Lucy Balian Rorke-Adams

She was born as Lucy Balian in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1929. She was the fifth and last daughter of Armenian immigrants born in Turkey. Her father left Turkey for Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1913 on the advice of a German engineer who warned him that the Turkish government planned on exterminating the Armenians. On top of not knowing the language, she had to walk three miles to grade school each day, and this distance increased to five miles once she reached high school. Since there was not a large enough Armenian population in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area for an Armenian Orthodox Church to be established, the Balian family attended a local Baptist Church during Lucy's childhood. Her and her sisters were very involved in their church community as children: they attended weekly Sunday school, bible classes, sang in the choir, and participated in youth fellowship programs. As a teenager, Lucy's dream was to be an opera singer. She eventually earned an audition with Gladys Swarthout, one of the major stars of the Metropolitan Opera Company at the time, but her audition was cancelled two days before it was scheduled to occur. She was so devastated that she gave up pursuing a career in music entirely and turned her focus to medicine. == Education ==

Lucy Balian entered the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate psychology major in 1947. Balian relied on work to earn enough money to fund her education. As an undergraduate and graduate, to pay her tuition, she served as "girl friday" for a surgical supply salesman. After receiving her master's degree in psychology, she worked evenings in a psychology clinic doing psychological testing for the first two years of medical school. For her final two years of medical school, she worked a research job in University of Minnesota's department of psychiatry. Starting in her second year of medical school, she also had an externship at a local Minneapolis hospital. In 1952, Balian entered medical school at the University of Minnesota. She was one of five women in her class of 110 people, and all her professors were male. She entered medical school with the goal of becoming a psychiatrist, but her focus soon shifted to neurosurgery. During an interview with the chief of neurosurgery, she was told that pursuing such a field as a woman would be pointless because neurosurgery is a referral type of specialty and nobody would refer any cases to a woman. However, this did not deter her. Degrees • Bachelor of Arts in psychology, 1951, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota • Master of Arts in psychology, 1952, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota • Bachelor of Science in medicine, 1955, University of Minnesota Medical School • Doctor of Medicine, 1957, Medical School, University of Minnesota == Career ==

Balian started her medical internship in 1957 when she was offered a highly coveted general rotating internship by Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH) on her match day. Riggs died shortly after the book was written, without knowing it had been accepted for publication, In the mid-1970s, after several years of holding a part-time position at CHOP, she became co-investigator on a massive study of pediatric brain tumors, where she looked at 3300 brain tumors over a four-year period. In 1972, the office of the medical examiner for the city of Philadelphia moved their location to PGH, bringing Rorke into close contact with forensic pathology for the first time. She also went on to become the acting chair of pathology from 1995 to 2001. In the 1990s, she presented a hypothesis on the origin of brain malformations arising in early human development: she proposed that disordered genetic control allows neurons to migrate to abnormal, disease-causing locations. Rorke-Adams has been instrumental in donating significant artifacts to museum collections. As Chief of Pathology at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Rorke-Adams was instrumental in preserving the contents of the Blockley "Dead House" of Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH). The original small brick building was used by Sir William Osler for autopsies. When it was torn down, Riggs had the contents moved to the Pathology building. When PGH closed in 1977, Riggs donated the Osler collection, including the autopsy table, instruments and records, to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Rorke-Adams had also obtained a set of 23 pairs of slides from the brain of Albert Einstein in the 1970s, and donated them to the Mutter Museum in November 2011. • 2017, Outstanding Achievement Award, University of Minnesota Medical School • 2010, named faculty chair in pediatric neuropathology created in her honor by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) • 2008, Richard D. Wood Distinguished Alumni Award, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia • 2003, Provost's Award, University of Pennsylvania • 1999, Award for Meritorious Contributions to Neuropathology, American Association of Neuropathologists • 1982, President, American Association of Neuropathologists • 1971, Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia == Personal life ==

Lucy Balian married Robert Rorke on June 4, 1960. Rorke died in 2002, after the two had been married for nearly 42 years. In 2004, Lucy Balian Rorke married Boyce Adams, who had been a close friend of hers for many years. Adams died of metastatic cancer two years and two months after they were married, leaving Rorke-Adams widowed for the second time. == References ==