TWiPO #21 ~ Interview with Dr. Beatrice Lampkin

November 29, 2011

Dr. Tim Cripe and co-hosts Dr. Maureen O'Brien and Dr. Raj Nagarajan interview a pediatric hematology/oncology legend, Dr. Beatrice Lampkin, who served as Director of Cincinnati Children's Division of Hematology/Oncology in the 1970’s. This enlightening and inspiring discussion explores her career and her contributions to leukemia therapy and the challenges she faced as an early leader in the field as a female. She describes her experience with polio, paralysis from the neck down, crutches for mobility, and later, her confinement to a wheelchair. Revealing another era in communications with parents and patients in the 1960s and 1970s, she explains how parents were advised to use the term "anemia" to describe their child's condition rather than "leukemia" to to explain why the child would require periodic blood transfusions, in order to prevent shunning by friends and family. Dr. Lampkin also shares her satisfaction in following the earliest survivors of pediatric cancer she treated who are now in their 40s and 50s.

As if all that isn't inspiring enough, she describes her busy retirement in which she continues to teach the Cincinnati Children's Hospital fellows how to examine blood and bone marrow smears under the microscope and her work in the founding of the GLAD House (http://www.gladhouse.org/), a sanctuary to help drug-addicted youth get off the streets.

Please send all comments and questions to twipo@solvingkidscancer.org.