Jane F. Desforges

Desforges was born in 1921 in Melrose, Massachusetts, where she attended Melrose High School.[1] Although her father was a general practitioner, she initially did not want to pursue a career in medicine; she majored in chemistry at Wellesley College and then followed a friend to enroll at Tufts University School of Medicine.[1][2] When she graduated in 1945, she was one of five women in a graduating class of 98 men. She met her husband Gerald Desforges (who would later become a thoracic surgeon) at medical school, and married him in 1948.[1]

Desforges worked as a resident at Boston City Hospital before moving to Salt Lake City to complete a fellowship with the hematologist Maxwell Wintrobe. After a year in Salt Lake City, she returned to Boston City Hospital, where she would remain for the next 25 years in a variety of roles including the director of laboratories and physician-in-charge of the Tufts University hematology laboratory. As a hematologist, she specialized sickle cell anemia and Hodgkin lymphoma.[2] She became a professor of medicine at Tufts in 1972,[3] and during her tenure she received the medical school's Outstanding Teacher Award for thirteen years in a row.[4] She served as an associate editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1960 to 1993, was president of the American Society of Hematology, was made a member of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), and received the Massachusetts Medical Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.[3]

Desforges retired in 1995 and died on September 7, 2013.[3]