Now 79, she is an international leader in the study of childhood cancer. Her focus on the long-term health of survivors - even at a time when few were beating cancer - has helped kids grow into healthier adults and reduced the later side effects of many treatments.
Meadows is the "matriarch of the entire field" of cancer survivorship, said Les Robison, an expert in cancer survivorship at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee. "She was stern and rough when she had to be. . . . But, at the same time, she nurtured all the people who are leaders in the field."
A Brooklyn native, Meadows had long thought of going to medical school. But on finishing her undergraduate psychology studies at Queens College at the ripe old age of 20, she said, "I thought I'd be too old when I finished."
In the early 1960s, she was raising two sons and a daughter and teaching night school at Lake Erie College outside Cleveland, where her first husband worked. Meadows met Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician and baby-rearing expert, during his 1962 visit to campus. She told him of her desire to go to medical school.
"He said, 'If we can go to the moon, surely you can go to medical school,' " she said.
After the failed inquiry to Harvard, Meadows was accepted to the Medical College of Pennsylvania, which began as the nation's first medical school for women, and is now part of Drexel.
In 1972, Meadows was recruited for a fellowship at Children's by longtime oncology chief Audrey Evans and Giulio "Dan" D'Angio, then head of radiation oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Meadows was charged with scouring the charts of patients across the United States and abroad, looking for physical and developmental problems - the unintended consequences of treatment. She found almost none.
