Google shows Doodle for Fe del Mundo | Short Biography of Dr. Fe del Mundo

The Search Engine Google is showing this Doodle in few Countries for celebrating Fe del Mundo’s109th Birthday. Fe Del Mundo was a Filipino pediatrician. She was the first woman admitted as a student of the Harvard Medical School. And, she founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines. Doctor Fe Del Mundo was honored with a lot of Awards for her self-less medical service to the people over the span of 70 years. Doctor Fe Del Mundo was born on November 27th in Manila in the Philippines in 1911. She was the sixth of eight children. Her father served one term in the Philippine Assembly. Three of her eight siblings died in infancy, while an older sister died from appendicitis at age 11. This older sister had the ambition of becoming a Doctor for the Poor. Her death spurred young Fe Del Mundo towards the medical profession. She enrolled in the University of the Philippines and earned her medical degree in 1933. She passed the medical board exam that same year the president of the Philippines offered her a full scholarship to study any medical field of her choice at any school in the United States. She chose Harvard Medical School. But Harvard Medical School was not taking women students at that time. Due to an oversight, Harvard officials didn’t realize Fe’s gender and unwittingly enrolled their first female student. The mistake wasn’t realized until Fe arrived in Boston in 1936. The head of pediatrics claimed there was no reason to turn her away since she’d already been admitted. Fe del Mundo then became the first female student at Harvard Medical School, over ten years before the school officially began admitting women, and the only woman to be enrolled at the time. After attending the University of Chicago and completing her Master’s degree in bacteriology at the Boston University School of Medicine, Fe del Mundo returned to the Philippines in1941. She began working with the International Red Cross and set up a hospice at an internment camp during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. She became known as “The Angel of Santo Tomas” for her work helping children detained at the University of Santo Tomas. After the Japanese shut down her hospice in 1943, the mayor of Manila asked her to set up a government hospital. She became director of the new medical center, but the constraints of working for the government made here to leave and start a private hospital. To fund her hospital, Fe sold her home and almost everything she owned. The Children’s Medical Center, the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines, opened in 1957. The following year, she conferred her ownership of the hospital to a board of trustees. In her lifetime she published over a hundred articles, reviews, and reports in medical journals. Fe also wrote the “Textbook of Pediatrics”, which was used in medical schools in the Philippines for many years. Throughout her career, she was active in promoting public health. Her work also helped to improve the coordination between hospitals, doctors, and midwives. Fe Del Mundo revolutionized Philippine medicine, making major breakthroughs in immunization and in the treatment of jaundice, and providing healthcare to thousands of poor families. She is credited with studies that led to the invention of the incubator and jaundice relieving device. Since she sold her home to open her Hospital, she lived in the hospital itself for the rest of her life. She was still making rounds to check on patients when she was wheelchair-bound at the age of99. She passed away from a heart attack just a few months before her 100th birthday in 2011. In 1977, Fe Del Mundo received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for outstanding public service. She also received the 15th International Congress of Pediatrics award as the most outstanding pediatrician and humanitarian in 1977. She was also the first woman to be named National Scientist of the Philippines in 1980.