When Hannah Alter, MD ’18, received her medical degree, like many classmates, she’d invited her family to witness and celebrate the occasion. Completing medical school is a huge accomplishment, and Yale is among the most rigorous medical schools in the world. Present with the family was Alter’s grandmother, Jocelyn Malkin, MD ‘52, and Edith, Alter’s 6-month-old daughter.
Malkin didn’t have to walk far—now retired after over 40 years of practice, she lives in New Haven, the city where she received her own degree from Yale School of Medicine. Her career included appointments at such institutions as the Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies, the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute (where she was director), Georgetown University, and George Washington University, and a stint as President of the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine. Due in part to the quotas of another era, Malkin may have been the first Yalie from a certain generation to see her granddaughter finish medical school. In Malkin’s time, five students out of a class of 50, or 10 percent of the class, were permitted to be women.
Heading to Columbia to pursue her residency in psychiatry, Alter feels that her grandmother’s experiences helped lay the groundwork for her career path, and in more ways than one.
“I had a wonderful experience overall,” says Alter, who led the HAVEN Free Clinic as Executive Director for a year, and participated in numerous programs designed to give back to the New Haven community. “I wanted to come to Yale because of the Yale System. But also, I was aware of my grandmother’s experiences here, what she accomplished. She taught me it was okay to be strong, and that it was possible to overcome any obstacle.” Alter feels that she owes her positive experiences at Yale School of Medicine to her grandmother and people like her, who lived in a very different world than that of the 21st century.
When Malkin arrived at Yale School of Medicine in 1947, for example, accommodations were catch as catch can for medical students. Her first quarters were not what one would describe as luxurious. “You had to look around in town for a place to live,” remembers Malkin. “I found a place in a nurse’s house. She had a room up on the top floor that I finally was able to get on Howe Street. It was so cold … she had a thermostat over her radiator and it would read 48 degrees.” The pursuit of medicine was difficult and austere, but it also meant one could aspire to certain comforts, with time. “They had tenements that were what the med students lived in, near the hospital,” says Malkin. “I finally got into there and had a room with heat, which was very special.”
To see rows and rows of women waiting for their degrees, it was very warming. It’s been a long, hard road.
Jocelyn Malkin
Malkin, who serves on the executive committee of the Medical School Alumni Association, says that women were welcomed and supported by their classmates, and attributes part of that to the influence of WWII. “Many of my classmates, and my eventual husband (an ex-Marine, who was an undergraduate at the time), had returned recently from Europe or the Pacific, and were entering medicine as a way of getting on with their lives, putting their past behind them, finding a way to give back … they were officers and gentlemen, and helped create an inclusive culture in my class and the university.” She was married at the end of her first year. Her husband, Myron S. Malkin, earned his PhD in physics at Yale and later went on to direct the first U.S. space shuttle program.
Having grown up with Malkin’s stories about medical school and the challenges she faced as a young woman, Alter feels especially fortunate to have attended Yale School of Medicine when she did. “We’ve come a long way in terms of women doctors having families and making that work. My grandmother was called ‘nurse-doctor’ on hospital wards, and patients didn’t believe she was their doctor … she was turned away from the local psychoanalytic institute because she hadn’t had children yet,” says Alter. “It gives me an historical perspective on where we are, and where we still need to go.”
Malkin says that as pleasant as her time was at YSM, watching the YSM culture approach true equity has been inspiring; especially at her granddaughter’s graduation ceremony. “To see rows and rows of women waiting for their degrees, it was very warming. It’s been a long, hard road.”