Dr. Margaret D. Craighill, 1898-1977: The military’s first commissioned woman doctor changed the way the Army – and the VA – practiced medicine.

By Craig Collins

It took two world wars, but the American military was finally compelled, in 1943, to get over the belief that doctors should be men and nurses should be women.

Many women had already defied this stereotype by the time the United States entered World War I, but despite the great need for their expertise, none were considered for military service as physicians. Ultimately, the U.S. Army hired more than 50 women doctors as contractors during World War I, but none were commissioned. At the beginning of World War II, the doctors in the Army and Navy Medical Corps were all men.

The workforce demands of World War II led to the formation of what would become the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), which began as an auxiliary unit that, again, hired women nurses and doctors as contractors before conferring “relative rank” onto commissioned nurses.

Maj. Margaret D. Craighill.

U.S. National Library of Medicine Photo

During the war, about 147,000 women served in the auxiliary or the WAC, and by 1943 it was obvious that this new corps of medical professionals needed its own women leaders. On May 28, 1943, Margaret D. Craighill, MD, a 44-year-old doctor and dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, was appointed as the Army’s first woman medical officer. Two weeks before the director of the WAC, Oveta Culp Hobby, received her own commission as an active-duty colonel, Craighill had become the first woman doctor to become a commissioned medical officer in the Medical Corps, with the rank of major.

It wouldn’t be the last time Craighill would set a historic precedent. Her career has left an indelible mark not only on the military, but also on the Veterans Health Administration – and on the entire medical profession.

BORN TO SERVICE

It shouldn’t be surprising that Craighill was drawn to military service; she was a third-generation Army officer. Born in October 1898 in Southport, North Carolina, she was one of six daughters. Her father, Col. William E. Craighill, and her grandfather, Brig. Gen. William Price Craighill, were West Point graduates who served in the Army Corps of Engineers – her grandfather as Chief of Engineers from 1895 to 1897.

Her first job after college was with the Army: Craighill graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin in 1920 with an A.B. degree, remained to complete a Master of Sciences degree in 1921, and then took a year off from her studies to work as a physiologist for the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service (now the Chemical Corps) at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. Soon she was accepted and enrolled in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she earned her MD in 1924. For the next few years, she held several postgraduate positions at Johns Hopkins, where she was assistant resident of gynecology until 1928, and at Yale University, where she was an assistant instructor of pathology.

Margaret D. Craighill, center, the only woman in this group photo among otherwise male members of the Army Medical Corps.

After leaving Johns Hopkins, Craighill was an assistant surgeon at Bellevue Hospital in New York, working under the supervision of J.A. McCreery, MD. During this time she maintained her own obstetrics and gynecology practice in Greenwich, Connecticut, while also serving as an assistant surgeon and attending gynecologist at Greenwich Hospital.

Craighill’s impressive career in women’s health attracted the attention of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP, now part of the Drexel University College of Medicine), the second medical institution in the world established to educate and train women to earn the MD degree. In 1940 – by which time the school had graduated more than 1,000 women physicians – Craighill was appointed acting dean. She saw opportunities for reform and improvement in the 90-year-old school, and launched major changes to the curriculum, improvements in studentfaculty relations, and a better working relationship with the Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia – the teaching hospital where many students earned their first clinical experience.

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The “acting” designation was quickly dropped from Craighill’s title, and she was named dean of the medical college. While she held this appointment, she was also assistant gynecologist at Philadelphia General Hospital. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Craighill took an immediate interest, joining the War Manpower Commission and the Procurement and Assignment Service within the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services – an organization designed to field requests for medical and dental personnel from federal agencies, maintain a list of available personnel, and stimulate interest among medical professionals in volunteering for military service.

Within two years, Craighill’s involvement in the war effort would become much more direct.

A MILITARY FIRST

In his profile of Margaret D. Craighill in the spring 2018 edition of the Army Historical Foundation’s journal, On Point, Lt. Col. G. Alan Knight notes that one of her close friends and allies – and almost certainly one of the people who influenced her appointment to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania – was the eminent Emily Dunning Barringer, MD, a pioneering physician whose many firsts included her service as the nation’s first woman surgical resident.

Barringer, who became president of the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) in 1942, was among those who lobbied for women doctors to serve as commissioned officers in the Army

Craighill, starting from scratch, initiated and developed medical policies related to Army women.

Lt. Col. Margaret D. Craighill receiving the Legion of Merit Award in 1945. She went to work for the VA in 1946.

Medical Reserve Corps. On its website, the Army’s Office of Medical History points out the dire need at the war’s outset: “Five months after the declaration of World War II, approximately 3,000 fewer physicians were on active duty with the Army than at the end of the same length of time after the declaration of World War I.”

Congress needed little further convincing, and the law known as the Sparkman-Johnson Act – which granted women the right to receive commissions in the Medical Corps of the Army and the Navy, as well as in the U.S. Public Health Service – was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on April 16, 1943. Within three days, Craighill was offered an appointment to the Medical Corps, and her Army upbringing compelled her to act: She divested herself of her civilian responsibilities and obtained a leave of absence from the medical college, and was commissioned about six weeks later.

Before passage of the law, Army women belonged to the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), a unit of women trained primarily to fill roles such as switchboard operators, mechanics, bakers, drivers, and clerks. Tens of thousands more women enlisted in the corps than had been anticipated, and the Sparkman-Johnson Act was motivated, in part, by the understanding that these women would need qualified professionals to organize, coordinate, and oversee their working and living conditions, including their health care – and the knowledge that qualified professionals were more likely to join an organization that would recognize them with commissions.

