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AI: So, today's April 4, 2003. We're continuing our interview with Dr. Ruby Inouye. I'm Alice Ito with Densho. Co-interviewing is Dee Goto and Dana Hoshide is videographer. And Dr. Ruby, yesterday we covered a lot of the early portion of your life, your family's background from Japan, your childhood and growing-up years, going to high school, starting college at University of Washington, then, of course the beginning of World War II and having to leave Seattle and go into the camps. And then your, the whole process of applying to get leave clearance and permission to go out of camp and the assistance you got to relocate to go to college in Texas, and then, of course, your difficulties, but eventually your ability to go to medical school. And we had gotten up to the ending of your internship year and I wanted to go back a little ways into your medical school years. And you were at the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia. So I wanted to ask a little bit about whether the fact that it was a women's medical school, if there might have been perhaps a different or more thorough approach to training, especially in some of the issues that especially affected women, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and related issues like birth control, which, of course, there was a much different attitude toward birth control and, at that time, as well as abortion, which, of course, at that time was not legal. So I was wondering if you could think back to that...

RI: Oh, yeah. Well, I always felt that our medical school emphasized women's issues like obstetrics and pediatrics. And those two fields I feel as though we were given better training, more hours of lectures, etcetera. And then, the doctors who were in charge of those departments mostly were women, so we were also exposed to lot of women doctors who were in charge of those areas. And in obstetrics, particularly, I felt that we were given very good training because later when I was in practice, I was told by the nurses where I was doing obstetrics that some of the other physicians didn't know anything about using forceps. Well that's, right now it's not in practice much, but then in those days we used a lot of forceps. But they said that, "Oh, these men doctors, they don't know anything about how to handle forceps." So I said to them, "Well, in our medical school we were given very good training on obstetrics especially." So, I feel that they were very strong in that field. Well, I think that they felt they had to be because it was a Woman's Medical College and then maybe patients tend to look at women as though they should be better-trained in those fields. Well, pediatrics also was a very strong field. So maybe many of the graduates, as they graduated, wondered whether they would specialize in obstetrics or pediatrics. And many of my co-students did specialize in obstetrics and pediatrics. I think the reason why I did not was because maybe I felt that going back to Seattle I needed just a general practice. But it was a matter of, at that time, trying to get internship and residency. Sometimes in internship is when you really decide which field you're interested in. Because then you get better training in the actual hospital work. But in school, we're given lot of training but not as much practical training. So...

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.