“It just doesn't get any more meaningful when you’re talking about the subject of space than that,” TMA President Bradford W. Holland, MD, told Texas Medicine. The House of Delegates, where he presented the gavel, uses a near-identical instrument.
Dr. Seddon was one of six women in her medical school class and the only woman in her surgical residency at the University of Tennessee. When NASA opened its astronaut program to women in 1976, she applied and was designated an astronaut in 1979.
On her 1985 flight, when a satellite malfunctioned, her surgical training helped: she used a bone saw from the medical kit to fashion repair tools. She also carried three gavels that would later return to medicine – one each to TMA, the American Medical Association, and the Harris County Medical Society (HCMS), which represented Dr. Seddon’s peers in Houston.
One of those peers was 2006 HCMS President and 2020-21 TMA President Diana Fite, MD.
“I met Dr. Seddon at a medical meeting in Galveston in about 1980, and since we were both emergency physicians about the same age in a time when there were not many female physicians anyway, we hit it off,” Dr. Fite wrote to Texas Medicine.
When Dr. Seddon’s NASA schedule allowed for medical practice, Dr. Fite connected her with part-time hospital shifts. Dr. Seddon’s network also included Clarence Alfrey, MD, principal investigator for NASA’s Space Life Sciences Laboratories. Studying blood samples from Dr. Seddon and her crewmates, his team identified the link between space travel and anemia. Dr. Alfrey became HCMS president in 1992, and Dr. Seddon’s gavel still resides in the medical society’s presidential office.
Symbols like the gavel matter, Dr. Holland says, particularly for physicians entering organized medicine.
“We try to invigorate the new generation and younger physicians into what organized medicine is,” he told Texas Medicine. “The more you’re aware of the history, it does bring a sense of awe and respect of what we’re doing and how long we’ve been here.”