Connie Guion


Connie Myers Guion was an American professor of medicine. She was influential in developing health care systems for the poor in New York City and training programs for new health care professionals at Cornell Medical Center. She founded the Cornell Pay Clinic, which supported the poor in the city and brought in training. She was the first woman to be named professor of clinical medicine, and in 1963 became the first living woman physician to have a building named after her. Up until her death, she made many house calls and ran her own private clinic.

Biography

Early life

Dr. Guion was born in River Bend Plantation near Lincolnton, North Carolina, on August 29, 1882. She was the ninth child of Benjamin and Katherine Caldwell Guion and had eleven siblings. She attended Miss Kate Shipp's School from 1898–1900 and Northfield School for Girls in 1900-1902.

Education and Early Career

Dr. Guion earned a B.A. degree from Wellesley College in 1906. She then became a chemistry instructor at Vassar College and a professor and head of the chemistry department at Sweet Briar College. She earned her M.A. in biochemistry in 1913 with a thesis entitled "Purine Metabolism of the Raccoon, the Opossum, and the Rat" and earned her M.D. in 1917 from Cornell University Medical College graduating first in her class.

Medical career

Residency

During Dr. Guion's medical internship and residency at Second Medical Cornell Division at Bellevue Hospital, she and her peers were working 24-hour ambulatory shifts. Instead, she created a 12-hour shift schedule that the hospital adopted.

Cornell Pay Clinic

Dr. Guion helped create the Cornell Pay Clinic in 1922 to provide affordable and attentive care for the New York City community. She became chief of the Clinic in 1929 which later became the Outpatient Department of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and was the chief until she retired in 1953.

Death

She died on April 30, 1971.