Fe del Mundo
Arrived at Harvard Medical School to find the dormitory had never expected a woman
Fe del Mundo was born in 1911 in Manila, the second of eight children, and decided to become a doctor after two of her siblings died young from illnesses that better medical care might have prevented. She trained at the University of the Philippines and in 1936 won a scholarship to study at Harvard Medical School, only to discover on arrival that the school's dormitory had not been built to house a woman, since none had ever been admitted before. She was allowed to stay, and became the school's first female student.
She returned to the Philippines to practise pediatrics, and during the Japanese occupation of Manila in the Second World War she ran a camp caring for thousands of interned children, negotiating directly with occupying officers for food and medicine to keep them alive.
After the war she founded the country's first hospital dedicated entirely to children, and later established a second focused on pediatric medicine that operated on a sliding scale so poorer families could afford care. To reach rural areas without reliable electricity, she designed an incubator built largely from bamboo, keeping premature infants warm without a power supply.
She practised medicine for more than seventy years, receiving the Philippines' National Scientist award, and continued seeing patients into her nineties before her death in 2011.