Great Women Who’ve Made a Mark on Diabetes History
Dr. M. Joycelyn Edwards
For starters, this woman was the first person in Arkansas to become board-certified in pediatric endocrinology. That was remarkable in itself, as she was born to poor farming parents in a poverty-stricken, rural area of the state. She scrubbed floors to help pay her tuition and her siblings picked extra cotton and did chores for neighbors to help pay for her bus fare for college. She then joined the Army after college and went on to train in physical therapy, before eventually devoting her career to pediatric endocrinology and publishing hundreds of academic papers on childhood diabetes and growth. If that accomplishment wasn’t history-making enough, she went on to become the first African American to serve as Surgeon General of the United States in 1993 and was also the second woman to serve as head of the U.S. Public Health Service.
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