When Craighill was commissioned, the WAAC had been reorganized as the WAC and incorporated into the Army. She was assigned to be Consultant for Women’s Health and Welfare within the Preventive Medicine Division of the Office of the Surgeon General, reporting directly to the Army surgeon general and in liaison with WAC Director Col. Hobby.

Lt. Col. Margaret D. Craighill with Director of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) Col. Oveta Culp Hobby.

It was an unprecedented role. Craighill, starting from scratch, initiated and developed medical policies related to Army women. One of her first undertakings was to visit Army induction stations to learn how medical screening was affecting WAC recruitment. She found that at most enlistment stations, women were screened in the same way as men, often by people who had little or no training in women’s health – which resulted in women with tumors, or pregnant women, being inducted. Craighill developed and implemented new procedures that included examinations for pregnancy, tumors in reproductive organs, and other medical concerns Craighill described as “problems of health peculiar to women.” She established standards for screening and for women’s medical care, and over time, as women’s health needs were addressed, the rate at which women recruits were rejected increased, while the rate of disability discharges decreased significantly.

During the war, Craighill was responsible for inspecting the field conditions of all women in the Army, including the provision of medical care and the development and implementation of hygiene courses. She met with a board of Army physicians to create a set of standards for acceptability of women medical officers, and served as an adviser on their assignment. In their book, Women Doctors in War, Judith Bellafaire and Mercedes Herrera Graf noted that this advisory role sometimes chafed: “… there was a strong tendency,” they wrote, “to assign [women doctors] as women, rather than as doctors.” Craighill believed these doctors were too often assigned to WAC units, to treat women, rather than to units where their expertise could do the most good.

Craighill also wanted desperately to go overseas. It took her a year and a half to convince her superiors that she should do so – but when she did, she undertook an inspection tour of women’s living conditions that lasted eight months and spanned the globe, taking her to facilities in England, France, Italy,

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Egypt, the African Gold Coast, Iran, India, China, the Philippines, and New Guinea. In all, she traveled an estimated 56,000 miles, dispelling fears that women would perform poorly in cold or tropical climates.

The mental health of Army women before, during, and after service became a particular interest for Craighill, who stressed the importance of standards for evaluating mental health. She advocated for establishing mental health units in WAC training centers to improve the performance of examiners. This was ultimately done in 1944 by Col. William C. Menninger, who’d founded, with his father and brother, the world-renowned Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric school and clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

Craighill, Col. Elizabeth C. Strayhorn, commandant of the WAC Training Center at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, and WAC Deputy Director Lt. Col. Helen Hamilton pictured during a WAC officer conference at Fort Des Moines, Sept. 18, 1945.

For her distinguished service in World War II, Craighill was promoted to lieutenant colonel and awarded the Legion of Merit. She separated from service on April 8, 1946.

CHARTING A NEW COURSE FOR VA HEALTH CARE

Even before she’d left the Army, Craighill was tapped by Gen. Omar Bradley to conduct an inspection tour of Veterans Administration hospitals “to give some suggestions,” she wrote to a colleague, “on the care of women patients.” It was the first position of its kind in the VA. Her time as chief consultant on medical care for women veterans established a historic precedent; as she’d done in the Army, Craighill advocated for increasing the numbers – and expanding the roles – of women doctors in VA hospitals. In 1946, nine other women doctors were assigned to VA posts across the country – two of them graduates from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Their mission was “to see that medical care for women veterans in VA hospitals and homes over the country [was] kept at the highest possible standard at all times.”

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This effort to develop standards and policies for women’s health care evolved into what became, in 1951, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. The offices and programs in place within the VA today – the Women Veterans Health Care Program, the Women’s Health Research Network, the Women’s Health Services Office, and more – can all trace their origins back to the work begun by Craighill and her colleagues after World War II.

Craighill returned briefly to the WMCP after her service, with the intent to remove the “Woman’s” designation and eliminate the gender stereotypes she’d seen holding women doctors back in the Army. Her efforts to create a coeducational medical school by negotiating a merger of WMCP and Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, however, were thwarted, and she resigned in frustration. The merger eventually happened – in 1970.

The G.I. Bill offered Craighill the chance to resume her studies, and she jumped at the opportunity to learn more about the field that had fascinated her during the war: In 1946, she enrolled at the newly established Menninger Foundation School of Psychiatry in Topeka, and graduated as a member of its first class. She served as chief of the psychosomatic section at the Winter VA Hospital in Topeka from 1948 to 1951, when she joined the staff of the Menninger Clinic. Ultimately she decided to return east to continue her studies, and graduated from the New York Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1952.

Until 1960, Craighill conducted her own private practice in medicine and psychology in New Haven, Connecticut, but maintained her interest in women service members, writing and publishing many articles on the mental health of women in the Army. She also served as chief psychiatrist in residence at the Connecticut College for Women in New London. Craighill died at the age of 78 on July 20, 1977, at her home in Southbury, Connecticut.

As a pioneer, Craighill had often been frustrated with how women doctors were viewed and treated: “I must acknowledge that I am feeling discouraged over any progress I can make in regard to establishing better conditions for the women doctors,” she wrote to a colleague, Capt. Gladys Osborne, during the war. “There is such a deep-rooted prejudice which arises in such unexpected places, it leaves me baffled sometimes.” But the progress she did make was remarkable – historic. Her legacy is indelible today, in the quality of medical care delivered to women service members and Veterans, and in the service of women at the highest levels of the medical profession.