Jane Cooke Wright, M.D.
from the class of 1945 yearbook, page 106
Dr. Jane Cooke Wright, M.D. (1919-2013) was a pioneer in the use of chemotherapy for cancer treatment. Many of her accomplishments were considered “firsts” in the study, practice, and education of medicine, including her appointment as Associate Dean of Medicine with the New York Medical College.
Birth: November 30, 1919, Manhattan, New York
Death: February 19, 2013, Gutenberg, New Jersey
Education:
At New York Medical College:
Jane Cooke Wright, M.D. (1919-2013) was a prominent clinician and researcher whose work in cancer treatment contributed to the development of more effective chemotherapeutic agents, to impactful techniques of delivering chemotherapy, and to the wider implementation of such life saving treatments. Dr. Wright continually dedicated her time and effort to the wellbeing of cancer patients.
Born in Manhattan in 1919, Dr. Wright faced an impressive legacy straight away. Her father, Dr, Louis T. Wright, was one of the first Black men to graduate from Harvard Medical School and had founded the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center. Dr. Jane C. Wright’s father is remembered as being very supportive of her pursuing a medical doctorate from the New York Medical College.
Dr. Wright received a full scholarship for her studies with the New York Medical through the Walter Gray Crump Scholarship program. She began with the school in 1942 in an accelerated study program, and she graduated in 1945. She completed her internship with Bellevue hospital before beginning her surgical residency at Harlem Hospital, which had been founded by her father.
At a time when chemotherapy was highly contested, Dr. Wright worked with her father to prove the utility of tissue samples in testing chemotherapeutic drugs for effectiveness without risking harm to living patients. After specific drugs were deemed safe enough and effective enough for testing, patients with severe cases agreed to participate in clinical studies as a last resort treatment. Additionally, Dr. Wright contributed significantly to the development of combination therapies with chemotherapeutic agents and the development of techniques that used catheters to administer high doses of these drugs into the patients major blood vessels, flooding cancerous tumors in the patient’s body, hidden or known.
Her highly influential work helped her to gain her position with the New York University Bellevue Medical Center as the Director of Cancer Chemotherapy Research in 1955. In 1964, she was appointed to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke. In 1971, she was the first woman to be elected as the president of the New York Cancer Society. Amidst all of her extraordinary achievements, she decided to return to the New York Medical College.
In 1967, she was appointed an associate dean of the New York Medical College. This made her the first African American woman to hold such a position and the highest ranking African American Woman in a national medical institution. In addition to her administrative responsibilities as Associate Dean, she led the New York Medical College’s Cancer Chemotherapy Department.
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