When Estelle Cooke-Sampson arrived at Union in the fall of 1970, a bright seventeen-year-old out of the southeast quarter of Washington, D.C., she suddenly realized she had a problem that she needed to take care of.
°I could read English quite well,” Cooke-Sampson says today from the office of DC Imaging, her radiology clinic near Howard University Hospital. “But I really couldn't
speak. I grew up and went to a school in an environment where keeping quiet meant staying out of trouble. And that's what I did.”
While other students in her inner-city junior high school raised a ruckus in the classroom, Cooke-Sampson sat quietly in the back doing her work and hoping one day to escape what was quickly becoming a treacherous urban landscape. She thought her chance had arrived when a representative of the ABC education program offered to send her to a prestigious northeastern prep school.
But her mother wasn't ready to let her adopted, half-Korean, half African-American daughter go. So Cooke-Sampson kept quiet, and remained in the D.C. school district. “I realized then that I was going to be responsible for my own education,” she says.
A few years later, she came to Union along with approximately 100 other young women, the first such group to arrive on campus.
In addition to recognizing her speech difficulties, Cooke-Sampson also quickly became aware of how deficient her junior and senior high school education had been. She says that she can't remember having to write a paper before she came to Union,
and that she had “no knowledge of sentence structure.” So she decided that she would take her time, not worry about graduating in four years, and take advantage of the chance Union was giving to catch up to her classmates.
“For me Union was like good, fertile soil,” she says. “There was enough sunshine, enough rain, and enough storm. I learned enough to know how to go about learning in the future. I felt I was in the right place and that eventually I was going to be able to compete in society.”
And compete she has.
During her senior year, she showed up at the admissions office of the Georgetown Medical School during the Christmas break, said she couldn't afford the bus fare to come back, and was granted an interview. She received a public health service scholarship to Georgetown, where she decided on radiology because she was having difficulty communicating with patients. She has painful memories of patients criticizing her speech; radiology offered her the comfort of communicating through her written reports and the occasional forays into primary care procedures.
Nearly two decades later, though, Cooke-Sampson is hardly the kind of radiologist who sits in a back room and studies medical images. As the medical director of DC Imaging, she sees some fifty patients and performs 100 procedures every day, ranging from prenatal sonograms to mammograms and prostate biopsies.
Cooke-Sampson says she doesn't mind that she has to see twenty to thirty percent more patients than her suburban colleagues to generate the same amount of money. And, she says, she likes the added responsibilities of taking a truly active interest in her patients' overall health programs. She sees to it that her office workers make the extra call to remind patients of their appointments and help arrange for transportation if it is needed.
“One must serve in order to get any fulfillment out of life,” she says.
She learned that lesson during high school while working with nurses in the public health services. Today, as a doctor affiliated with the nonprofit Daughters of Charity Providence Hospital and as a member of the DC Army Reserves, she continues to practice and preach the gospel of service. During the conflict with Iraq, she was sent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to take the place of a radiologist who was sent to the Persian Gulf.
“I feel very fortunate to live in America,” she says. “This is the only country I know of that has laws that regulate civil rights. I was a 'war-baby,' and if I hadn't been lucky enough to get out of Korea, I don't know what would have become of me. So I take my service very seriously.”
Earlier this year, the College awarded her an Eliphalet Nott Medal for her outstanding career achievements.