Steady manner earned doctor respect
June 21, 1930 - Dec. 3, 2017
As one of the few female medical students attending Harvard Medical School in the early 1950s, Barbara Wright at times became so discouraged by men not taking her seriously that she considered dropping out.
But with her mother’s urging, she finished her degree. And when she graduated in 1955, Dr. Wright earned the highest medical board scores recorded that year in the U.S., according to her daughter, Caroline Hayes of Ames, Iowa.
“In medical school, my mother said her male colleagues were not very respectful,” Ms. Hayes said.
By the time Dr. Wright began caring for infants in poor, urban communities as a physician for Allegheny County Health Department clinics in the 1960s, she could shrug off the discrimination she felt as a medical student.
“The patients responded very well to having a female doctor,” Ms. Hayes said. “They thought having someone who understood how to raise babies was exactly what they needed and wanted.”
Dr. Wright, a resident of Friendship Village, died Dec. 3 from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 87.
She grew up in Fergus Falls, Minn., where the Wright family name was prominent. Her great-grandfather founded the town and her grandfather founded an electric company, Otter Tail Power, that now serves customers throughout the state.
But it was a couple of female doctors who influenced Dr. Wright’s medical career, said Ms. Hayes.
One was Dr. Wright’s aunt, a practicing physician near Philadelphia; the other a family friend who like the Wrights owned a summer lake house in Fergus Falls.
“She had two examples of strong women who were doctors and they gave her the idea that women could be doctors,” Ms. Hayes said.
The day after Dr. Wright graduated in 1951 from Barnard College, where she did her undergraduate studies, she married John Richard Hayes, who lived in Oakmont. The couple later divorced.
Following medical school, she interned at Minneapolis General Hospital and worked as a medical technician before having three daughters and staying home to raise them.
After the couple moved to Pittsburgh in 1965 for her husband’s job as a professor in the psychology department at Carnegie Mellon University, the family settled in Fox Chapel and Dr. Wright began working at the county health clinics.
“She loved being a clinician,” Ms. Hayes said. “My sisters and I got to go with her occasionally to see what she did. She was working in inner city neighborhoods in some of the most challenging areas of Pittsburgh. When she had to walk back to her car after dark, no one ever bothered her. She thought that was because they knew who was providing services to the community. She told us they were thinking, ‘That’s the doctor. You don’t mess with her car.’ “
When her daughters reached high school and college, Dr. Wright earned a doctorate in biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh, then joined Pitt’s Student Health Service as a physician.
The students “found her very reassuring,” Ms. Hayes said. “It was her very calm, Minnesota way.
“And she had a funny, dry sense of humor which I think people responded to well.”
Her steady manner benefited the family in 1976 when during a sailing expedition in the Berry Islands district of the Bahamas in the Caribbean, their boat wrecked near a deserted island.
The family spent about 24 hours on the island before being rescued by a fisherman who transported them — at night in a motorboat guided only by his flashlight — to a nearby island where they eventually connected with air transportation to Florida.
While stranded, the family tapped provisions they had packed in their boat for a two-month journey, and collected rainwater which fell every hour or so.
“We sat on the sand and cooked our dinner of canned goods in a little stove,” Ms. Hayes said. “My mother father kept soldiering on, undramatically. All they had to offer the fisherman who rescued us was a bottle of liquor.”
After she retired in 1995, Dr. Wright spent time traveling and pursuing hobbies including photography, raising orchids, and chasing eclipses.
Her health didn’t allow her to view the solar eclipse in August. But Ms. Hayes and other family members gathered in Missouri to watch it and recalled their mother waking them in the middle of the night when they were children to look for lunar eclipses.
She tended orchids for decades and built a greenhouse on the family’s property when they lived in Fox Chapel. Her most recent flowers bloomed on Dec. 3 — the day she died, her daughter noted.
In addition to Ms. Hayes, survivors include two other daughters, Elizabeth Hayes of Herndon, Va., and Marian Gravel of Newburgh, N.Y.; a brother, Thomas Wright of Baltimore, Md.; a sister, Grace Wright of Swarthmore, Pa; and six grandchildren.
A celebration of life featuring personal stories about Dr. Wrightwill be held from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 16 in the library at The Mansions on Fifth, 5105 Fifth Ave.,Shadyside.
Her ashes will be scattered near her family’s lake house in Minnesota next summer.
“We’ll cook a big meal, tell stories, take a family picture and then all go swimming,” said Ms. Hayes. “It will be something happy.”
Memorial contributions may be made to the Orchid Society of Western Pennsylvania, 150 Ammons Dr., McMurray, Pa. 15317 or at OSWP.org; or to the Alzheimer’s Association.