Mira du Plessis Forges Her Future With a Hammer and a Scalpel

“I’ve always had a large variety of interests,” she said. “I used to go exploring in the woods around my house when I was a kid, and I realize now how dangerous that was. I would take apart my video game controllers and see what was in them. I’ve always done arts and crafts and I have been drawing comics since I was 5. I started drawing comics for my high school newspaper and continued that in college for Humans of Virginia Tech and The Cavalier Daily.”

Her fascination for taking things apart and putting them back together, fixing them, helped lead her to medicine, joining the several doctors that are already in her family.

“My French grandmother was one of the first women to attend medical school in Paris during the 1940s, but she had to drop out because of the Nazi occupation,” du Plessis said. “She eventually went back to the medical field and became a psychologist. There are a lot of doctors in my family, which led me to medicine.”

During the COVID-19 outbreak, du Plessis is pursuing her medical education while self-isolating in Palmyra, working with the School of Medicine’s flexible schedule and online content delivery system.

“My professors have gone out of their way to be present and approachable via a digital platform as well,” she said. “They will have live office hours on Zoom and are incredibly good at responding to our emails. They have also made themselves available to talk and reach out to if any of us were not doing well dealing with the stress of the pandemic.”

The pandemic has also given du Plessis a different view of her professors.

“They are not only my teachers and mentors, but also physicians,” she said. “I have seen them approach this challenging emergency with utmost professionalism and leadership. Some are braving the front lines caring for COVID19 patients.”

Despite the current isolation, medicine is largely a hands-on profession. Du Plessis likes to work with her hands, a trait that draws her to both blacksmithing and surgery.

“I would say that I am really interested in surgery,” she said. “I’ve always liked working with my hands, building miniature models or blacksmithing. Surgery is hands-on and has interplay between macro and micro approaches, and it is something I can see myself enjoying for the rest of my life and the rest of my career. It’s just going in there and being involved with it; I wouldn’t want to sit behind a desk; I wouldn’t want to be looking at numbers all day. I just want to go in there.”

With utmost confidence in her abilities, du Plessis wants to solve problems and improvise, traits she uses as a blacksmith and pilot, and which she hopes to use as a physician. 

“I need a career where I have mental tasks all the time. I really enjoy the puzzle-solving process, and if I can use my hands at the same time, even better,” du Plessis said. “Surgery ticks all the boxes.”

A first-year medical student, du Plessis has been developing a deft hand with a scalpel working in the dissection lab. 

“You need to be very precise with your incisions,” she said. “You need to be very careful you are not damaging anything you are not supposed to be cutting or removing.”

And she is intrigued by the intricacies of her chosen trade.

“The human body is incredible,” she said. “It’s really fun because I’ll see all these structures, all these nerves and muscles and I would think, ‘That’s in me, too, and that’s in everybody I know.’ And that is so cool.”

Du Plessis, a native of Dublin, Virginia, (“We have a population of 2,000 people and 30,000 head of cattle, so Charlottesville is the big city for me”) transferred into UVA as a second-year undergraduate student and graduated with a biochemistry degree in 2019. She found the Blacksmith Club early on at a student activities fair. 

“The first day, I was hooked,” she said. “I would really look forward to Fridays because it gave me a hands-on artistic outlet like no other.

“Surprisingly, there’s a lot of chemistry involved with blacksmithing, so I could relate what I was learning in my courses with what I was doing at the forge, and that was really cool.”

The club works out of The Stokes of England Blacksmithing Company in Keswick, run by head blacksmith Steve Stokes. The forge is in a converted 1901 railroad warehouse once visited by James Dean while he was in town filming “Giant” in 1955. Stokes has hosted the club since it started in 2013.

In blacksmithing, as in medicine, the tools are important, and du Plessis treated herself to a four-pound German blacksmithing hammer that she named “Juanita.” 

