In a lot of ways, Susan Blackwell (Crawford), M.H.S, PA-C’89, and the physician assistant profession have grown up together. They were born at roughly the same time, matured in parallel and proximity, and for more than three decades they’ve been inextricably linked.
Blackwell grew up on her family’s farm in Caswell County north of Durham. The PA profession was born just to the south, at Duke, founded in 1965 by cardiologist Eugene A. Stead, Jr., MD, former chair of the Department of Medicine in the Duke University School of Medicine.
At the time, nurses and primary care physicians were in short supply, and Stead established a program to create a new position “to fill a gap between physician and nurse.” People in this new field, he said, would be trained in numerous areas of the medical profession. “We have chosen to call these individuals ‘physician-assistant’,” Stead wrote.
The program he created at Duke remains the best in the nation, perennially ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report. Blackwell entered the program in 1987, graduated two years later, and has been a practicing PA at Duke ever since. This year — her 32nd on the job — the program honored her as the 2021 Distinguished PA Alumnus of the Year.
