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WOW2: August's Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History - August 17 through August 24, 2022 [1]
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Date: 2022-08-20
August 18, 1914 – Lucy Ozarin born, American psychiatrist and physician, one of the first seven women in psychiatry who served as commissioned officers during WWII. After Pearl Harbor, almost all the male staff left the state hospital where she was working, leaving her the only physician for 1000 patients, and she quickly felt overwhelmed. When Federal legislation established the W.A.V.E.S. as part of the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942, she decided to join. The hospital refused to approve her request for leave, so she resigned her position. As an “officer and a gentleman” (the Navy just used the same commission papers that they already had for men to sign up the women), she started an Assistant Surgeon, Lieutenant Junior Grade. With no military training, she was immediately assigned to the military hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, then sent to Camp Lejeune. There, the hospital’s commander assigned her to doing physical examinations on civilian applicants for laborer jobs, even though male doctors with only 90 days of psychiatric training were treating psychiatry patients. A colleague helped her get a transfer, and she returned to Bethesda, to treat WAVES. She also studied for and passed the boards in psychiatry (1945). After the war, she went to work for the Veterans Administration, and was soon promoted to Chief of Hospital Psychiatry. She visited all of the Veterans Hospitals to investigate and make recommendations on clearing up the backlog of mental health services. She started programs for VA hospital staffers to improve their skills in relating to patients, and a training institute for clinical directors on advances in psychiatry. Ozarin joined the U.S. Public Health Services in 1957, working in the Kansas City regional office while studying for a Master’s in Public Health, which she earned in 1961. The National Institute of Mental Health chose her as one of 5 people to write the regulations and establish community health centers across the U.S. after passage of the 1963 Community Mental Health Act. She was an advocate for deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients. In the 1970s, she did a study for the World Health Organization (WHO) on drug and alcohol treatments in 9 European countries, then convened a conference to report her findings, attended by representatives from 21 countries. After her “retirement” in 1983, she volunteered to catalog medical books, and thousands of documents, medical dissertations, and publications for the National Library of Medicine, to facilitate medical research. Received the Director’s Honor Award for her efforts in 2008. Even in her late nineties, she continued working, this time as author of over 50 mini-biographies of notable psychiatrists, posted at Wikipedia. She lived to be 103 years old.
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