William Felix Mengert was born in Washington, D.C. on November 13, 1899 to Ulric and Margaret [Johnson] Mengert. He and his older brother grew up in Washington, D.C.

After graduating from Eastern High School in 1917, he entered Haverford College outside of Philadelphia. This was the time of World War I. So, Mengert registered for the draft and served in the Naval Reserve Force in 1918 while attending Haverford. He was on the football squad and active in campus activities, including the Scientific Society.

Mengert evidently delighted in teasing his classmates whose roast of him in the 1921 Haverford Record yearbook includes a comment about his interest in medicine.

It is worthy of remark that Bill’s ambition is to kill people until he has enough money to go to raising hogs.”

Following graduation in 1921, Mengert returned to Washington, D.C. where he taught chemistry and mathematics at Gallaudet College for two years. There, he met Ida Gaarder, the principal of the Kendall School for the Deaf. The couple married in June 1924 and were the parents of two children, Eric John and Ann Katharine.

In 1923, Mengert entered The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, graduating in the class of 1927. If he had any aspirations to become an obstetrician gynecologist, he could not have chosen a better medical school. J. Whitridge Williams, the author and editor of the first six editions of the seminal textbook, Obstetrics, was Obstetrician in Chief. Dr. Williams influenced Mengert’s decision to seek a residency at the University of Iowa under Dr. Everett D. Plass — another Johns Hopkins graduate.

Following residency, Dr. Mengert spent two years as a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Gynecean Hospital Institute of Gynecologic Research before returning to the University of Iowa as an Assistant and later an Associate Professor (1934–1943). He remained at the University of Iowa until accepting the position as chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Southwestern Medical College in November 1943.

Dr. Mengert is probably best remembered for his passionate insistence that obstetrics and gynecology be joined academically in one department. He was a “generalist” in every sense of the word — practicing what are now the subspecialties of maternal-fetal medicine, gynecologic oncology, reproductive endocrinology, and urogynecology. He was also dogmatic — some might say dictatorial — in his approach to medicine and academics. He believed that women had no place in academic medicine. Needless to say, these traits did not endear him to everyone. 

Following his resignation at Southwestern Medical College, Dr. Mengert became Professor and Head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago where he remained until his retirement in September 1968. 

After his wife’s death in 1970, he was named Visiting Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Chicago Medical School. And in 1971, he published a book entitled, History of The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 1950–1970.

Dr. Mengert died on March 23, 1976, at age 76.