The lessons Senora Simpson absorbed from her Sargent College professors are as clear today as they were more than six decades ago. Respect every person you work with. Demonstrate empathy for colleagues and patients alike. And expect the best work from yourself and those around you.
Simpson, who graduated in 1957 with a physical therapy degree, felt both individual attention and high expectations from the moment she arrived on the Sargent campus, then in Cambridge, in the fall of 1953.
“They were people who cared about the students as individuals,” says Simpson. For a Black student in 1953—one year before the US Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional—that sort of reception wasn’t a given.
Early Career Adversity
Simpson was one of only four Black physical therapy students in her class. But, she says, they were treated the same as their classmates. And when the time came for Simpson to gain clinical experience and job referrals, her college mentors both helped her and stood up for her.
In Simpson’s senior year, she expressed interest in an internship at a Washington, D.C., hospital. One of her professors, Adelaide McGarrett (Sargent’33, Wheelock’47), told her it was not a suitable placement for a Black student and rejected the idea over Simpson’s protests. “She finally said very openly, ‘They will fail you. And you are a good student,’” says Simpson, who first decided to study physical therapy after her close friends’ baby was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and she saw the impact the profession could have.
“You can be successful if you really care about what you’re doing and who you’re working with. That is what Sargent taught. I knew they cared. And I would do anything to make them proud.” —Senora Simpson
She received a different kind of confidence vote when, after graduation, another professor, Helen Hickey, recommended her for a position at a hospital in Brownsville, Texas, that was experiencing a polio outbreak.
Simpson was an ideal candidate because she had become proficient in a technique called manual muscle testing. “Polio patients had these sort of scattered deficits, where they would have one muscle here that was good, and another one that wasn’t. And you had to be really good at determining which muscles were the strongest,” she says.
Just before traveling to Brownsville, Simpson called to confirm she could stay in a nurse’s dorm. When she mentioned that she was Negro—the term used at the time—the person on the line said they’d have to call her back. They never did. The Texas facility had sought Sargent’s best physical therapist for the job—so Hickey refused to send anyone else. “Her stance was… You asked me to get you the best, I’m providing it to you, and you rejected it,” Simpson says.
After graduation, Simpson instead joined the rehabilitation staff at Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York.
There, she learned how to navigate conversations with medical residents who came to Rusk from around the world and who, in the 1950s and 1960s, were new to physical therapy techniques and yet needed to remain in charge of a patient’s care. “We were teaching them all the time, how to order PT treatments, what PT was,” she says.
The Power of Policy
Simpson eventually returned to Washington. After working as a physical therapist at District of Columbia General Hospital for five years, she shifted into program administration, managing a federal pilot project to deliver physical and occupational therapy services to geriatric and chronically ill patients in their homes. That program became a model for Home Health Agencies as we know them today.
The experience led to Simpson working for federal agencies for 38 years. In one of her roles, she wrote and helped implement the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment program, which ensures that children receive free and timely assessments of medical conditions that interfere with their quality of life. She also continued her education, earning public health degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California. In 2008, she received the Lucy Blair Service Award, the American Physical Therapy Association’s honor for exceptional contributions to the field. And she has taught at several DC-area universities and remains a guest lecturer at the University of the District of Columbia.
Asked to reflect on her career, Simpson refers to her college days: “What you find is that you can be successful if you really care about what you’re doing and who you’re working with. That is what Sargent taught. I knew they cared. And I would do anything to make them proud.”