She never graduated from Temple and needed another credit, in organic chemistry, to meet the pre-med requirements at Hahnemann. The only university nearby that offered organic chemistry in the summer was Villanova, which only accepted men at the time. She enrolled anyway, but after taking a week of classes, officials insisted she leave. Her professor offered to give her private lessons and said that if she passed the exam, he would give her the credit she needed. She graduated and started medical school in the fall of 1941.
She graduated in 1945—one of three women in the class, Hahnemann’s second to hire women—and did an internship at New York Medical College in Valhalla. A friend there arranged her for a blind date with Dr. Louis J. Salerno, who had just returned from his service as a major in the army at the end of the war. They were married in 1948 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
She kept her own name, which was highly unusual at the time. She and her husband were both professors at New York Medical College (she taught pediatrics; he taught obstetrics and gynecology), and she wanted to minimize any confusion.
In addition to her son Louis, she leaves behind three other sons, Robert, Justin and Mark Salerno; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1988.
dr. Giannini’s work at the Mental Retardation Institute, of which she was director from 1950 to 1978, caught the attention of President Jimmy Carter, who appointed her first director of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (now the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research). ). , Independent living and rehabilitation research).
After Mr. Carter lost the 1980 election, she joined the Department of Veterans Affairs, expanding her work to include physical disabilities associated with military service, including post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, blindness, deafness, and other issues.
On her second presidential appointment, President George W. Bush named her the chief deputy assistant secretary for aging in the Department of Health and Human Services. There she met Tommy Thompson, the secretary of the department, who in 2002 appointed her director of the Department’s Office for the Handicapped.