SATSUMA, Ala. — Dr. Julia Hart Box insists she did nothing remarkable. The record of her career says otherwise: she made Mobile’s ambulances safer, helped establish respiratory therapy departments at Gulf Coast hospitals, and helped create the region’s first school of anesthesia for nurses, serving as its dean.
“I have not done anything remarkable that I can say,” Box said from her home in Satsuma.
An Early Spark and an Early Obstacle
Born in 1927, Box grew up during the Great Depression. A painful bone infection at age eight set her on the path to medicine — but her father saw no future in it for a daughter.
“My father wasn’t interested in a girl going into school anyway, to college,” she recalled. “He just laughed. He thought it was stupid to waste money on a girl going.”
Tenacity ran in the family. Her mother had emigrated alone from Scotland at 18, built her own hairdressing business, and never backed down from a goal. Box worked her way through college and graduated from the University of Alabama, then applied to medical school — only to be flatly turned down by the head of admissions, who told her he wasn’t considering any women.
She watched male classmates with worse grades receive invitations from Tulane’s medical program while hers never arrived. So she simply showed up in New Orleans without one.
A First in Mobile Medicine
At Tulane, she met the man she would marry. In 1961 the couple moved to South Alabama, raised three children, and Box became the first female anesthesiologist in Mobile.
Her son Mike Box attributes it to what he calls a certain hard-headedness his mother inherited from her mother.
Her advice to anyone facing similar odds is characteristically direct: “If you want it, don’t let somebody say you can’t do it. Don’t expect to sit back and expect somebody to give it to you. You just get out there and start working on it.”