UA College of Medicine Class of 2005 Graduate Becomes
Fifth-Generation Physician and Fourth-Generation Female Physician

 July 7, 2005
Contact: Susan Guthrie, (602) 631-6555                                                        

        Making a strong case for the influence of genetics on career choice, a member of the Class of 2005 of The University of Arizona College of Medicine has become her family’s fifth-generation physician and fourth-generation female physician.

        For more than a century, Anna Woodruff’s family has practiced medicine.  Her great-great grandfather, great-grandparents, grandparents and parents all were physicians.

The family saga begins with Anna’s great-great grandfather, J. Fletcher Byington (born 1832), who was a doctor and worked as a dentist in Michigan.  He trained his wife, Martha Louisa Smith, and after his death in 1872 she continued his dental practice.  Their fourth daughter, Mary Kate “Mamie” Byington (Anna’s great-grandmother), followed in her parents’ footsteps and went to medical school.

        Mamie and Charles Chesterfield Nicola (Anna’s great-grandparents) both graduated from the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor on July 1, 1897.  The couple married on that same day.  Dr. Charles Nicola traveled around Europe with the infamous Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of Corn Flakes.  Dr. Nicola corresponded extensively with his wife, Dr. Mamie Nicola, advising her about how to start a sanatorium in South Lancaster, Mass.  She ultimately started the clinic, while her husband was gallivanting around Europe with Dr. Kellogg.  After her husband disappeared at sea on Feb. 6, 1911, she continued working and raising her children.  Many of her patients reported she helped save their lives during the 1917-1919 flu epidemic.

        Dr. Nicola’s daughter, Hazel Byington Nicola, continued the family’s medical tradition and graduated from the Loma Linda University School of Medicine in Loma Linda, Calif., in 1935.  She married Dr. Roy Paul Woodruff, a medical graduate from the same university.  The two shared a practice in Vallejo, Calif.  Dr. Hazel Byington Nicola Woodruff passed away just months before her granddaughter Anna was born in California in 1997.  Anna grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and later graduated in 1996 from University of California at San Diego in women’s studies.

        The Drs. Woodruff had three sons, two of whom became doctors.  Anna’s father, Paul Woodruff, graduated in 1963 from the Loma Linda University School of Medicine.  Anna’s mother, Nadezda Ludmila Dudová, was born in Czechoslovakia and graduated from Komensky University, Bratislava, Slovakia, in the Faculty of Medicine in 1964.  She practiced as a surgeon until 1968 when politics forced her to flee to the United States.  She completed an anesthesia residency at the University of Utah and passed her boards in 1975.  Paul Woodruff practiced anesthesia at St. Mark’s hospital in Salt Lake City until 2001.

        Despite her family history, Anna says she wasn’t pressured into becoming a doctor.

        “My parents didn’t want me to go to medical school,” she says.  “It’s not an easy lifestyle and they wanted something different for me.”

        Anna was never one to listen to her parents, so this summer she will begin a residency in medicine at University of Arizona-affiliated hospitals in Tucson. She lives with her husband and two-year-old daughter in Tucson.

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EDITORS NOTE:  To arrange interviews with Anna Woodruff, and for photos (including family photos of Drs. Mamie Nicola, Hazel Byington Nicola Woodruff, Paul Woodruff, and Nadezda Ludmila Dudová’s graduation from Komensky University), contact Sáša “not a doctor” Woodruff, (801)641-1442.

 

Susan Guthrie
Senior Public Affairs Coordinator
University of Arizona, College of Medicine
Phoenix Campus
4001 N. Third Street, Suite 401
Phoenix, Arizona  85012
602-631-6555 (office) 480-241-7738 (cell)
sguthrie@email.arizona.edu