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Boynton in 1936, when she became director of the University Health Service. All images courtesy of University Archives

Ruth Boynton (M.D. ’20, M.P.H. ’27) had just arrived on the campus of the University of Minnesota as a newly enrolled medical student when she made her first acquaintance with the institution that would become the center of her professional universe in years to come. It was the fall of 1918, and the University of Minnesota Health Service had opened its doors for the very first time late that September when a flood of students poured in. The great flu pandemic was sweeping the nation, and it hit the campus hard, including Ruth Boynton.

Dr. John Sundwall, the first director of the Health Service, along with a small staff of volunteer nurses, medical students, and doctors from the University Hospital, were inundated with sick students, some of them suddenly and desperately ill. The University closed its doors in a vain attempt to prevent the spread of the virus; even so, more than 2,000 cases of the flu would be seen by health personnel at the University. Through all of October, classes were canceled and the campus was shuttered. Ultimately, 20 students would die of the disease before the crisis abated over the winter of 1918–19.

Boynton was one of the lucky survivors. A native of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Boynton contracted the disease upon her arrival in Minneapolis but did not succumb. Perhaps out of appreciation for the aid she received there, Boynton returned to the University Health Service in 1921 with her medical degree in hand to begin a long and distinguished career in student health.

Except for a couple of brief stints early in her career, when she served as director of the Division of Child Hygiene for the State of Minnesota and then taught at the University of Chicago, Boynton would spend the rest of her next 40 years in the employ of the University Health Service. In 1936, she became the first woman in the nation to be appointed the director of such an organization and would hold that post for 25 years.

Boynton was at the Health Service as the University

A technician gives an allergy test.

of Minnesota grew from a good-sized land grant institution in the years before World War II into a giant state university. She was there as G.I.s poured into college after the war, and she was there through the University’s continued growth in the 1950s. She oversaw the commensurate growth of the Health Service, which had begun as a one-doctor unit housed in a few rooms in the basement of Pillsbury Hall, and wound up, by the time of her retirement, as one of the most essential services offered by the University to its students, faculty, and staff.

The Health Service was a long time in the making. A typhoid epidemic in the Twin Cities in 1904 had prompted the first calls for a student health organization, but the wheels of the bureaucracy were slow-turning and it would take 14 years for the plan to be fully implemented.

After its horrible first days in 1918 dealing with “The Spanish Flu,” the Health Service settled into the routine of handling more typical student health problems. It also quickly experienced its first growth spurt. In 1921, the same year that Dr. Ruth Boynton was hired, John Sundwall took a position at the University of Michigan and was replaced as director by Dr. Harold Diehl. Dr. William Shepard was hired as the third full-time M.D. on this staff.

The service’s most pressing ongoing concern at the time was tuberculosis. The U of M averaged two new cases of TB a month during these early years of the Health Service. But as with all student health services, the most frequent misery attended to was the common cold, and Boynton, Shepard, and Diehl spent long hours not just prescribing bed rest and aspirin, but searching for a cure.

According to Shepard, in a recollection published upon Boynton’s retirement, a post–World War I report from a weapons arsenal in Maryland suggested that workers in the plant who had been engaged in making chlorine bombs for gas warfare “were remarkably free of colds.” This prompted an experiment at the University of Minnesota in which a group of students with colds were sent to a “chlorine room” where “a very small,

Students making appointments at the Health Service in 1933. The service was then located in a wing of the University Hospital.

carefully measured amount of chlorine” was pumped into the room. Afflicted students would sit for an hour in study chairs, breathing the chlorinated air. Its effectiveness as a remedy for the sniffles was then matched against another group given more traditional treatment. Needless to say, the chlorine cure didn’t work, but under Diehl and then Boynton, the Health Service would continue to conduct experiments in the vain hope of finding that ever-elusive fix for the common cold.

Shepard also tells us that in the first years of the Health Service there was “a terrific outbreak of scarlet fever at the [St. Paul] farm campus.” But its most serious crisis was an epidemic of smallpox that struck the Twin Cities in the mid-1920s. Eight thousand vaccinations were given to students and other members of the University community; still, seven students died from the disease.

Boynton’s foray into the world of student health whetted her appetite for continued service. She taught public health at Minnesota, as well as at the University of Chicago. She was also interested in the study of tuberculosis and would over the course of her career publish a number of articles on public health aspects of the disease.

TB remained the largest and most fearful killer of college-age students when Boynton assumed the role of director. While in that position, she would expand the amount of TB testing done at the University, insisting first that all new students be tested for the disease and then that all staff, academic and non-academic, be tested as well. It was one of the early steps in what would become a gradual process of expanding the Health Service from its focus on students to its ultimate role as a University-wide service.

When she took office in 1936, Boynton inherited a well-run office. She replaced Diehl, who left to become dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Medicine, where he would do much to build its national reputation. He left Boynton a service that had grown to nine full-time physicians, 28 part-time doctors, 11 part-time dentists, and a whole slew of nurses,

A Health Service dietitian consults with a student.

administrators, and other staff. The Health Service had long since left Pillsbury Hall and was now housed in a wing of the University Hospital. It attended to an assortment of health needs for the 400 to 500 students it saw on a weekly basis.

