By Nancy West

1968 was one of the most tumultuous years in American history. While the Beatles topped the charts with “Hey Jude,” the U.S. was rocked by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, widespread protests against the Vietnam War and violence at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. At the same time, Gloria Steinem was leading the second-wave feminist movement and NASA’s Apollo 8 astronauts completed the first human orbit of the moon.

It was during this turbulent time that Jeannette A. Chirico-Post, MD, WMC ’68, graduated from Woman’s Medical College, determined to support women who wanted to become doctors while advancing her own career at a time when female physicians faced a great deal of discrimination.

“I knew when I was a youngster in grade school that I wanted to be a doctor,” says Chirico-Post. “It began when my younger sister was ill. My folks said that I was very attentive to her and, when the doctor made a house call, I tried to tell him what to do. When he was preparing to give her a shot, I said, ‘Oh, she doesn’t need a shot.’ I learned to speak my mind at an early age.”

Speaking her mind helped her to meet the challenges she faced while pursing a career in medicine when women were in the minority. Her greatest support came from her family. “My parents worked very hard to help me get through school. I couldn’t have done it without them,” she says.

You're a Woman. Why do you want to go to Medical School?

Chirico-Post’s first experience with discrimination was with her pre-med advisor at St. John’s University in New York. She was determined to earn a straight Bachelor of Science degree, which would enable her to apply to medical school, instead of the Bachelor of Science and Education degree that her advisor was recommending. He said, “You’re a woman. Why do you want to go to medical school? I don’t know if I can support you.”

Undeterred by his response, she changed her approach. She switched her major to chemistry and found a very encouraging chemistry professor who helped make her application to medical school stand out. She applied to six schools, an expensive proposition that her parents wholeheartedly supported, and was accepted by Woman’s Medical College.

“The support for women at Woman’s Medical College was unbelievable — very different from what we got anywhere else,” she recalls. “It was a very caring place in the ’60s. June Klinghoffer [MD, WMC ’45] and many other wonderful faculty members looked after us.”

Chirico-Post also supported her fellow students. A member of Zeta Phi, the women’s medical fraternity housed in an old Victorian mansion on Fox Street, she became one of the fraternity officers and ran the house. “We served dinner six nights a week,” she relates. “The students considered it a blessing to come home and have a really great meal ready for them. We fed about 20 women on those six nights, and we also ran socials — that’s where I met my husband, Jim. We got married after graduation.”

The newlywed couple moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where Chirico-Post completed her internship and residency in neurology at a hospital affiliated with the University of Buffalo, and they welcomed their first child, Christopher. Once again, she faced discrimination when she learned that a male resident who was the same year and had the same night calls as she did was making $500 more than she was. “In the ’70s, that was a lot of money,” she says. “So I went to the chairman about it. He said, ‘Oh, but he’s married and has a child.’ And I said, ‘Oh, but I’m married and I have a child.’ He said, ‘But you have a husband.’ I said, ‘I’m married and have a child and do the same call and the same rotations.’ He finally gave me my $500.”

Her fellow female residents often came to her for help with their own problems with discrimination. She recalls that one year, the male residents put up a girlie calendar in the residents’ room. “The women were angry and came to me,” she says. “I marched over to the residents’ room and said to the guys, ‘Take it down.’ And they did. It was finished.”

Fortunately, she also encountered a lot of people who were happy to help women advance in medicine. “I had a lot of support when I was preparing to take the boards,” says Chirico-Post, who was six months pregnant with her second child at that time. “Pioneering behavioral neurologists Drs. Norm Geschwind and Frank Benson were a great help to me.”

Chirico-Post paid it forward by mentoring other young women. “We had a ‘girls club,’” she recalls. “They would come to our house for dinner, and we made sure everyone had a place at the table for Thanksgiving and no one had to be alone for the holidays.”

Committed to Helping Veterans

In 1974, after a few years in private practice, Chirico-Post decided to become a neurologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs, a move that defined the rest of her career. In the beginning, she joined the VA for a very practical reason — equity of salary, something that was difficult for women to achieve in those days. But the reason she stayed with the VA for the rest of her career was because she loved helping and improving care for veterans.

She served in various leadership roles at the Boston VA Medical Center for 20 years. As assistant chief of staff, she ran the quality management program for that facility. “I always believed that it was up to us to police ourselves to make sure we were doing right by our patients,” she states.

When the chief of staff position opened at the Boston VA, she applied but wasn’t selected. “I was absolutely crushed by that and felt it was a discriminatory act. But I have lived my life with the belief that sometimes when a window closes, a door opens,” she reflects. Another chief of staff position opened up at the Providence VA Medical Center in Rhode Island and she applied.

