Mind and Heart

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Through the American Medical Women's Association, Judelson created and chaired an education project on coro­nary heart disease in women that has trained more than 17,000 primary-care physicians. She coauthored the American College of Cardiology guidelines for prevention of cardio­vascular disease in women. And through her books, such as The Women's Complete Wellness Book, she has reached women and health practitioners around the world.

Though passionate about women's health, Judelson considers herself a somewhat accidental doctor. As a materials science major at MIT, she hadn't considered medicine until her junior year, when she worked on a project annealing the alloy Vitallium for use in prosthetic devices--for which the American Society of Materials Science Engineering named her the outstanding student nationwide in metallurgy and materials science engineering. As a freshman, however, she had begun supplementing her Course III requirements with pre-med chemistry and biology courses--mainly because her roommates told her their organic-chemistry professor was "cute," and Nobel laureate ­Salvador Luria happened to be teaching biology. "Who doesn't want to take a class with a cute professor or a Nobel Prize winner?" she says.

Having finished nearly all the requirements for her bachelor's in metallurgy and materials science engineering in just three years, ­Judelson started medical school her senior year as one of the first students to enroll in the ­Harvard-­MIT joint program in health sciences and technology. She earned her MD from Harvard Medical School in 1976.

"I hated it," she says of med school. "MIT taught you how to learn and gave you a degree of freedom to pursue inquiries you were passionate about. In medical school, they teach you to memorize a lot of stuff. Some things were fascinating--dissecting a human body, for instance. But not much else."

In medical school, Judelson was discouraged from going into orthopedics, though she'd planned to apply her materials science background to bone mechanics and prostheses. "They told me I had to be a big, burly guy to be an orthopedist," she says. So after an internship and residency in internal medicine at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco, she convinced her future husband, AJ Willmer '75, to move south and accepted a cardiology fellowship at Kaiser in Los Angeles. (The couple met at MIT, and their two daughters would also attend the Institute.)

Thus, Judelson turned to mastering the mechanics of the heart. It was not, in her estimation, a radical departure. "The heart, after all, is a pump that behaves according to biomechanical prin­ciples. And of course, you've got Ohm's law at work," she says, alluding to electrical conduction in heart muscle. "V = IR in the myocardium, too."