Aside from the TB testing, Boynton instituted some immediate changes at the Health Service. Consultants in proctology and urology were added at the service, as was a “diet table” in the campus dining area. Boynton’s early concern about what students ate foreshadowed the modern era. Her diet table treated primarily obese students, who had trouble finding healthful foods elsewhere on the campus or in Dinkytown restaurants, but also served students with diabetes, nephritis, gastric ulcers, and colitis. She hired a graduate dietician to oversee the menus, and 82 students signed up for the service in its very first year.

Another problem was the excessive use of the amphetamine Benzedrine by students on campus. First introduced around 1940, the drug quickly became popular around exam time with students looking for post-midnight boosts. One year, Boynton and the Health Service had four students in the hospital suffering from Benzedrine overdoses. In response, the Health Service ran an ad in The Minnesota Daily advising students of the dangers of the drug. “Whether this was effective, I do not know,” Boynton would later write a colleague. Regardless, the initial popularity of the drug faded and there were no more cases of overdose.

Beginning in her early years at the Health Service, and continuing throughout, Boynton would respond to an increasing number of “mental hygiene” problems at the U. Particularly in the postwar years, Boynton would oversee the boosting of psychiatric and psychological counseling services for students—including increasing aid to a number of vets dealing with what would come to be called post-traumatic stress disorder.

World War II and its aftermath brought other special problems to the University Health Service. During the war, as the campus became home to a large number of servicemen, the incidents

A Health Service sanitarian inspects the health and safety aspects of campus housing.

of communicable diseases climbed. Particularly frightening was a November 1943 outbreak of influenza. For those, like Boynton herself, who had lived through the 1918 pandemic (which had been exacerbated by troops being shuttled around the globe), the week of November 22 must have seemed like a terribly dangerous moment in time. Coffman Union was converted into an emergency hospital, and 80 beds were set up in the halls of the building. This strain of flu was not deadly, however, and the epidemic passed in four weeks with no fatalities. (A far more serious outbreak of influenza came in 1957. Around 1,200 U of M students wound up hospitalized with the disease, but fortunately, once again, there were no deaths.)

The years after the war saw an enormous boost in student enrollment and a concomitant jump in visits to the Health Service. From just under 40,000 trips to the Minneapolis clinic in 1944–45, the service had to handle more than double that number in 1946–47. To meet these demands, both full- and part-time staff were increased, including the addition of three physicians and two full-time psychiatrists. Administration became much more complex as the service now had to deal with veterans attending the University under the auspices of the G.I. Bill. The Veterans Administration contracted with the University’s Health Service to provide campus medical services for its ex-soldiers, adding to the administrative and medical burdens of the service.

Not surprisingly, the beds and waiting rooms at the old Health Service (in Minneapolis, still housed at University Hospital) quickly proved inadequate to the growing needs of the University, and plans were made to construct a new building. Finished in the fall of 1950, the four-story structure was built across from a wing of the hospital on Church Street, in the heart of the campus. The Health Service also had an office on the St. Paul campus, and Dr. Boynton pronounced that “the University of Minnesota now has physical facilities for its Health Service second to none.”

But student numbers kept rising, and health services were

Boynton came to campus for the naming of the Health Service after her, in 1975.

expanded. In 1954, Boynton hired a full-time health educator and enlarged the pharmacy and X-ray departments. Also housed in the building under the service’s administration was the University’s Environmental Health Department. Just five years after the new Health Service was completed, another expansion was needed.

By all accounts, Boynton not only kept pace with the dizzying rate of change at the University, she also generously offered her expertise to the wider world of public health. Throughout her many years of service at the U, Boynton was active in state public health matters as well. For 22 years she served on the Minnesota State Board of Health and was twice elected its president. From 1931 until her retirement, she was a professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University and served as acting director of the School of Public Health during World War II. In addition, in the early 1950s, a Rhodes Scholarship took her to Oxford for a year where she assisted British colleges in establishing student health services.

When she retired in 1961, Boynton was one of the most highly regarded directors of a student health program in the United States. She took her leave in Miami, where she lived with a companion, Prudence Cartwright, and worked as the unpaid secretary-treasurer for the American Student Health Association. According to her old colleague, Dr. William Shepard, who visited her in her new home soon after her retirement, “She seems to be enjoying the happiest days of her life.”

In 1975, the University of Minnesota honored Boynton’s long and distinguished career by renaming its health service for her. Boynton herself was able to attend the ceremony, but she lived just two more years. The Boynton Health Service still carries her name.  

Tim Brady is a freelance writer based in St. Paul. His January–February 2005 Minnesota article, “The Great Flu Epidemic,” about the founding of the University Health Service, can be read at www.alumni.umn.edu/flu.