Five St. Louis women who pushed health care forward

Understanding sexual response, controlling reproduction, preventing the death of children, treating cancer, healing trauma—the world owes these women a debt.

by

We hear all the time about the celebs who came from St. Louis and went on to entertain the world—John Goodman, Betty Grable, Tina Turner, Stan Musial... But St. Louis has also been home to quite a few pioneers who’ve made the world a healthier place. As we finish Women’s History Month, here are five St. Louis women who made, and continue to make, significant contributions to the field.

Virginia Johnson

Virginia Johnson, best known as part of the famous research team Masters and Johnson, paved new ground in our understanding of human sexuality. In 1957, this Springfield, Missouri, native started working with Dr. William Masters at Washington University as his research assistant. Through direct observations and the use of medical instruments, they broadened our understanding of the human sexual response cycle, sexual diagnoses and treatment. They also published several books on their findings, including the controversial classic Human Sexual Response in 1966.

Masters and Johnson married in 1971 and continued their collaboration at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation (later renamed the Masters and Johnson Institute) in 1978. The couple divorced in 1993, and the following year, Masters retired and the institute closed. Johnson later founded the Virginia Johnson Masters Learning Center in Creve Coeur to provide information about sexual dysfunctions. She died in 2013 at the age of 88. That same year, a series about their lives, Masters of Sex, debuted on Showtime, loosely based on a book by Thomas Maier.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

Neurophysiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with biochemist Stanley Cohen for their discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF) during the 1950s while working at Washington University-St. Louis. NGF is a protein in the body that plays an important role in the growth of cells. This breakthrough advanced our understanding of cancer and various other diseases.

Born into a wealthy Italian family in Turin, Levi-Montalcini went into medicine in spite of her father’s objections. After World War II, she became an assistant at the University of Turin Institute of Anatomy. Two articles she published in foreign scientific journals intrigued Viktor Hamburger, the head of the zoology department at Washington University, and he invited her to collaborate with him.

Levi-Montalcini initially planned to stay in St. Louis for less than a year. Due to the success of her research, she stayed for thirty, eventually retiring as professor emeritus of biology in 1977. In the 1960s, she established the Laboratory of Cell Biology of the Italian National Research Council in Rome, serving as its director until 1979. She died in Italy in 2012 at age 103.

Dr. Helen Nash

Dr. Helen Nash was a pediatrician who broke gender and racial barriers to improve child care in St. Louis. Nash grew up in Atlanta and followed in her father’s footsteps, despite his initial reluctance, by becoming a physician. In 1945, she interned at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, then the only teaching hospital for African-Americans in St. Louis. When she rose to pediatric supervisor, she reduced infant mortality by pushing for more incubators and more hand-washing facilities.

In 1949, Nash was one of the first four African-Americans—and the only woman in the group—to be hired at Washington University-School of Medicine. She worked at Children’s Hospital, where she reduced infant mortality by using individual bassinets for each infant.

As Nash’s obituary recounted, she was a leader in preventing child abuse and she encouraged city officials to fight led poisoning and rat bites, then common for city children. In her private practice, she taught adolescents about sexual health. Dr. Nash died in 2012 at the age of 91.  

Faye Wattleton

Native St. Louisan Faye Wattleton devotes her life to women’s rights and reproductive health. She started college at 16 at The Ohio State University and graduated in 1964 with a bachelor’s in nursing. Two years later, she moved to New York to pursue her master’s degree. While there, she saw firsthand the unsafe and often fatal consequences of illegal abortions and resolved to focus on women’s health. She joined Planned Parenthood in Miami Valley, Ohio, becoming executive director in 1970.

In 1978, Wattleton became the first African-American, the first female, and the youngest president in the history of Planned Parenthood. This organization flourished during her tenure, expanding to 170 affiliates nationwide by the time she resigned in 1992. She published a memoir in 1996, Life on the Line, and is currently a managing director with Alvarez & Marsal in New York, heading the board governance advisory practice.

Reflecting on her career, she says she is humbled to have helped women gain the dignity of control over their bodies and reproductive lives. “I am especially proud of having played a major part — as the longest tenured leader of the premier women’s health and reproductive rights organization — in the progress toward acceptance of women’s access to the exercise of their sexual liberty and childbearing decisions.”

Terri Weaver

Terri Weaver is a nationally recognized PTSD expert who continues to advance our understanding of coping with trauma, especially interpersonal violence. “We now know traumatic events are common and can exact a tremendous toll on your physical and mental health,” says Weaver. “They can even shorten your life.” Her insight is regularly sought by local and national media, and she has commented on the physical and mental effects of Michael Brown's shooting, Shawn Hornbeck's four-year captivity, and the Parkland shooting. 

A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, Weaver earned her doctorate in clinical psychology, then moved to St. Louis in 1995 to be a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In 1999, she joined the faculty of Saint Louis University, where she was the project coordinator of the Pediatric-Psychology Partnership for Abuse Prevention. This was a groundbreaking program that trained psychology graduate students to do perceptive assessments of domestic violence victims before they fell through the cracks. Two outcomes of this project were integrating an assessment of maternal intimate-partner violence during the pediatric visit and including education about domestic violence within most of SLU’s clinical psychology graduate program.

Stay well mentally, physically, socially, and emotionally with our Wellness newsletter.
Or, check out all of our newsletters.