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Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame: Dr. Joanna Seibert, Health Care Pioneer

4 min read

It’s been almost 50 years since Dr. Joanna Seibert graduated from University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine and almost 20 years since she was ordained an Episcopal deacon. Yet in all that time, she’s never experienced a conflict between science and the sacred.

“That’s never been a problem for me, never,” she said. “I still think every time a baby’s born it’s a miracle. There’s so many things that could go wrong and just how it happens, you know? Science can go so far and then there’s a mystery. I still believe in the mystery.”

Seibert was born in Virginia and was largely raised by her namesake grandparents Joe and Annie Whaley. After attending college at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, going on to medical school didn’t seem a possibility, so she set her sights on being a medical technologist. Given the era, even that was something of a stretch.

“At the time I was growing up, women went to college but then got married right away and had a family,” Seibert said. “I knew very few professional women, maybe just one woman doctor, and she really didn’t practice very much.”

Between her junior and senior year in Greensboro, while working as a medical technician in a local hospital, Seibert realized she had an aptitude for working with patients and wanted to play a wider role in their healing.

“I had this great education that I wasn’t using; I just was performing tests but then didn’t have a lot to do with what happened afterwards,” she said. “So I decided I was going to go to medical school, kind of all of a sudden. This is what I want to do.”

1968: Seibert graduates from medical school

1969: Marries Dr. Robert Seibert

1972: Seiberts move to Iowa and Joanna accepts pediatric radiology post

1976: Seiberts recruited back to Arkansas and the new Arkansas Children’s Hospital

1992: Seibert named Worthen Arkansas Woman of Distinction

1996-1998: Seibert named among Top 100 Women in Arkansas

1997-2013: Seibert named a Best Doctor in Arkansas

2015: The Seiberts retire from practicing medicine; biennial Joanna and Robert Seibert Award created in their honor

Seibert’s dream was delayed by an auto accident so severe it required her to drop out of school for six months. As it turned out, the lingering effect of her injuries helped define her particular medical specialty.

“I’d always had an interest in pediatric radiology and I was going to become a pediatrician,” she said. “I had a lot of trauma to my lower extremities, so I knew I was going to have trouble standing up or walking for long periods of time. That’s when I decided, well, I love pediatrics and maybe in radiology you can sit down a little bit more.”

“But,” she added with a laugh, “I forgot about those heavy lead aprons that you have to wear.”

Graduating from medical school in 1968, she did an internship and residency in Memphis. While there she met her husband Dr. Robert Seibert, also in residency. The two married in 1969 followed soon by the birth of their first child and Robert’s deployment to Vietnam.

In 1972, she followed her husband to Iowa where he had accepted a prestigious residency in the University of Iowa’s ear nose and throat program. Little did she know it was also to be where her medical career would gain steam thanks to the mentorship of department chairman Dr. Robert Soper.

“I didn’t know where (Iowa) was. I thought I was going to some missionary station or something,” she said. “But it was amazing medicine and that’s where my career started.”

“I went there to finish up my pediatric radiology and a couple of months after I got there, their pediatric radiology person left and so (Dr. Soper) said, ‘This is something you’re interested in, you take over.’ I had an amazing opportunity there.”

The couple was recruited as a pair back to Arkansas and the new Arkansas Children’s Hospital in 1976. Once again Joanna was the beneficiary of a visionary administrator, the late Dr. Bob Fiser, then chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at UAMS.

“Right then, pediatrics was still at the university and the Children’s Hospital was more like an orthopedic polio-type hospital,” she said. “I was recruited primarily by Bob Fiser. People in radiology said, ‘Oh we don’t need a pediatric radiologist,’ but he said we did.”

Seibert developed a method of detecting whether children affected by sickle cell disease were at risk for stroke and studied whether premature babies could be less at risk by several treatment methods to the mother.

Seibert published more than 100 peer review papers on pediatric radiology and has several textbooks to her credit, including 2017’s Casebook of Pediatric Radiology 2 Edition, which is a foundational text for radiology residents.

She has been named among the top 100 Women in Arkansas in 1996 through 1998, Worthen Arkansas Professional Woman of Distinction in 1992, and a Best Doctor in Arkansas in 1997 through 2013.

She and Richard retired in 2015; today Arkansas Children’s Hospital presents the biennial Joanna and Robert Seibert Award to the physician who embodies teamwork in his or her practice.

As a deacon, she’s developed health ministries and grief recovery groups statewide, worked with people in recovery, taught lay people how to become visitors to the sick and helped parishes develop adult education. She is the author of six books on spirituality and her medical career serves as a frequent touchstone for her sermons at St. Mark Episcopal Church in Little Rock.


Discover more about the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame Class of 2017.

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