Photograph courtesy of the Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine
When she arrived in St. Louis in 1920, the first things Mildred Trotter noticed: "the absence of 'keep off the grass' signs and the number of artificial-limb stores located on Olive Street." Wash. U. offered her a grad-school position as a Fellow in Hypertrichiasis, studying the disorder that resulted in Lady Olga's 13-inch beard, not to mention her gig with the Great Orient Family Circus; Trotter grafted patches of rotated skin on the backs of guinea pigs to study hair slope, gathered samples from the Journeymen Barbers' International Union of America, corresponded with the Bureau of Hair Research. Ultimately, though, she was known as a genius of bones. She scrubbed antique Egyptian vertebrae at Oxford and flew to the Pacific after World War II, identifying the dead by their skeletons—her forensic formulas are still used by the FBI. Here, she poses in a classroom against a display of pelvises that, from afar, could almost be mistaken for a 4-H doily exhibit. At far left is Dr. John Finerty, and in the center, Edmund Cowdry, head of the anatomy department. Though Dr. Trotter is 47 here, she's only recently been named a full professor, the first woman to hold that title at the med school. Funny to think a stern committee was assembled to ponder that decision, though Dr. Trotter turned down Oxford to return to St. Louis and its trampled grass, its drowsy traffic, its shopfronts full of prosthetic legs.
