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When Shirley Carter was a teenager growing up in Macon, Ga. in the 1940s, a case of strep throat and the penicillin that cured it set her on a path to pay it forward.

“One of the reasons Mom became a doctor was that modern medicine saved her life when she was 15 years old,” recounted her son, Elis Olsson. “This story appears in The History of Pfizer, and she was featured in their annual report in the 1990s.”

Her journey, however, was not without challenges. As Carter trained in internal medicine at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in the early 1950s, she faced barriers that were common during the era.

“Sexism. Mom faced sexism while studying medicine,” said Olsson. “A male doctor once told her she didn’t belong at MCV and that she was taking the spot from a man who would take it seriously and dedicate himself to the practice of medicine. She was one of only a few women at MCV at the time. Hearing this made her dedicate herself even more.”

Olsson said that dedication was no more apparent than when Carter, who at the time was a resident physician, met Sture Gordon Olsson, who was then the president of Chesapeake Corporation in West Point, Va.

“They hadn’t known each other for very long when Dad went to see her at work, and she told him she had to finish an autopsy and would finish faster if he helped,” Olsson chuckled. “So she handed him a clipboard and said, ‘Write down what I tell you,’ and he dropped the clipboard and told her to take her time.”

After marrying on June 8, 1957, and taking her husband’s surname, Carter Olsson opened a small, private practice in West Point but largely worked in public health clinics in the counties of King William, King & Queen, Gloucester, Mathews and Middlesex during her career.

“Mom did that for many years,” said Olsson. “She was essentially a family doctor, a pediatrician. She did it all. She worked with doctors who did not like reading [electrocardiograms], EKGs, so Mom read EKGs. She quite enjoyed it.”

During her time practicing medicine, Carter Olsson was very civic-minded. She served on the board of trustees for several organizations, including VCU Massey Cancer Center. In the earliest days of the cancer center, she worked to infuse the community needs she witnessed into the day-to-day operations. Carter Olsson was also able to learn about and then share the latest treatments in oncology.

“My mother’s sister, Jean Raulston of Decherd, Tennessee had leukemia, and I think that may have been a reason that Mom felt so connected to Massey,” said Olsson. “She arranged for Jean to get gamma globulin treatments in Tennessee that improved her quality of life [in the late 1980s, early 1990s].”

It was not the only time Carter Olsson’s medical background would make a difference in her personal life.

“Dad died in 2007, and then Mom had a heart attack in 2010,” Olsson recalled. “I got the call and raced to the house. I learned from the rescue squad that she read her own EKG, pointed out an ST depression and said, ‘You need to get me to the hospital now.’ Mom had trained all of them on the rescue squad on reading an EKG, and there she was doing it. They got her to the hospital, and she had a quintuple bypass.”

By this time, Carter Olsson was retired, and her commitment to Massey continued through the Shirley Carter and Sture Gordon Olsson endowment. Steven Grant, M.D., associate director for translational research and co-leader of the Developmental Therapeutics research program at Massey, currently holds the Shirley Carter and Sture Gordon Olsson Chair in Cancer Research.

After Carter Olsson died in 2020, Olsson received an outpouring of support from individuals whose lives she had touched.

“A woman reached out to me and told me a story about how Mom had saved her life,” Olsson remembered. “My mom had seen her at the grocery store and walked up to her, put her hand on the woman’s throat and told her to have a doctor look at it. The woman said that she had just had a routine physical and got the all clear, but my mother insisted that she make a doctor’s appointment. The swelling my mother saw in the grocery store was actually a sign of cancer, and the woman would not have known early on. She saved that woman’s life.”

The Olsson family requested that memorial gifts be made to Massey at the time of Carter Olsson’s death. The funding continues to support Massey research and maintain the legacy of a woman who gave so much to the cancer center and the community.

“I have some of her oral history on video tapes,” Olsson shared. “She was very special.”

Written by: Amy Lacey