Weill Cornell Medical College student Pauline Flaum-Dunoyer is a natural storyteller and historian.
Since she was 10 years old, she has considered what it means to preserve history in a respectful way. She recalls visiting her great-uncle, a historian with expertise in the West African countries of Mali and Togo, and looking with fascination at the wooden masks on his wall. She understood then the trust that was placed in him to care for the culturally significant relics.
As a college student, her curiosity about the past and how it shapes the present led her to study religion and “examine patterns in religious doctrine that have influenced culture and society,” she said.
With a passion for understanding who and what preceded us, Flaum-Dunoyer attended a history of medicine lecture in 2019 as a first-year medical student at Weill Cornell Medicine and immediately realized that it seemed incomplete. She wondered: What about the work of women and people of color?
“People of color have contributed to medicine in this country, sometimes to the detriment of their own community,” said Flaum-Dunoyer, now a graduating fourth-year student.
