Katie Dodd Remembered as One of the Greatest Clinical Pediatricians

She spent only eight years at Cincinnati Children’s, and yet, when alumni are asked to identify the hospital’s greatest teachers, her name invariably comes up. Katherine “Katie” Dodd, MD, joined the faculty in 1944, at the behest of Chairman Ashley Weech, MD, and quickly established herself as an indefatigable educator, much admired and beloved by medical students and residents. At times, however, she provoked censure for her dogmatic, unsolicited opinions, and especially, her politics.

She was born in 1895 into a wealthy Boston family. After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she pursued a career in medicine at Johns Hopkins, but they were reluctant to admit a woman to their ranks. They allowed her to audit the first-year courses, hoping she’d get discouraged and drop out. When she did not and her lawyer father threatened a discrimination suit, she was admitted. Her performance earned her election to Alpha Omega Alpha, an honor she rejected because, at that time, women were not permitted to attend the annual AOA banquet.

In 1926 she joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University, where she spent the next 18 years of her career acquiring a reputation as an outstanding clinician and teacher. She was also known for her boundless energy, rounding every day, then on weekends, leading family and friends, including medical students, on long hikes and picnics, regardless of the season or weather. Yet despite her seniority, when the Chairman of Pediatrics died unexpectedly in 1943, she was passed over for his position in favor of a younger male candidate. This created, in her own words, “an impossible situation,” and so she accepted the offer from Weech, her former medical school colleague, to join the faculty of Cincinnati Children’s in January 1944.

Her arrival came at a most opportune time. During the war years, male residents and even faculty were frequently being called up to serve in the Armed Forces, leaving the training program bereft of both manpower and instructors. Having a “permanent” teacher of her caliber and energy was a real coup for the Cincinnati program. She made rounds on the entire hospital every day; whenever she appeared, residents and medical students would gather around her in rapt attention. She was often referred to during those years as a “super-chief resident.”

Now almost 50 years old, Katie Dodd was described by one colleague as “plain-appearing and plain-spoken, with a deep hoarse voice,” whose experience with sick children was as extensive as her enthusiasm was contagious. In an era in which technological medical modalities were in their infancy, the skills of a brilliant clinical diagnostician were highly prized.

"When presented with a difficult case with a long differential diagnosis,” recalled Clark West, MD, “her eyes would sparkle, and she would say, ‘There is only one thing it could be,’ and proceed to establish the diagnosis.” When the answer eluded her, she’d regularly head to the library and return with an armful of literature. Although she herself engaged in little research, she was able to inspire her investigator colleagues to study the clinical problems occurring in her patients.

An Outspoken Woman

Her unwavering self-confidence and diagnostic acumen sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. Although she appears to have been universally respected, she was not always liked by her faculty colleagues. At times, she antagonized community physicians, whom she openly criticized when their diagnoses and treatments did not concur with her own, insistently offering her opinions when none had been solicited.

Yet her students found her warm and supportive. Weech observed, “Often I have felt that she was lavishing on her students the same kind of loving attention that a parent gives a child.” Another colleague commented, “I don’t think she particularly liked children, but she was intrigued by sick children.” This observation is at odds with Dodd’s own letters; for many years, she shared a duplex with Drs. Sam and Ingeborg Rapoport, and several times referred to their young, growing family as “my darling grandchildren.”

It was her association with the Rapoports, coupled with her sometimes abrasive personality, that prematurely ended Dodd’s association with Cincinnati Children’s. The Rapoports were forced to flee the country in 1950 after being accused of being Communists. Dodd was unwavering in her support for these close friends and was not shy about expressing her own “leftist” views, particularly regarding socialized medicine. In fact, in 1948, she had participated in a radio broadcast with the president of the Academy of Medicine during which the pros and cons of “federalized” medicine were debated. Though the exchange was described as cordial and collegial, members of Children’s Board of Trustees were not pleased with her endorsement. They began to withdraw their support, and the collegial atmosphere in which she had once thrived began to deteriorate.

And so, in 1952, when the University of Arkansas offered her the long-awaited opportunity to become the first woman chair of a co-ed pediatric department, she accepted the challenge.

Her colleagues in Cincinnati were distraught. Twenty-five members of the Children’s Hospital faculty wrote a letter to Weech, the dean and the Board, expressing their dismay at the loss of their esteemed colleague; the signatories represent a virtual “who’s who” of Children’s Hospital pioneers: Albert Sabin, Fred Silverman, Clark West, Joseph Warkany, Robert Lyons, Louise Rauh, Carl Weihl, and many others. But it was all in vain.

Too Much Integrity

Edward Park, MD, Dodd’s old mentor from John Hopkins, likened her to Socrates, a person with too much integrity to hold her tongue, even in the face of dire consequences. Writing to give her some unsolicited advice as to how to win support in her new position, he counseled, “You ought not go to places where your honesty will get the better part of your judgment. You can do the most good by taking care of sick children and teaching to the highest possible level,” and staying out of politics. Yet, he acknowledged, one of the reasons people loved her so was because of her “confounded honesty.”

“Someday perhaps peace and a little more liberty to think one’s own way and to act accordingly will return to our world,” Dodd wrote to Weech shortly after her departure.

Her transition to Little Rock was difficult. As she had been warned, Arkansas had limited resources and lacked the prestige of Vanderbilt and Cincinnati; it also had an entrenched system of segregation (this being two years before Brown vs. The Board of Education.) “Most of the house staff know very little, the nursing is almost nil,” she wrote Weech, noting also that many of their patients were “colored children, and very neglected” in terms of access to medical care. Nevertheless, she worked doggedly for five years to build a reputable pediatric department.

Following this, she became professor of pediatrics in Louisville and then took a similar position at Emory in Atlanta. The May 1962 issue of the Journal of Pediatrics was produced in her honor, featuring articles from 27 of her former students, as well as editorial comments from Weech. Upon her death in 1965, at the age of 73, the Vanderbilt University Faculty Scholars program was established in her name.

The eminent scientist Rene Dubos called her “one of the most amazing women I have ever met; she had the mind of a seasoned investigator and was able to stimulate others to solve problems which arose in her own inquiring mind.” Ashley Weech simply called her “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, pediatric clinician in the world.”