CLEVELAND — Dr. Nancy Kurfess Johnson is truly a medical pioneer. She grew up south of Toledo, in a small town called Luckey.
A farm girl for whom hard work was second nature.
“We ate our food out of the ground, and manure was the only chemical. I worked seven days a week, we milked cows twice a day, seven days a week for 50 years,” Dr. Nancy said.
Her family had modest means and no money for higher education, so Nancy worked hard to earn a full scholarship to Mather College for Women in Cleveland. She remembers the strict rules.
“We had to be in at 7 o’clock at night,” she recalls.
She graduated from college in 1948, but her dream of attending the Case Western Medical School, was just that -- a dream.
“We were told, 'you’ll just take up a space, you’ll just get married and have children,'” she said.
Instead, Nancy attended graduate school and became a researcher. She started taking med school classes on the side, until the day the dean of the medical school stopped her after class.
“He said, 'one of the sophomore guys wants to become a history teacher, would you like his spot?' And I thought, 'now I’ll have to pay $300 but I’d better grab it,' so I did,” she says smiling.
During medical school and beyond, she began to see some of the firsts in Cleveland medicine, including open heart surgery, the development of the Kay Cross oxygenator, the beginning of dialysis and more.
“I saw all the tragedies of polio. I delivered a baby in an iron lung, all the stuff I did at Metro, I was in there of all months, August. Polio 24 hours, we were doing lumbar punctures around the clock,” she said.
It was delivering the baby in the iron lung that made her decide her career would be in obstetrics and gynecology. She remembers the first ultrasound machines, when pap smears became routine, but she also knew she needed to know more.
She graduated from Case Western Medical School in 1954 and received her M.D.
In 1955, she completed her internship year at St. Luke’s Hospital. Some of her patients there lived in Solon — then a farming community without a physician.
With no office buildings in the city, she looked at a house under construction on the main road. She and her husband worked on converting the garage into a three-room office, while the family lived in the basement.
In late October 1955, her converted garage opened. In her book, The Doctor Wears Pearls, she says: “In 1955, no male physician would even consider adding a female to his group. A paid position was not an option anywhere, Solon welcomed me.”
Over the years she delivered babies, she worried that some of the more complex cases were beyond the scope of her education.
“I was better than the head of my department at delivering babies, but I didn’t know some of the things that the medical students knew,” she said.
So, in her forties she became the first woman in 22 years to return to the Medical School at Case to study gynecological surgery. Times were finally changing.
“In about 1976 suddenly the class became full of women, and they walked out of the chauvinistic lectures,” she recalls.
Dr. Johnson became the first woman board certified Ob-Gyn to set up private practice in 1977 and did her part to transform healthcare for women as much as she could.
One example was explaining to her mail counterparts that breast exams are part of women’s health.
“You had to change the culture from the inside,” she says.
She was in family practice for 18 years, and after becoming board-certified, she spent the next 25 years in a career in Women’s Health. After 50 years in the field, Dr. Nancy retired in August 2001.
Dr. Nancy Kurfess Johnson, the farm girl from Luckey, never bet on chance, because her hard work blazed the trail for all women in medicine who followed.
She will be honored with the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland and Northern Ohio Legacy Award this weekend.