Thornton sisters biography

1947—

Physician, author

In the 1970s Yvonne S. Thornton became the first African-American woman to achieve board certification as a physician with expertise in both maternal and fetal medicine.

The high-risk pregnancy specialist has a New York City practice and teaches at her alma mater, Columbia University, but she also gained a measure of fame for her 1995 memoir The Ditchdigger's Daughters: A Black Family's Astonishing Success Story. In it she details her working-class New Jersey childhood as one of six sisters whose construction-worker father was determined that each would go on to medical school and become a doctor.

The Thornton story was so remarkable that as far back as 1977 the family was profiled by Georgia Dullea of the New York Times for Father's Day. In it, Donald Thornton told Dullea that he fixated on medicine as a career for his young girls back in the 1950s because, in part, "I didn't know at that time things would get better for black