In the meantime, she had a mammogram, which she had delayed due to the passing of her mother during that same time period. She soon got the news that she had breast cancer. A week later the director of the Providence VA Medical Center called to offer her the chief of staff position.

“I was thrilled to have been selected, but couldn’t make a decision because of my cancer diagnosis,” she relates. “The director said, ‘Jeannette, when you’re ready to call me back, you’ll call me back.’ I took a few weeks, met with the surgeon and had a treatment plan in place. When I called the director to tell him the plan, he said, ‘I’m going to wait for you.’ And he did, even though my cancer treatment took months. When I went to Providence, it was the best thing that happened to me,” she continues. “I loved being the chief of staff. As a physician, you have the opportunity to affect hundreds of people’s lives individually. As chief of staff, you affect thousands of people’s lives.”

Soon after that, Chirico-Post was selected to become network director for the VA’s New England Healthcare System, which extended from Maine to Connecticut.

“Great mentors guided me through the procedure of applying to become network director,” she recalls. “A national search was conducted, and I was delighted to be selected. That’s how I wrapped up my career with the VA, serving eight years as network director where I had the opportunity to positively affect tens of thousands of people’s lives. It was one of the most rewarding and most challenging times for me.”

There was a huge shift occurring in the VA from inpatient to outpatient care, she says. “Our facilities in New England were old and we were losing resources left and right, and yet they were demanding that we do so many things with limited resources. To help bridge this gap, I developed working relationships with premier medical schools in New England. I also appealed to VA headquarters for additional funding and got more than $40 million to make big improvements in both inpatient and outpatient facilities in our network.”

Dedicated to providing the best possible care to veterans, Chirico-Post participated in the development of quantifiable quality measures as drivers of veteran health care nationwide. Her network developed many of the recognized clinical centers of excellence for the Veterans Health Administration, incorporating state-of-the-art research activities in daily work. As a result of her hands-on style, the New England network became well recognized in performance improvement, earning the coveted national Kizer Quality Achievement Award.

Members of the Zeta Phi fraternity in 1968.

IMPROVING CARE FOR WOMEN VETERANS

Chirico-Post retired in 2008, but not for long. Within a few months, a former colleague asked her to work on an initiative to improve care for women veterans in the Veterans Health Administration. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, and she spent another five years working on that study project. Her expertise was instrumental in the development and implementation of a protocol to be used nationally to address and improve routine primary care and specialty care for women.

“VA facilities were not necessarily geared for women’s health,” she notes. “We established a Women’s Health Division, and our team developed criteria to evaluate how we were doing, asking women veterans if they were getting all the services they needed. We asked the VA medical centers whether they had enough female physicians on staff to meet the requests being made by women veterans. Some chiefs of staff did not recognize that as a specific requirement,” she says.

“It was a challenge to get them to follow the protocol in some places,” she continues. “We were known for being tough but reasonable. I used this line with the chiefs of staff to emphasize the importance of providing quality care to women veterans: ‘What if the headline in the local newspaper is ‘Woman denied care because this service is unavailable at this facility?’ Then they got it!”

She adds, “I met many Vietnam veteran nurses in the VA who continued to advocate for their fellow women veterans. We know that, in some instances, years may occur between physical, sexual and emotional trauma before the memory would come to a conscious level for treatment by mental health providers. When I was at the Boston VA, we had a great PTSD program for women. I’m sure there are millions of women veterans who are getting better care because of that team and what we did,” she reflects. “We set the standard for what needed to be done, and it brought me back to my original role in life as a student at Woman’s Medical College. This is one of the achievements I’m most proud of, along with being a network director.”

Chirico-Post also loved the one-on-one with patients. “That’s a unique bond when someone shares with you how they’re feeling. It was so rewarding to get to know and help so many veterans. I’m also proud of the influence I had over where new VA clinics were going to open. I asked the hard questions like, ‘Would we meet the VA rule that a veteran shouldn’t have to travel more than 50 miles to get care?’ And the fact that we finally put telehealth in place has expanded care to many more veterans in more remote areas.”

WE MUST PRESERVE OUR PAST.

Reflecting on her education, Chirico-Post says, “I have always taken great pride in being a graduate of Woman’s Medical College.”

One way she has expressed that pride is through her generous contributions to both the WMC/MCP Legacy Scholarship for medical students and the Allies of the Archives fund that supports Drexel’s Legacy Center. “We must preserve our past,” she emphasizes. “If you don’t look at what has come before, it will be forgotten. Discrimination was a big part of our past in medicine, and I think the Legacy Center has a responsibility to make sure that people know that it existed and still exists at some level. It’s important to keep the legacy alive so people can appreciate all that women went through to get more equal footing with men in medicine.”

 
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