By Charlotte Fontaine
This Women’s History Month, we will reflect on the impressive career and life of Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown, who is the epitome of turning “no’s” into “yes’s.”
Brown was born January 7, 1914 in Philadelphia, PA. She was raised in an orphanage until the age of 12 after being put there by her mother at 5 months old, who reclaimed her when she turned 13. However, given the volatile nature of their relationship, Brown preffered being at the orphanage and frequently ran away from her mother. Determined to make a life of her own separate from what she had known, she ran away at age 15 and enrolled herself at Troy High School. The school principal quickly caught on to her unstable living environment and arranged for a foster home to take her in.
Her foster parents, Lola and Samuel Wesley Redmon, became her family for life, and the first source of stability that she had ever known. Upon graduation from Troy High School, Brown was given a scholarship to Bennett College in North Carolina. Her first job out of college was as an inspector in the Rochester New York Army Ordinance Department. However, since she had been a little girl who needed her tonsils removed, she had decided she wanted to be a doctor. This was highly unusual for her age, and race. She then enrolled at Meharry Medical College in Nashville where she graduated in 1948.
Brown became significant to medical history when she chose surgery as her choice of residency. At the time, Black women in the South were not working in general surgery. She credited Dr. Matthew Walker with taking a chance on her, with the public attitude towards the subject being that surgery was too taxing for women in medicine to take on. Brown prevailed, working through a five-year residency at Meharry and George W. Hubbard Hospital, eventually in 1955 becoming Assistant Professor of Surgery. Brown became the first African American woman to be a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
Brown also took an interest in politics, attempting to have a seat in the Tennesee Senate in 1968, though she was not chosen for being seen as too radical with her backing of abortion laws. She then returned to medicine and became Chief of Surgery at Riverside Hospital. Brown was quoted as crediting her success to being “not hard, but durable.”
Brown’s ability to fulfill her purpose continued to expand as she became a clinical professor of surgery at Meharry Medical College, where she once was a student, and became a consultant on education, welfare, and health at the National Institute of Health in the 1980s.
In her personal life, in a near-reflection of the childhood she never experienced, Brown was convinced by a patient of hers to adopt her daughter as the birth mother did not see herself fit to care for the baby. Brown became the first single woman in the state of Tennessee to adopt a child legally. Named lovingly after her foster mother, the little girl was called Lola Denise Brown.
Dorothy Lavinia Brown may not have the most flashy story known to Nashville history, but her strength, intelligence, and boldness should be recongized by the city she called home until her death in 2004. She accomplished so many “firsts” professionally and personally, in the South and for Nashville. Brown opened the pathway for opportunity for so many young Black women in Tennessee, and the U.S. at large.
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