore.
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