PIONEERING SPIRIT

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Apr 13, 2008 | by MELISSA CASSUTT

Her high school counselor scoffed at the idea. Her dad was ashamed to hear it. Her childhood friends never even knew. Women just weren't doctors in the

1950s. They were nurses or teachers -- preferably homemakers. So on the rare occasion Amilu Rothhammer admitted she wanted to be a physician, few people took her seriously.

Even after she became one.

Patients didn't mind her gender -- it was her colleagues that often pushed back. Pharmacists called her "sir" after she ordered a prescription. Nurses handed her bedpans to take to the supply room.

"It was interesting trying to get people used to working with a woman doctor," said Rothhammer, now 70. "I didn't let it bother me too much. There was a lot of chauvinism."

When she started, her colleagues wouldn't refer patients to her. These days, even competing surgeons are sad to see her leave the field. In January, after 36 years working as a surgeon in Colorado Springs, Rothhammer retired.

"All those articles about the physician shortage -- you're just contributing to it," teased Dr. William Chambers at Rothhammer's recent retirement party at Penrose Hospital.

"Totally irresponsible," chimed in Dr. John Marta.

Though she's known for her firsts -- Rothhammer graduated with the first female class at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and became the first female president of the Western Surgical Association -- her career milestones aren't praised as often as her skill in the operating room.

"She's not your average surgeon," said Marta, an anesthesiologist who worked with Rothhammer for 35 years. "She is superb."

Words of encouragement

"I guess this pioneer spirit has always been within me," Rothhammer said.

It was her grandmother, whom Rothhammer is named after, who inspired her.

"She was really the role model for me," Rothhammer said. "She'd tell me, 'You can do what you set your mind to. Don't let anyone tell you (that) you can't.'"

As a student at Central High School in Pueblo, Rothhammer decided she wanted to be a doctor. The career path was rejected by her high school counselor, one of the first who knew of Rothhammer's dream.

"She told me that girls didn't go to medical school," Rothhammer said. "She told me girls become nurses."

After graduating in 1955, Rothhammer accepted a full-ride scholarship to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. Then she married, and began working in a blood bank in Denver.

About a year later her husband was accepted at Jefferson Medical College. She became a chemistry technician in the research lab of Dr. John Gibbon, a surgeon who performed the first open-heart operation with his invention of the heart-lung machine.

Her first child, Joe, was born in 1960. The same year, Rothhammer applied to Jefferson Medical College, hoping to become part of the first class open to female students.

"She was interviewed by three psychiatrists to see if she was crazy or not," said Dr. Tom Russell, executive director of the American College of Surgeons and a longtime friend.

They wanted to know how she, a married woman with a child, was going to go to school. The other applicants were single and childless.

She admits she wasn't sure. There weren't many women before her who had balanced the two. Her family pushed her to be a homemaker, like her two sisters.

"I had no support from my family at all," Rothhammer said. "If you asked my father what I was doing he would have denied it."

She was accepted into the college, and while at school she delivered her second son, Bill Martin, who's now a lawyer in Denver.

(A note on names: Rothhammer was the name of Amilu's second husband and the name by which most patients and colleagues know her. Martin was the last name of her first husband. She recently married a third time, but legally she's taken her maiden name, Stewart.)

"She's very strong-willed and independent, and she's been a great, stable and supportive force in my life," Martin said. "She's done a lot and she's been a trailblazer, but I can't remember her being driven to do it because there hadn't been a woman who'd done it before. I think she's known what she wanted to be forever and she has not let anyone stand in her way."

After graduating med school, Rothhammer and her family moved back to Colorado, where her husband had a residency at the University of Colorado Denver. She completed a yearlong internship at the university, before attempting to land an OB/GYN residency.

She was denied by the department chair, she said.

"Actually, he did me a favor," Rothhammer said. "(He) got me directed to where I should have been."

General surgery.

Many accomplishments

She helped found the Penrose Emergency Physicians' Corporation in 1972, which pioneered a project that put doctors in the emergency room 24/7.

Previously, ER doctors were on call during late-night and earlymorning hours.

In 2000, she was named the first female president of the Western Surgical Association, an exclusive group dedicated to education and surgical advancement.