Kathryn Anderson

Kathryn Dorothy Duncan Anderson (born 1939) is a British-American pediatric surgeon. She was the first woman elected president of the American College of Surgeons and the first woman president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association. She was a Nina Starr Braunwald Award laureate.

Early life Kathryn Anderson was born Kathryn Dorothy Duncan in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, England in 1939. With encouragement from her parents, she knew that she wanted to become a surgeon at the age of 8. She began studying at Cambridge University in 1958, and went on to earn a bachelor and masters of arts from the university. She met French Anderson, an American, in an anatomy class while at Cambridge University. In 1962 they married and moved to the United States.

After moving to the US, Anderson continued studying medicine in 1964 at Harvard Medical School. Upon graduating, the dean denied her a surgical internship, saying women were too weak to be surgeons. She ended up completing an internship in pediatric medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. A year later, in 1965, she moved to Washington, D.C., and completed her general surgical residency at Georgetown University Hospital. Over the two years she was at Georgetown University Hospital, she was only assigned seven cases. Believing that discrimination against her gender was affecting her training, Anderson left the hospital and began working in various community hospitals. In these hospitals, she worked on 700 cases in the first year. One major area of research interest from 1972 to 2004 was esophageal replacement in children and infants. She wrote a book in 2009 entitled Who Will Hold My Hand?: A Guide For Parents Whose Child Needs An Operation, which aims to help parents understand medical conditions and the medical system and is based on Anderson's training, personal experiences, and research.

Over the course of her career, Anderson was a practicing pediatric surgeon for 32 years in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, California.

Awards and honors 1995, Nina Starr Braunwald Award from the Association of Women Surgeons 1999, lifetime fellowship in Royal College of Surgeons of England. 2005, Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland 2007, Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh