Jane Cooke Wright

Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan on the thirtieth of November 1919, into a family already woven into the story of American medicine. Her father, Louis Tompkins Wright, graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1915 — fourth in his class, among the earliest African American graduates of that institution — and became a founding force in American oncology at Harlem Hospital. In that household of purpose, Jane was raised to believe that a life could be spent dissolving what others called impossible.

She earned her medical degree from New York Medical College in 1945 and soon joined her father at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. There she pioneered the use of human tissue cultures — rather than laboratory mice — to test how drugs acted on a patient's own cancer cells, and in 1951 she helped establish methotrexate as an effective treatment against tumors, including breast cancer and skin cancer.

Wright's genius lay in sequence and dose: she studied not merely which drugs to combine, but in what order and measure, laying groundwork for modern combination chemotherapy. In 1964 she was among the seven physicians who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and in 1967 she became associate dean and head of the cancer chemotherapy department at New York Medical College — then the highest-ranking African American woman at a nationally recognized medical school.

She carried her craft across the world, leading oncology delegations to Africa, China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Jane Cooke Wright died on the nineteenth of February 2013, at ninety-three. May she be honored as a healer who turned the machinery of medicine toward mercy, and taught a stubborn disease to yield.