A BURNING PASSION MDI summer resident publishes first novel at age 89

Anne Wight Phillips has a fire inside of her.

Despite her nearly 90 years, the oxygen tank that softly wheezes in the next room and the veil that obscures the sight in her blue eyes, the coals of that fire burn brightly – even on a day so damp and foggy that the panoramic view of the ocean far below her Mount Desert Island summer home is blotted out entirely.

“I’m 89 years young,” Phillips reflected with a smile. “The old body is not in such good shape. I’m legally blind, I’m deaf, but I still have most of my marbles.”

That’s an understatement. She may look like a sweet little old lady, swaddled as she was in several layers of Easter egg-hued sweaters and with hair as white and soft looking as down. But looks can be deceiving. An hour of conversation with the retired surgeon and prominent burn researcher is like a combination of a lecture from the sharpest college professor and a journey into a past so colorful that it seems pulled from fiction.

That’s fitting, since Phillips has just published her first novel, “The Corners In Time.” Loosely inspired by her life, the book reads like a swooping roller-coaster ride that you want to go on again. And again.

“I started the book 54 years ago and finished it 50 years ago,” she said with a laugh. “It was full of drug addicts and criminals. I never sent it to any publisher. Four years ago I threw out all the criminals and drug addicts and wrote about nice people, which was much more satisfactory.”

Though perhaps with fewer drug addicts than “ER,” her novel has as much hospital intrigue as any nighttime soap opera – and Phillips knows her subject well. As a young woman in the late 1930s, she defied the conventions of Boston Brahmin society and worked hard to become a doctor, using her wit, determination and positive attitude to fight and overcome the systemic sexism at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

” I was one of the ‘tokens,'” she remembered. “There were five tokens. Five women and 141 boys.”

Every night for three months, someone let the air out of Phillips’ tires. Every day, she kept her mouth shut and pushed the bike up a hill to the nearest gas station to pump it back up again. Finally, at Christmas, the prank stopped. She never knew if the culprit flunked out of school, or just got used to having the women around.

Despite the pressure of being one of a handful of women in a mostly-male school, Phillips had a good time.

“I thoroughly enjoyed medical school,” she said.

After graduation, she was whisked into a world at war that badly needed doctors – even one with the wrong assortment of chromosomes. She interned at the university’s hospital, getting experience in orthopedics, obstetrics, ear, nose and throat, ophthalmology and her favorite, surgery. It was a tired but exciting time.

“My internship … was a time of utter exhaustion,” she said. “All hospitals were required by war to reduce to 60 percent of normal staff. We were very short of sleep. Fortunately, none of us ever killed anybody.”

Her desire to become a surgeon did not wane during this time. Phillips traveled next to one of the four hospitals in the country that trained women surgeons, Laird Memorial Hospital in Montgomery, W.Va. For Phillips, brought up in the somewhat rarefied air of Boston’s Beacon Hill with the advantages of education and opportunity, it was a different world.

“I had a date with a coal miner once,” she reminisced. “We parked under a streetlight. He pointed to his lip, expecting me to kiss it. I said, come in tomorrow and I’ll cut that out.”

Her coal miner had a tumor on his lip. She operated on him the next day.

Phillips returned to Boston to complete her training at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she became the first woman to operate. She worked there for 25 years and made a name for herself in burn research.

Fire safety always had been a lifelong interest of hers. She organized a fire drill system at a hotel on the Isles of Shoals when she was just 13. As an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, she continued her passion.

“The first thing I did, after putting down my suitcases and meeting my roommate, was to go down the fire escape and it was locked on the bottom,” she said, her disgust still apparent after more than 70 years. “A week later, we had our first fire drill.”

As a surgeon, she wrote an innovative paper positing that lung damage from smoke inhalation was the primary cause of death at the fire scene and in the first days afterwards. She was chosen to serve on the first national commission on fire prevention and control in the late 1960s.

“I had a call from the White House, which I thought was a joke at first,” she said.

Phillips did not agree with the findings of her fellow commissioners and she wrote a minority report on fire prevention, the first such report ever seen by the federal government.

Her views struck a chord with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, who named her “Fire Protection Man of the Year.”

She and her late husband, Asa Phillips, founded the 4,000-member national Smoke, Fire and Burn Institute Inc. She also developed the smoke drill program, which teaches students how to avoid deadly smoke as well as flames when evacuating. The drills have been adopted in 49 states.

Anne Wight Phillips’ inner fire and drive have carried her a long way. The author, surgeon and safety activist has been glad to pass on some of her lifetime’s worth of accumulated wisdom.

“You can go as far as your energy and ambition will take you,” she said. “Don’t worry about discrimination. If you’re an achiever, you’ll achieve.”

To order “The Corners In Time,” call 1-888-280-7715 or visit www.authorhouse.com. Abigail Curtis can be reached at 667-9395 and acurtis@bangordailynews.net.