When Vivian Pinn was 4, she announced to her family that she would be a doctor.
“That’s all I’ve ever known that I wanted to be,” she said.
Although few women and even fewer black women were medical doctors, Pinn said her parents gave her nothing but encouragement.
Now 54, Pinn, associate director for research on women’s health at the National Institutes of Health and the first director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at NIH, makes it her business to ensure other women and minorities receive that same encouragement and women’s health issues receive proper attention.
“I didn’t know any women doctors, but that was before there were many women doctors,” Pinn said. “I give credit to my family. They didn’t tell me that I couldn’t be a doctor because I was black or a woman.”
The daughter and granddaughter of schoolteachers, Pinn gave her diabetic grandmother her insulin injections when she was a child and as a teen she nursed a grandfather who had cancer.
When Pinn entered the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1963, she was the only black and only woman in her class of 76 medical students. She recalls the first day sitting in the back of the auditorium waiting for another woman or person of color to enter the room.
“I thought they must be late or lost,” she said. When roll was called she realized she was the only one. Then the dean told the students to form lab groups, Pinn was sure she would not be welcomed into any of the groups.
“I’m sitting in the back feeling very, very lonely,” Pinn said. “I had never felt so isolated in my life.”
As she slowly walked toward the front, two students invited her to join their group.
Now some medical school classes are almost half female, said Pinn, who is a pathologist, a doctor who analyzes how diseases and aging affect the organs and tissues of the body.
“I tell them (women medical students) they don’t know how exciting this is to me,” Pinn said. “For so many years I’d go into medical meetings and there would be so few women and much less women who were in leadership positions.”
Most of her fellow medical students were supportive, but one classmate did tell her she would never be a doctor because he had read that women had smaller brains.
“There’s no way you’re going to make it with the rest of us,” she said he told her. By the end of the next year, he had flunked out and “I was still there,” Pinn said with a chuckle. “Smaller brain or not, I’m still around.”
Not only is Pinn still around but also she is one of the most respected women in medicine in the country. Her curriculum vitae, listing her professional activities, publications, awards and honors, takes up 39 pages.
In November she received the Elizabeth Blackwell Award from the American Medical Women’s Association. The award, named after the first woman physician trained in the United States, honors a woman physician who has made the most outstanding contribution to the cause of women in medicine.
She was the first African-American woman to chair an academic pathology department when she came to Howard University College of Medicine in 1982. In 1989 Pinn was elected president of the National Medical Association, a national organization of African-American physicians. She was the second woman to hold the office. Last year Ladies’ Home Journal listed her as one of the 10 most important women in medicine.
From her corner office in a large red brick building on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md., Pinn directs a 12-member staff. The office is dominated by a large conference table occupied by stacks of papers and books. Shelves of books take up one side of the room, and African-American art, women’s health posters and awards decorate the other walls of her office.
Staff members describe Pinn, who is divorced and has no children, as a workaholic.
“She’s always available and always has an answer,” said Joyce Rudick, a senior program analyst in the Office of Research on Women’s Health.
Besides encouraging women to pursue careers in biomedical science, Pinn’s office, which was established in 1991, is also charged with channeling funds into women’s health research and making sure women are included in clinical trials.
The Office of Research on Women’s Health and her current position were born out of a 1990 report by the federal government’s General Accounting Office that criticized the NIH’s exclusion of women from medical research.
The report affirmed complaints from health-care professionals and activists that had accused the NIH of neglecting women’s health issues. Not only was there little research on women’s illnesses but also women were routinely excluded from clinical trials, critics claimed.
The report resulted in widespread publicity about the shortchanging of women’s health and political pressure from women’s health activists. In late 1990 the Office of Research on Women’s Health was created.
Pinn knows firsthand about the effects of the shortchanging of women’s health concerns. When Pinn was in college, a doctor dismissed her mother’s complaints as arthritis and prescribed a pair of sturdy shoes and exercise for her painful backaches. When Pinn was 19 and a sophomore at Wellesley College, her mother was diagnosed with bone cancer.
Pinn returned home to Virginia and nursed her mother until she died. Her mother’s death strengthened Pinn’s resolve to become a doctor.
After medical school, she interned at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, specializing in kidney pathology. She went on to become a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, where she was an assistant dean for student affairs and a fierce advocate for minority students, colleagues said.
“She’s something special,” said Dr. Martin Flax, who did research with Pinn at Massachusetts General. “I think of her as being a great success, irrespective of her gender and race.”
“When she dealt with students she was extremely demanding,” said Flax, who is now chairman of pathology at Tufts. “but when it came to the rest of the world, acting as their advocate, she was extremely protective. She really cared, and they knew she cared.”
In 1991, cardiologist Bernadine Healy became the first female director of NIH, which funnels billions of dollars a year to biomedical researchers. Besides committing NIH to the Women’s Health Initiative, a more than $600-million longitudinal study of women’s health, Healy tapped Pinn, one of her former instructors at Massachusetts General Hospital, to head the Office of Research on Women’s Health, the first government office established to promote programs related to women’s health.
Pinn, then chair of the department of pathology at Howard University in Washington, was excited about the new position.
“I never thought about the pressure when I came,” Pinn said. “I really just felt excitement.”
Pinn receives dozens of invitations a month to speak about women’s health. She said she has to turn down most of them, but she tries to give as many as she can.
“Every time I’m out of the office it just cuts into what we have to do,” said Pinn. “I try to do as much as I can because people are so interested. People really want to hear about women’s health and what we’re doing. There’s a real excitement about it.”
When she gives one of many her speeches, she often uses a quotation from a 19th Century medical textbook that states, “Woman exists for her womb.”
For Pinn the statement typifies how women’s health has been considered for years.
“The health of women was thought to be that of her reproductive system during the childbearing years” and not much else, Pinn said.
At NIH, Pinn said she has focused on broadening the perspective on what constitutes women’s health. For example, polls show that most women fear breast cancer, but the leading cause of death for women is heart disease.
Health-care should also include diseases such as autoimmune and pulmonary diseases in relation to women, Pinn said. Other issues are women’s mental health, addiction treatment, culture and the role of the environment in women’s health.
Colleagues give Pinn high marks on how she has navigated the political waters of the NIH.
“I think she has done a terrific job, and she has done it in a very progressive way, by seeking agreements,” said Dr. Claude Lenfant, director of the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute at NIH.
“When somebody comes in an organization like this one they could get everyone mad or everyone to work with them. She has been a very astute and very productive person.”
But Pinn says the strengthening of female networks and focus on women’s health does not exclude men but helps everyone.
“We never intended this to be a competition with men’s health,” Pinn said. “If we’re looking at gender issues there will be mutual benefits.
“It’s very important to have more women role models, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need men as role models and mentors. While we need to strengthen the female network, we also need to make sure that we don’t drop men out of that process.”
