Jean Emily Henley

Who was Jean Emily Henley?

Jean Emily Henley was an anesthesiologist. She was the only child of Eugene Henry and Helen Esther Heller, who emigrated from Hungary and Germany respectively into the United States. The father changed the name into Henley while she was a child. Both parents practiced lay psychotherapy and later obtained PhDs.

After graduation from high school, she obtained her BA degree at Vassar College and Barnard College and went from March 1930 – 1932 to Paris in order to study sculpture. In New York she studied medicine starting 1936 and graduated 1940 at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. She started a residency in internal medicine in San Francisco, then at New York Hospital and completed her training at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. In 1944 she voluntarily joined the army and became a captain in those 27 months. On March 1, 1947 she began her residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, that she completed March 1949. Instead of becoming a faculty member at Columbia, she travelled to Switzerland and took up an invitation from Maria Daelen to come to Wiesbaden. Initially she wanted to visit Germany just for a few days, but eventually she stayed there for two years. She was a visiting physician in Gießen, Frankfurt, Marburg, Wiesbaden, Tübingen, Berlin, Heidenheim, Hamburg and Heidelberg. She used anesthesia machines from the US Army and developed her own machine.