Dr. Newell Heads Project's
Fight Against Breast Cancer
By Margaret Howell
“The name of this game is early
detection,” said Dr. Josephine Newell,
new coordinator of Duke’s Breast
Cancer Demonstration Project.
In private general medical practice in
Bailey, N.C., for the last 24 years. Dr.
Newell replaced Dr. F. M. Simmons
Patterson in January.
She is the youngest of four children in
a family of seven generations of doctors
and a native of Henderson. She
received her M.D. degree from the
University of Maryland.
“I went to the University of South
Carolina and majored in chemical
engineering, believe it or not," she said.
"When I found that none of my family
were going to keep up the tradition, I
decided to go to medical school.”
Twenty-four years later and armed for
the crusade against cancer, she’s glad
she did.
The Duke demonstration project,
which she now heads, is a breast cancer
screening program for women from 16
North Carolina counties. It began
operation in June 1974. It is one of 27
centers throughout the country, all
working toward perfecting a screening
modality which will be effective, safe
and relatively inexpensive, according to
Dr. Newell.
Once proven effective, these
modalities will be implemented in
hospitals and clinics nationwide to aid
In the early detection of breast cancer.
“We have appointments booked
through the end of this year," said Dr.
Newell. The project, she said, receives
all its screenee names from American
Cancer Society volunteers working in
local units in the 16 designated
counties within a 75-mile radius of
Durham.
‘The screenees must be between the
ages of 35 and 74,” stated Dr. Newell.
"They must not be pregnant and they
should be asymptomatic, that is, show
no signs of known breast disease. ”
The project, with the help of Cancer
Society volunteers, completes lengthy
histories and interviews with each
screenee before their examinations.
Three types of examinations are given
each screenee by the project’s 15
volunteer physicians, including the use
of mammography (a low-radiation X-ray
which reveals the inner structure of the
breasts), thermography (a photographic
representation of the heat emitted from
the breasts) and a clinical examination.
"Of the over 5,500 screenees we have
examined thus far,” said Dr. Newell,
we have found only 17 cancerous
tumors. That figure is about what we
expected." she continued. “It jibes with
the national levels found in the other 26
demonstration projects.”
According to Dr. Newell, there are
many breast cancer facts and statistics
that are shown simply by experience,
even if their ‘whys and wherefores’
cannot always be explained.
Sifting through the mass of
information taken from breast cancer
patients across the country. Dr. Newell
noted some of the things statistics have
shown and, when possible, what they
mean:
(Continued on page 4)
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VOLUME 22, NUMBER 16
APRIL 18,1975
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
DR. JOSEPHINE NEWELL
Tosteson Chosen To Lead
Med School at Chicago
Dr. Daniel C. Tosteson, chairman of
the Department of Physiology and
Pharmacology, has accepted
appointment as dean of the Division of
the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker
School of Medicine at the University of
Chicago.
He also was appointed the Lowell T.
Coggeshall Professor of Medical
Sciences in the Department of
Pharmacological and Physiological
Sciences.
The appointments are effective July 1.
Tosteson plans to assume his duties
there full-time later in the year.
Tosteson came to Duke as
department chairman in 1961. In 1971
he was appointed James B. Duke
Professor of Physiology. He is a native
of Wisconsin and a 1949 graduate of the
DR. DANIEL C. TOSTESON
Harvard Medical School.
In making the announcement of
Tosteson’s appointment, the provost
and acting president of the university.
John T. Wilson, termed Tosteson “a
scholar-physician of the first rank.
“Dr. Tosteson brings to the University
of Chicago a strong commitment to
excellence in biomedical research and
clinical medicine and a national
reputation in the scientific community.”
Duke’s vice president for health
affairs. Dr. William G. Aniyan. said that
“we received the news of Dr. Tosteson's
appointment with mixed emotions. On
the one hand we are terribly proud that
a key member of the Duke faculty was
selected to become the dean of
biological sciences at one of the
nation s most distinguished private
universities.
“On the other hand," Aniyan said,
"Dr. Tosteson has been a key leader of
the faculty that has helped spiral the
quality of education and research at the
Duke Medical Center in the past 14
years. He has built one of the nation s
outstanding departments of
physiology. ■
In addition to his research and
teaching interests at Duke, Tosteson
has been a spokesman on medical
education on the national scene for the
past several years.
He is Immediate past chairman of the
Association of American Medical
Colleges (AAMC) and recently served as
chairman of the AAMC’s Task Force on
Health Manpower which formulated the
association s policy on health
manpower legislation before Congress.
A search committee will be appointed
to seek a new department chairriian.
iilorfc
MONSTER WITH A BIG MOUTH—^That s what an INTERCOM photographer saw in
this close-up view of part of the south face of the Seeley G. Mudd Building, the
medical center s new communications center and library. The modern gothic
structure, scheduled for completion in mid-autumn, will have 10 miles of shelves
on four levels, sufficient to store more than a quarter of a million volumes.
Presently, the facility is a study in angles, lines and spatial relationships, (Photo by
David Williamson)