When Janet Wolter, MD, first began practicing medicine, the polio vaccine hadn’t yet been discovered, and cancer was so feared that it wasn’t discussed openly.
By the time she retired from Rush in 2009, Wolter had provided thousands of cancer patients with hope and made important contributions to the advances that have transformed cancer care. Wolter died in 2020 at age 93.
“She served as a role model, for me and many other oncologists who trained at Rush, for our internal medicine residents and students, and especially for many female physicians,” longtime Rush cancer specialist Philip Bonomi, MD, now retired, said in a 2010 interview.
Wolter first came to what would become Rush in the 1940s during a clerkship at Presbyterian Hospital, while she was attending the University of Illinois College of Medicine. World War II had just ended when the River Forest native was accepted into medical school.
“A lot of the guys weren’t out of the service yet,” Wolter recalled. “In my class of 165, 21 were women, but the next year when everybody came back from the war, it went down to four women and 161 men.”
Breakthroughs in cancer care
After receiving her medical degree in 1950, Wolter completed training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Duke University Hospital, the University of Illinois Research and Education Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital before joining the U of I faculty. There, she treated polio patients, who were confined in iron lungs that enabled them to breathe.
“All the equipment back then was big and rigid and heavy,” Wolter recalled. “We had no computers. Electrocardiograms were done on photographic paper, and every floor in a hospital had a darkroom where you’d develop the EKG.”
The advent of the polio vaccine in the mid-1950s eventually led to the end of her program, and Wolter joined the Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital faculty in 1963 to collaborate with pioneering physician Samuel G. Taylor III, MD, in his work treating cancer patients with hormones and chemotherapy.
“It wasn’t even called oncology. There wasn’t even a name for it then,” she said. “There really wasn’t anything that could be called cancer care. If the surgeon couldn’t remove the tumor, that was it.”
Over the coming decades, the field advanced with the development of chemotherapy and radiation, hormone and targeted therapies. While her early experience included all kinds of cancer, Wolter’s primary focus was breast cancer, an interest that ultimately led to her role in Rush opening the first comprehensive breast center in the Midwest. After remaining largely unchanged from 1930 to 1990, breast cancer death rates decreased by 27% from 1990 to 2005, according to the American Cancer Society.
Making a difference
One of the most rewarding aspects of her work was the role she played in this progress. She served on the executive committee and board of directors of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Program, a National Cancer Institute-supported cooperative group of researchers conducting clinical trials of cancer treatments, and she was the principal investigator for the Rush arm of the program from 1989 until January 2010.
“I’ve put hundreds of patients on their clinical trials, which helped us define not only what hormones are going to work and how long we should administer them, but all kinds of combinations of chemotherapy,” Wolter said. “These are things that nobody can claim as personal triumphs, but you get a lot of satisfaction from being part of the answer.”
Bonomi credited Wolter with another important innovation in cancer care. “She had the idea of having nurse specialists in oncology working in tandem with oncologists and began training them 35 years ago or more, long before medicine had nurse practitioners,” he says.
In addition, Wolter took the initiative in establishing the Rush Pigmented Lesion Clinic in the mid-1970s, and she served until her retirement as the clinic’s medical director.
Hope and strength
In treating her patients, Wolter combined the pursuit of medical advances with compassionate, personal attention. She routinely gave patients her home phone numbers — “they never abused it, and it meant so much to them” — and maintained an optimistic outlook.
“As soon as patients have a little bit of hope," Wolter said, "they feel better."
