Surgery

B.A. Vassar College
M.A. Columbia University
M.D. Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Harlem Hospital Center
506 Lenox Avenue
New York, New York 10037
Public Affairs: (718) 579-5700

Barbara Barlow became known as the crying doctor when she began operating on children in 1975. "It is so pathetic to see an injured or a dying child or a permanently disabled child and it really made me cry," she said.

As Harlem Hospital Center’s first full-time pediatric surgeon, she discovered that children in Northern Manhattan were hurt, crippled or killed in preventable injuries at twice the national and city rate. Dr. Barlow always remembers one five-year-old boy rushed to the emergency room in the arms of his frantic mother. With their apartment door open for air while she cooked dinner one summer evening, her son wandered into the hallway and tumbled out a fifth floor window. Surgery couldn’t save him.

Dr. Barlow noticed many other buildings without window guards and playgrounds so filled with rats and broken swings that children were playing in the streets where cars hit them.

This daughter of bucolic Lancaster, Pennsylvania got angry and then busy. On her own time, she began collecting injury data and mobilizing parents and community leaders.

So far, she’s helped build 55 new playgrounds in Upper Manhattan and started a host of prevention programs that inspired the nation-wide Injury Free Coalition for Kids, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Run by Dr. Barlow, the coalition is active in 40 pediatric trauma centers nationwide. Their website is www.injuryfree.org.

At Harlem Hospital Center, where Dr. Barlow has been director of surgery since 1999, "we almost never see a window fall anymore." Since her efforts, the area’s major injury rate among juveniles has dropped from 1,275 to 524 per 100,000 children.

She’s funded her injury-prevention programs with near- constant grant-writing that has brought in more than $29 million so far.

Women surgeons were rare when Dr. Barlow, 66, entered medicine. Her engineer father, who died when she was 16, encouraged her to become a physician, his own dream deferred by World War I. On scholarships, she earned a bachelor’s degree at Vassar College, and a master’s degree in psychology at Columbia University. She went on to get her MD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

A bee-keeper and gardener, she lives with her husband Andre Zmurek, a retired oil company executive, in Tenafly, New Jersey.

Now a year past her promised retirement age, Dr. Barlow said "I’m still here and I’m not going anywhere." She’s turned down job offers through the years to stay with her "family" at Harlem Hospital Center. Problem-solving, first as a surgeon now as a full-time administrator, remains a passion.

"I love it, it’s very satisfying," she said.