In Her Words
Letters from Vilray P. Blair and Ruth Ingram to Virginia Minnich, May 1932
On December 10, 1914, Virginia Minnich’s dress caught fire and she was burned from the waist up to her eyes. She was horribly disfigured and endured almost 30 operations from 1915 to 1952. Minnich traveled from her family home in Zanesville, Ohio to Columbus for the first several operations. In 1923 Minnich came to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis to be treated by Dr. Vilray Papin Blair, a well-known plastic surgeon who had been chief consultant of maxillo-facial surgery for the A.E.F. during World War I.
Minnich later recounted, “While I was seeing Dr. Blair, I had decided to go into nursing. But he advised me against nursing because of the over-supply of nurses at that time. Of course, I took this personally and believed I was discouraged from nursing because of my appearance.” *
Ruth Ingram, director of the Washington University School of Nursing, gave Minnich similarly discouraging advice about entering the nursing school. Ingram suggested the fields of social work or dietetics as alternatives. Minnich chose dietetics, studying Home Economics at Ohio State University (B.S., 1937) and Nutrition at Iowa State College (M.S., 1938). After completing her master’s degree, Minnich decided she did not want to work solely with women, so she wrote to Dr. Carl V. Moore, with whom she had worked at Ohio State University’s hematology lab. Dr. Moore, in turn, offered Minnich a job at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he was about to set up the new hematology division.
* WUSM Outlook, Spring 1978, p. 8
Letter from Vilray P. Blair to Virginia Minnich, May 11, 1932 |
Letter from Ruth Ingram to Virginia Minnich, May 9, 1932 |
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