Tiburon resident cements her legacy as a pioneer among women in medicine
Editor's note — This article won second place for best profile feature in the National Newspaper Association's 2024 Better Newspapers Contest.
When Ellen Killebrew was being interviewed for admission to medical school back in 1962, she was asked why she wanted to take a man’s place in the class.
“I’m not taking a male student’s place,” she responded. “I’m taking mine.”
The Tiburon resident went on to have a pioneering 50-year career in a field where women were not only rare but were actively discouraged by male colleagues and administrators who were often hostile to their presence. Now 85 years old, she’s retired from her work with Kaiser Permanente in non-interventional cardiology, but she’s still focused on passing her knowledge down to the next generation as a teacher at the University of California at San Francisco.
And she’s still being recognized for her accomplishments — just last year, she was named “Best in Medicine” by the American Health Council for her outstanding contributions in the field of cardiology.
She played a leading role in encouraging women to enter medical school and encouraging Kaiser Permanente to hire women doctors and specialists — and she says that the quality of the medical and surgical teams improved as the barriers to their hiring came down.
Born in Tiffin, Ohio, Killebrew’s father was a traveling salesman and her family, which included her younger sister and brother, moved around and eventually settled in Pennsylvania and then New Jersey.
She started at Bucknell University in 1955 as a business major with plans to become an executive secretary, which at the time was considered a suitable career for women who went to college.
However, she had been fascinated with medicine since she was 13 and a doctor made a home visit to treat terrible stomach pains that had been ailing her for days, drawing an injection and pills from what she described as his “magic black bag.”
In her sophomore year of college, Killebrew took a biology course as elective. She was hooked — but a university rule required her to secure her father’s permission to change her major.
“No one in our family is a doctor,” she remembers him saying. “Why should you become a doctor?”
She wore him down with her arguments and, when Killebrew graduated from New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, now Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, in Newark, her father “was the first one there with the camera,” she says.
However, she says, misogyny was rampant in medical school, starting with the admissions process, when in addition to being asked why she was taking a man’s place, she was asked whether she had thought about having a family and dropping out of school.
A group of male medical students raided her dorm room and searched for old exams because they believed she could only have scored an 88 on a very difficult test by cheating, she says. They even looked under her bed.
“I was so pissed,” she says.
When they didn’t find anything, they asked her how she could have gotten such a high grade. She told them she followed the instructor’s recommendation to take good notes in class.
“The professors and the attending physicians were wonderful, but the male students didn’t want (women) there,” she says. “It was fine once they got to know us, but they tended not to want to know us. It was an uncomfortable four years.”
Killebrew overcame the challenges with the support of the other three women in her class, with whom she shared an apartment.
One of the highlights of those years was an externship in Tampa, Florida, in 1962, when she was in her second year. As luck would have it, some baseball players were in town and she got to meet New York Yankees legends Yogi Berra, Tony Kubek and Joe DiMaggio, who were all staying at her hotel.
“It was so cool,” she says.
Killebrew went out to dinner with one of the rookies on the team when DiMaggio, by then retired as a player and working as the Yankees’ batting coach, and his former wife, Marilyn Monroe, came up to meet her. After divorcing several years before, the former couple had become friends.
“She was beautiful,” Killebrew says, recalling that the encounter was just a few months before Monroe died in August 1962.
Killebrew graduated from medical school in 1965, when less than 5% of all women with a medical degree became full-time medical-school faculty members.
And not much had changed in attitude since hospital chiefs of staff and male physicians were surveyed in 1949 and 1957 about their opinions of female doctors, according to Kate Scannell, the physician who gave the keynote speech at the large retirement gathering for Killebrew.
Scannell says the survey takers responded that women doctors were “emotionally unstable,” “talk too much” and “get pregnant.” One dean declared he would prefer a third-rate man to a first-rate woman doctor, Scannell says.
Killebrew did her internship and two additional years of residency at the University of Colorado General Hospital and Denver General Hospital, where she was the only woman. In those final two years, she was a senior resident teaching interns while rotating through different specialties. All three years, she and the other residents worked in the emergency room.
“I was turned off by oncology, partly because the attending physician was so cold,” she says. “Pulmonology and nephrology didn’t appeal to me. I liked cardiology because it was clean, and the patients were all different ages.”
In 1968, when Killebrew finished her residencies, she was reportedly the only woman at the commencement table.
Getting a job coming out of medical school as a woman was even harder than getting in.
“Most cardiology practices wouldn’t accept women cardiologists and were blunt about it.” she says. She finally landed a job at Kaiser Permanente in Richmond, then a small hospital that was not known for physicians of the first rank and really needed cardiologists.
“I went to Kaiser because they needed a warm body,” she says.
When she began, cardiologists didn’t have many tools at their disposal, she says. That includes what is today common, such as defibrillators, pacemakers and beta blockers.
When cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was introduced, it had “an incredible and positive impact,” she says. “The medicines we have now for heart failure are unbelievable.”
In 1970, Dr. Killebrew finished her cardiology fellowship at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. The next year, she and her late husband, airline pilot Ted Graves, built a house in Tiburon.
Advised by a mentor that the keys to securing membership in the American College of Physicians were publishing, teaching and service — and because she wanted to stay at the top of her game — she obtained a teaching position as an assistant clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco.
She also began to write articles for medical journals, at first because it was a requirement of her cardiology fellowship. By the end of her career, she had published nearly a dozen journal articles and had contributed to a textbook used at UCSF Medical School.
In the 1980s and ’90s, she served as president of the American Heart Association chapter in the East Bay.
Things have changed for the better for women in medicine, too, she says. She’s watched women’s enrollment in medical school soar to its current level of 52%.
“That’s so wonderful,” she says. “The women I worked with at Kaiser were astonishing, so smart and able to multi-task in their lives. They did more than I did. They’re great doctors, and they work hard.”
When she transferred to Kaiser’s Oakland medical center in 1978, it still had no OB-GYNs and no cardiologists.
In the 1980s, “we really started pulling in women doctors,” she says.
Still, in 1983, the American Journal of Psychiatry reported that 30% of male physicians felt “there was significant risk to the optimal functioning of a department that hired a woman of child-bearing age.”
These days, she is still very busy. When she’s not teaching a Zoom class to UCSF students on how to interpret electrocardiograms, she’s working out with a personal trainer, walking on the Old Rail Trail with friends, grabbing a latte at Rustic Bakery and enjoying the local restaurants. She and her late husband became engaged at the Caprice restaurant back in the day, and she still likes to eat there.
She also goes to Lake Tahoe every summer to cruise around the lake with friends in the vintage Chris-Craft, “Solitude,” that she and her husband bought years ago. However, she has given up snow-skiing and other more active sports she once enjoyed.
In quieter moments, she reads and does needlework and knitting with her two cats at her side. Her reading tastes run from mysteries to World War II spy thrillers to historical fiction and, of course, books about successful women doctors.
She continues to make her mark in her field.
“Most of Ellen’s medical career was lived through periods of time when professional barriers to women were blatant and prejudice was inarguably overt,” Scannell said in her speech for Killebrew’s retirement. “Remarkably, Ellen not only endured those times (but) through her persistence and perennial mentoring and support of other women physicians who followed her, she also helped to reshape the landscape for other women entering medicine. … Each time Ellen challenged the barriers excluding women from medicine, she made things easier for the next group of women who came up against these barriers.”
Reach Tiburon reporter Deirdre McCrohan at 415-944-4634.
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