User:Ameliamelody/sandbox

Early Life

Marie Koenig Olsen was born in Ithaca, New York in 1913. Her Father, Frederick F. Koenig, was a faculty member at Cornell University who received his DVM from Cornell in 1909 and served as a teacher of equine and an ambulatory clinician until 1918. Late in the year of 1919, Dr Koneig, along with his wife- a friend and campaigner for Eleanor Roosevelt- and children, moved to Jamestown, New York in order to establish a general veterinary practice, focusing mainly on smaller animals such as dogs and cats due to the declining value of the horse after World War One. Marie grew up within the veterinary lifestyle and often helped her Father with his work; as a result she made the bold decision to follow in his footsteps and become a veterinarian herself, despite the prominent gender imbalance of the time. Marie graduated from Cornell University in 1937, becoming the seventh woman to graduate with a Cornell DVM degree according to the college, and the eleventh female veterinarian in the whole of the United States. Despite being the only woman to graduate from Cornell in her year, and having an affliction with a chronic neurological condition Parkinson's disease which struck her as a sequel to a childhood influenza virus in 1917, Marie did not fail to achieve her qualification and participate as an active student at the university.