Fe de Mundo (27 November 1911 – 6 August 2011) was a Filipina pediatrician honored with a Google Doodle on November 27, 2018.
She is the first woman admitted to Harvard Medical School, and she founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines. Her pioneering work in pediatrics in the Philippines while in active medical practice, spanned eight decades.
When she graduated at the top of her class at the University of the Philippines in 1933, the President of the Philippines offered Fe a scholarship to any institution in the world to pursue her medical degree. She applied and was accepted to Harvard Medical School, an institution which would not officially be accepting women for another 10 years. The admissions office had seen Fe’s name on the application and assumed she was a man, and not until she arrived in Boston in 1936 to begin her education did they realize their mistake. However, at this point the head of pediatrics was so impressed with her qualifications that he advocated for her to stay, and Fe became the first woman to ever attend Harvard Medical School.
After her education at Harvard, Fe would go on to study at the University of Chicago and MIT, and she would earn her Master’s degree in bacteriology at the Boston School of Medicine before finally returning to the Philippines in 1941, shortly before the Japanese invasion of the Philippines during World War II.
Affectionately dubbed “The Angel of Santo Tomas” for her work during the second world war, she eventually sold her own home to finance a new hospital, and in 1957 The Children’s Medical Center in Quezon City, the first pediatric hospital to ever be established in the Philippines, opened its doors. The doctor would live on the second floor of the hospital and continued to make rounds in her wheelchair in her later years for the remainder of her life until 2011, when she passed away a few months shy of her 100th birthday.
Del Mundo received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1977. In 1980, she was conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines.
