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Sheriff, Hilla, 1903-1988


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    • found: One woman's college and medical school experience in the 1920s, 2017:t.p. (Jennifer L. Daniel ; Doctor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, University of South Carolina ; Bachelor of Science, University of Richmond, 2007 ; Master of Science, University of North Carolina, 2009) p. 1 (Hilla Sheriff, an extraordinary woman who challenged attitudes about women's education and employment in the medical field in the United States in the 1920s. Sheriff passionately promoted public health in South Carolina. Referred to by Patricia Evridge Hill as “South Carolina;s most highly decorated public health official,” Sheriff is “often associated with the eradication of endemic pellagra, pioneering contraceptive research for the Milbank Memorial Fund, and an examination of toxoplasmosis and other forms of household poisoning.” ... Sheriff was born in 1903 in Easley, SC.) p. 2 (Sheriff went to the College of Charleston to take premedical courses. However, she transferred to the Medical College of South Carolina (MCSC) after only two years, without receiving her bachelor degree. So, at the age of nineteen, Sheriff began medical school.)
    • found: South Carolina Encyclopedia webpage, Oct. 24, 2017(University of North Carolina, 2009, May 29, 1903-September 10, 1988 ; Sheriff's efforts to train and license lay midwives in South Carolina during the postwar decades reveal the pragmatism that guided her public health policies. Physician, public health official. Born on May 29, 1903, in Pickens County, Sheriff was the fifth of seven children of John Washington Sheriff and Mary Lenora Smith. The family moved to Orangeburg when Hilla was still in elementary school. She attended the College of Charleston for two years before transferring to the Medical College of the State of South Carolina, where she received the M.D. in 1926. After an internship at the Hospital of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, Sheriff completed residencies in Washington, D.C., and New York City. She opened a pediatrics practice in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1929. The poverty of her patients and an offer in 1931 to direct the first American units of the American Women's Hospitals resulted in Sheriff's move from private practice to the field of public health. Sheriff served as deputy and later chief health officer for Spartanburg County between 1933 and 1940, during which time her responses to endemic diphtheria, pellagra, and tuberculosis; her innovative maternal and child health campaigns; and her contraceptive research for the Milbank Memorial Fund spawned programs throughout the South based on her models. She established the first family-planning clinic associated with a county health department in the United States. Health departments around the state followed after 1936, and by Sheriff's lead 1939 South Carolina became the second state to make birth control an official public health service (North Carolina was the first). In 1936 Sheriff received a fellowship to study public health at Harvard University. She became the first American woman to receive the M.P.H. (master of public health) degree from Harvard the next year. In 1940 Sheriff moved to Columbia to become the assistant director of the Board of Health's Division of Maternal and Child Health. She advanced to director the following year and continued to administer programs for women and children until 1967, when she was promoted to deputy commissioner of the State Board of Health and chief of the Bureau of Community Health Services. She held these positions until retiring in 1974. In 1940 Sheriff married George Henry Zerbst, an ophthalmologist and public health officer who had been one of her medical school instructors eighteen years earlier) - http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/sheriff-hilla/.
    • found: Wikipedia, Oct. 24, 2017(Dr. Hilla Sheriff (1903 - September 10, 1988) was a South Carolina physician whose positions included being a Health Officer in Spartanburg County and being the Director of the Board of Health's Division of Maternal and Child Health in Columbia, South Carolina ... She became one of the most respected medical officials in the twentieth century. She devoted much of her life to eradicating diseases, such as pellagra and diphtheria, which plagued the poor and marginalized communities of South Carolina. ... She faced some doubt with the idea of studying medicine from her parents, as they thought it a "childish fantasy." However, this did not keep her from attending the College of Charleston for two years before transferring to the Medical College of the State of South Carolina where she received her M.D. in 1926. Then, she interned at the Hospital of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania and completed her residencies at the Children's Hospital in Washington, DC, and the Willard Parker Contagious Disease Hospital in New York ... She returned to Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1929 where she struggled to open a pediatrics practice for 2 years. Sheriff then received an invitation from the American Women's Hospitals Service to direct a unit in the Piedmont area of South Carolina, marking the beginning of her career in public health ... In 1933, Sheriff was selected as the assistant director of the Spartanburg County, South Carolina Health Department. She became the director four years later. ... Sheriff went on to study public health at Harvard University upon receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1936. She earned her Masters of Public Health the following year. In 1940, she took the position of assistant director of the Division of Maternal and Child Health in Columbia, South Carolina. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, she focused her efforts on programs to train and license midwives and later advocated for the prevention of child abuse. Sheriff retired from her positions as the deputy commissioner of the State Department of Health and Environmental Control and chief of the Bureau of Community Health Services in 1974)
    • found: OCLC, Oct. 24, 2017(hdg.: Sheriff, Hilla, 1903-1988)

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    • 2017-11-02: new
    • 2017-11-03: revised

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