The first woman at Harvard Medical School was a Filipina.
Fe del Mundo was a woman of many firsts. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines and also invented an improvised incubator, a cloth-suspended scale, and a radiant warmer made of bamboo that was widely used in rural areas.
She was also the first woman admitted to Harvard Medical School which only allowed female students almost nine years after she got in.
In 1936, Fe Del Mundo earned a post-graduate scholarship offer to enter Harvard University Medical School. However, she was already in a men’s dorm in Boston when Harvard — which would only open its gates to women in 1949 — realized they allowed a female to be part of their all-male school.
Thanks to her impressive scholastic credentials, Fe del Mundo was finally allowed to stay at Harvard and became its first and only female student at that time.