Pearl Tang, doctor who stanched rate of infant deaths in Phoenix, is dead at 99

Pearl Mao Tang, the first Asian female doctor licensed in Arizona, who started prenatal clinics in the 1950s that were credited with stanching a high rate of infant deaths in the Phoenix area, has died. She was 99.

It is impossible to know how many Arizonans survived the first year of their lives due to Tang’s work, but her legacy is borne out in statistics.

In 1950, approximately 41 out of every 1,000 children in Phoenix would die in the first year of their life, a number that was the highest of any large city in the United States. By 1970, that number had dropped by two-thirds, a statistic the federal government cited as unique in the nation.

Tang’s idea was starting prenatal clinics in areas of metro Phoenix that didn’t have ready access to medical care, areas where data showed most of the infant deaths were occurring. She and her nurses learned Spanish to better communicate with their patients who spoke limited English.

Tang, while working for the Maricopa County health department, also started programs that provided Pap smears for women to screen for uterine cancer and led a drive to require that schoolchildren were vaccinated.

"A lot of people living today who are now between the ages of 45 and 65 are alive as a direct result of her work to reduce infant mortality," said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association.

"She was one of the public health people that you measure your career against. She just was so tenacious."

Tang's story

The measures would have long-lasting effects, Tang said, but, like all public health measures, they were a tough sell politically.

"If (politicians) spend money, they want instantaneous results so they can tell their voters, 'Look what I did for you,'" Tang said in a 2013 interview with The Arizona Republic. "But we can't do that because it takes time to catch up and show the statistics."

Tang said she also learned how to convert the necessity of public health into a dollars and cents argument for public officials.

"What I did prove (is) that if you take care of the poor, it saves the taxpayer money down the line," Tang said.

Women of the Century: Pearl Tang among influential women on Arizona list

For her, though, the statistics were patients who needed care. “Sometimes when you hear about these arguments about health care,” she said, “people don't realize we're taking care of people who are really in need of it. Health care is really a basic need.” 

Dr. Bob England, the former longtime director of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, never worked with Tang, who retired from the department in 1982, but said her accomplishments were part of the health department lore. 

"She was a pioneer in a different time when the pressing needs were different than they are now," he said. "Prenatal care, well child visits, it was just not being done for anyone who wasn't insured. By all accounts, from everything I've heard, she was tireless, just out there trying to move mountains."

Barred from the medical exam

Tang was born in China as Pearl Mao. During World War II, she met a U.S. soldier, Thomas Tang.

Mao kept in touch with Tang as she went to medical school in Canada and he went to college in Santa Clara, California. In 1947, the two married and moved to Phoenix.

But Arizona had a law that said graduates from medical schools in foreign countries, like Mao, could not take the licensing exam.

Pearl Tang went to Tucson to study microbiology at the University of Arizona, while her husband argued to the state medical board that it should reverse the policy. The board did.

Tang passed the exam, becoming the first Asian female to earn a license to practice medicine in Arizona.

She was hired in 1954 by the Maricopa County Public Health Department to start an immunization program in schools to control an outbreak of diphtheria.

It was while crisscrossing the county that she saw the gap between urban and rural areas, a gap exacerbated by income.

The next year, she began tackling what was an infant mortality rate that had remained stubbornly high, only dropping slightly since Arizona’s territorial days.

Tang reflected on what she learned driving around the county and she studied statistics that put figures to her personal observations: Deaths were happening in rural areas where poorer people lived.

She set up pop-up clinics in Glendale, El Mirage, Queen Creek, Gila Bend and Buckeye. She favored American Legion halls, she said, because they had a standard setup that allowed for a large reception area and a smaller examination room. She tapped into the ladies’ auxiliary groups for volunteers.

The clinics operated once or twice a month. If she couldn’t find a volunteer doctor, she would see patients herself.

“It gives me a chance to get out of the office," she said.

Some of her patients had little experience with the health care system, exemplified by the man who showed up with a rifle to ward off the possibility of strange men examining his wife.

“He didn’t want a man fiddling around with his wife,” Tang said, “but he had never seen a woman doctor before.”

When she noticed patients were only giving her one-word answers, she realized it was a language barrier. She and some of her nurses signed up for evening Spanish classes to better communicate.

“When you talk to a mother in Spanish, they lighten up and you get so much more," she said.

In 1971, a federal study described the drop in infant mortality in Phoenix as a “plummet” and described it as “most impressive” for metropolitan areas.

Tang also got the ear of a federal official who agreed to fund another idea of hers: offering uterine cancer screenings.

"I wrote up a proposal and it went to Washington and, lo and behold, they wrote me and said they'll fund us," she said.

After six years of Pap smears, 240 cases of uterine cancer had been detected. The average woman testing positive was a mother of four. For Tang, that meant the screenings prevented children from becoming potential wards of the state.

Tang also championed legislation requiring all schoolchildren to be vaccinated. The sponsor of the successful bill was Sandra Day O’Connor, a state legislator who would go on to become the nation’s first female U.S. Supreme Court justice. 

Those programs Tang started have continued, making such medical care commonplace.

Tang was preceded in death by her husband, Thomas Tang, a Korean War veteran who became the first Chinese American to be named to the federal bench.

The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, in a Facebook post, remembered one of Tang's other contributions. 

"Dr. Tang’s public service in establishing medical clinics and her research on infectious disease cemented her reputation as a pillar in her community, but her continuing presence every year at the Thomas Tang Moot Court Competition made her legendary to NAPABA’s family and ensured that future generations of young attorneys would always be inspired by Judge Tang’s historic legacy."

Pearl Tang is survived by her brother, Peter Mao; her daughter, Carol Tang; her granddaughter, Barbara Wojtyna; and three great-grandchildren.

Republic reporter Stephanie Innes contributed to this article.