The first female cardiothoracic surgeon
Dr. Nina Starr Braunwald is celebrated today for her key role in the design and implementation of the first prosthetic mitral valve. On her way to becoming the first female cardiothoracic surgeon, she endured gender discrimination and was never promoted to full professor, nor honored with an endowed professorship by her prestigious academic institutions. And yet, her work inspired countless women to pursue surgery as a career, leading the way for a new generation of women surgeons. She was the first woman to be certified by the American Board of Thoracic Surgery and the first to be elected to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. She was an exceptional researcher, teacher and mentor, all while raising three daughters and sustaining a marriage to a prominent cardiologist.
The daughter of a physician, Dr. Braunwald began her medical career at a time when the scope of women’s work was severely restricted and women physicians typically chose less-demanding specialty fields. She received her baccalaureate and medical degrees from New York University, and from 1952 to 1955 trained in general surgery at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, one of the first women to do so. She completed her training in general surgery at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC, with a postdoctoral fellowship in the surgical laboratory of Charles A Hufnagel, inventor of the first artificial heart value.
Her training took her to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), first as a staff surgeon and then as deputy chief of the Clinic of Surgery, a position she held until 1968. In 1960, at the age of 32, she led the operative team that implanted the first successful artificial mitral human heart valve replacement, which she had designed and fabricated. She subsequently developed a cloth-covered mechanical valve (the Braunwald-Cutter valve), which was implanted in thousands of patients in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She made several other significant contributions to heart surgery, such that in the 1960s, Life and Time magazines described her as one of America’s young “movers and shakers.” In 1962, she received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Leaving NIH, she became an associate professor at the University of California San Diego, where she established a cardiothoracic surgery training program. She then moved to Boston to become an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, at the same time serving as staff surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’ Hospital, and consultant at the West Roxbury Veterans Administration Medical Center.
Dr. Braunwald published more than 110 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals and left behind a legacy of awards and fellowships in her name given to women in academic cardiac surgery. These include the Nina Starr Braunwald Research Grant and Fellowship offered by the Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research and Education, and the Nina Starr Braunwald Award offered by the Association of Women Surgeons to a surgical leader who has demonstrated exceptional support of a role for women in academic surgery.
Awards and Honors
- First woman to be certified by the American Association of Thoracic Surgeons
- First woman elected to the American Association of Thoracic Surgery
- Honored by Life and Time magazines
- Golden plate awards (1962) from the American Academy of Achievement
- Various awards and fellowships given to women in her honor
