Yvonne S. Thornton

1947—

Physician, author

In the 1970s Yvonne S. Thornton became the first African-American woman to achieve board certification as a physician with expertise in both maternal and fetal medicine. The high-risk pregnancy specialist has a New York City practice and teaches at her alma mater, Columbia University, but she also gained a measure of fame for her 1995 memoir The Ditchdigger's Daughters: A Black Family's Astonishing Success Story. In it she details her working-class New Jersey childhood as one of six sisters whose construction-worker father was determined that each would go on to medical school and become a doctor. The Thornton story was so remarkable that as far back as 1977 the family was profiled by Georgia Dullea of the New York Times for Father's Day. In it, Donald Thornton told Dullea that he fixated on medicine as a career for his young girls back in the 1950s because, in part, "I didn't know at that time things would get better for blacks. I just figured that if they was doctors, you know, you could be green and if you're a good doctor any person in pain would say, ‘Hey, help me.’"

Donald Thornton had quit high school after the tenth grade, served in the U.S. Navy, and worked two full-time jobs as a construction worker and janitor for twenty-five years. Thornton was born in 1947 in New York City, but her parents eventually moved to public housing in Long Branch, New Jersey, and then to a home on Ludlow Street. Itasker, their mother, was a domestic servant and also committed to seeing her five daughters and one foster child through college. As Thornton recalled in an article she wrote for Medical Economics, their mother sometimes said to them, "‘See that black woman wheeling that expensive baby carriage?…. There's a white baby in that carriage, and that's what happens when you don't have a diploma. You take care of white ladies' children. You clean white ladies' houses.’"

There was another extraordinary facet of the Thornton family that Thornton chronicled in her memoir: For fifteen years the sisters played weekend gigs as a jazz sextet, the Thornton Sisters. Their musical education began in the late 1950s, when Donna, the eldest sister, began taking saxophone lessons. Yvonne followed by playing the saxophone as well, Jeanette took up the guitar, Linda became the drummer, Rita played piano, and their mother learned to play the bass. Their first brush with fame came when they appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour in 1959, an early television-era version of American Idol, and they went on to win the weekly amateur contest at Harlem's Apollo Theater and record for the Roulette and Atlantic labels. The girls were delighted by their professional success, but their father was adamant about keeping them in school full time rather than letting them pursue music as a career. "These people are fickle," Thornton recalled her father saying, according to a speech she gave to educators in 2000 that was quoted in the magazine Reading Today. "They love you today; they'll love somebody else tomorrow."

Entered Columbia Medical School

Instead, the Thornton Sisters played at New York and New Jersey college campuses on weekends, and the income they earned helped pay for their college tuition costs. Unlike a few of her sisters, Thornton was sure that she wanted to become a physician at an early age. Her father's sister was a nurse and once took her to the hospital where she worked; the eight-year-old Thornton boarded an elevator and was astonished when one of the passengers went into labor. "The elevator doors opened, and hospital personnel rushed in and whisked mother and child away," she recalled in the Medical Economics article. "Wow, I thought to myself, she got on the elevator one person and got off two people…. How babies were delivered was unknown to me. I simply knew that I wanted to be present when one person became two."

Thornton won a scholarship to Barnard College, the women's school affiliated with Columbia University in New York City, but her strict father did not let any of his daughters leave home during their undergraduate years. Instead, she attended Monmouth College in northern New Jersey, like her sisters did, and lived at home. In the spring of 1968, she and her sisters were scheduled to perform at Princeton University on the night before she was to take the arduous Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) on the same Ivy League campus. She had just finished her finals exams at Monmouth that day, too, and she recalled in the Medical Economics article that the audience members "were yelling and screaming encores. Finally I said, ‘Hey, look, I got to get some sleep. I'm taking my MCAT tomorrow.’ ‘Yeah. Right,’ the guys laughed. To them it was like Tina Turner was going to step off the stage and turn into Mother Superior." Thornton was so tired the next day that she actually collapsed after finishing the MCAT. Some of the fellow test-takers who rushed to her aid were astonished to recognize her from the previous evening's festivities. They wanted to take her to the campus infirmary, but she directed them to deliver her to the campus performance venue instead, where she and her sisters were scheduled to play again that night.

At a Glance …

Born Yvonne Shirley Thornton on November 21, 1947, in New York City, NY; daughter of Donald E. Thornton (a laborer) and Itasker F. (Edmonds) Thornton (a domestic worker); married Shearwood J. McClelland (an orthopedic surgeon), June 8, 1974; children: Shearwood III and Kimberly Itaska. Military service: U.S. Navy, medical corps, 1979-82. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Baptist. Education: Monmouth College, BS, 1969; Columbia University, MD, 1973, MPH, in health policy and management, 1996.

Career: Thornton Sisters, saxophonist, 1961-76; Roosevelt Hospital, resident in obstetrics and gynecology, 1973-77; Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, fellow in maternal-fetal medicine, 1977-79; Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, 1979-82; Cornell University Medical College, assistant professor, 1982-89, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, 1989-92, assistant attending, 1982-89; New York Lying-in Hospital, assistant attending, 1982-89, associate attending of obstetrics and gynecology, 1989-92; New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, director of clinical services, department of obstetrics and gynecology, 1982-88, director of chorionic villus sampling program, 1984-92, Rockefeller University Hospital, visiting associate physician, 1986—; Morristown Memorial Hospital, director of perinatal diagnostic testing center, 1992—; Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, associate clinical professor, 1995—.

Memberships: American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (diplomate), American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (fellow), American College of Surgeons, American Medical Association, Association of Women Surgeons, Society of Perinatal Obstetricians.

Addresses: Office—St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1000 Tenth Ave., Ste. 11A61, New York, NY 10019.

Thornton graduated from the medical school of Columbia University with honors in 1973, and she completed her residency at New York City's Roosevelt Hospital in 1977. She recalled in the Medical Economics article that even though she was the only African-American resident in her program, there was much greater bias against women doctors at the time. The chief resident liked to remind her and the other women that "‘you'll get pregnant and have babies and all this training I'm giving you, it's going to be totally lost.’ He piled work on the women and looked for opportunities to show us up." Thornton went on to staff positions at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and with the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, while serving in the U.S. Navy medical corps. In 1982 she joined the faculty of Cornell University Medical College, and in 1995 she began teaching at Columbia University. By then she had been married for twenty years to Shearwood J. McClelland, an orthopedic surgeon whom she had met at Columbia Medical School and who came from a similar background—his father was a steelworker in Gary, Indiana. The couple have two children.

Adapted Book for Television

Three of the Thorntons earned doctor's degrees: Yvonne, plus Jeanette, who became a psychiatrist, and Linda, an oral surgeon. Rita is an attorney, and Betty, their foster sister, became a nurse. The oldest Thornton sister, Donna, was a court stenographer and homemaker who died of lupus in 1993 at the age of forty-eight. The Ditchdigger's Daughters was published in 1995 and was made into a television movie of the same name two years later. The screen version concluded with the 1983 funeral of their father, showing the six daughters as pallbearers for his casket. Their mother had died six years earlier, the same year as the New York Times article that described its Father's Day visit back in Long Branch. Donald Thornton told Dullea that when he first visited Yvonne at the hospital where she was practicing, he was thrilled to hear her paged as "Dr. Thornton" over the public-address system. "Of course, I was always a laborer. I didn't go beyond the 10th grade, but—oh!—it made me feel so good and so proud, you know, because I see myself in her … I see myself in all my girls."