But she was best known as a tough, innovative administrator who, as director of the National Institutes of Health from 1991 to 1993, championed studies that overturned false assumptions about women’s health. And as president of the American Red Cross from 1999 to 2001, she struggled to coordinate its complex, often contradictory missions of humanitarian disaster relief and the businesslike maintenance of blood supplies.
Dr. Healy’s curriculum vitae was a compendium of academic and professional achievements that in its cold detail omitted a central fact: her relentless attack on the misperception that heart attacks were men’s problems. Women’s groups had long sought a greater focus on women’s coronary health, cancers, and the role of hormonal changes and therapy.
Dr. Healy, who had pushed similar concerns within cardiology, went to Washington and made the issue her own.
“The problem is to convince both the lay and medical sectors that coronary heart disease is also a women’s disease, not a man’s disease in disguise,’’ Dr. Healy wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991. At the institutes of health, Dr. Healy, a Republican appointed by President George H.W. Bush, inherited an agency of 15,000 people beset by bureaucratic infighting, political interference, and declining morale. It had gone without a director for two years.
“I am willing to go out on a limb, shake the tree, and even take a few bruises,’’ she told reporters. “I’m not particularly concerned about being popular.’’
Dr. Healy cracked the whip on bureaucrats, recruited new talent, expanded the Human Genome Project, and reversed policies that, like the medical establishment, had focused on men’s health and virtually excluded women from clinical trials.
She began the Women’s Health Initiative, a $625 million study of the causes, prevention, and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, and cancer in middle-aged and older women.