“I wanted my own hammer because it becomes a part of me and an extension of myself,” she said. “It is my hammer, and I bring her [Juanita] with me every time I go to the forge. I even brought her it with me when I went to the [Medical College Admission Test]. Weighing in at four pounds, she’s a very voluptuous woman and gets the job done.”

While she is passionate about blacksmithing and the UVA Blacksmithing Club is about one-third women, du Plessis said that, in general, female smiths are unusual.

“In the actual blacksmithing profession, it’s pretty rare to see a woman, because it still has the physical aspect of it,” she said “You can still use power tools, but it is a traditionally male-dominated profession.

“Back in the day, a lot of women were jewelers because that didn’t require as much strength and that was considered acceptable for them to do that, so that is a branch point of blacksmithing you will see more women in. And we do have a few jewelers’ anvils at the forge, too.”

The blacksmithing club comprises about 50 members of the UVA community, but there is space for only about six people to work at the three anvils in the forge during the club’s Friday afternoon sessions.

“The people it attracts are fellow nerds and people who are really into Dungeons & Dragons and medieval stuff,” she said. “There’s also a lot of engineers, which makes sense because it has the design aspect and practical application. We’ve had mechanical engineers, and some history majors have come out. I had a guy email me who wanted to make a replica of a roman sword because he was writing a thesis on medieval weaponry and he wanted to create one.”

Du Plessis forged her own sword, which got her in trouble. 

“I brought my sword to the fall activities fair, and apparently you are not supposed to bring weapons,” she said. “The campus police were really mad at me, but I convinced them it was a decorative piece, and not really a weapon, because I purposefully made the blade dull.”

These days, she is making furniture. “I made a coat stand for some friends of mine,” she said. “And right now, I am working on making a music stand for my friend Aliena. She likes foxes, so I am putting a sleeping fox in the center of it.”

Du Plessis still goes to the forge, where Stokes and his workers maintain social distancing and wear masks while working.

“I am currently working on a replica of a Celtic lion Steve designed,” she said. “It’s been a good outlet and something I look forward to when I have some free time.”

While blacksmithing is du Plessis’ break from the intricacies of medicine, she believes the two to be interrelated.

“Blacksmithing is very procedural, very hands-on and shares parallels with surgery,” said du Plessis, “For instance, orthopedic surgeons use hammers, chisels and power tools in the operating room. Metal alloy implants are also used for joint replacements and fracture fixations, with the implants being ‘forged’ to fit individual patients.”

No longer a neophyte ironsmith, du Plessis is currently co-chair of the Blacksmithing Club with Dominic DeCannio, a role she anticipates surrendering as her medical education becomes more demanding. In her official role, she sends out sign-up emails, car-pools people to the forge for their weekly sessions (in normal times), and applies for Student Activity Fee funding to cover club activities, particularly time at the forge.

While blacksmithing grounds her, du Plessis is also a student pilot who learned to fly because she was afraid of heights. 

“I actually learned to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car,” du Plessis said. “I had a really bad phobia of heights, so bad that whenever I visited my grandparents in Washington, D.C., or Arlington and we had to go up a big building, I would ask if we could take the stairs because I couldn’t get on an elevator. And I knew that UVA had taller buildings, and I didn’t want to be that kid who really freaks out if I have to come to the fourth floor and I can’t take the stairs all the time.

“I followed my dad’s advice of exposure therapy by conquering my fear head-on at 2,000 feet in a Cessna-172 Skyhawk.”

When she first came to UVA, du Plessis started working in associate professor Mark Beenhakker’s pharmacology laboratory, working on epilepsy research. 

“Mira is one of my favorites,” Beenhakker said. “She hasn’t worked in my lab since starting med school, but she still swings by to chat every once in a while. Mira’s eccentric, very creative and she has a heart of gold. She really is one of the more thoughtful students to go through my lab.”

Du Plessis has forged a decorative sword with engraved Nordic runes and two knives for Beenhakker.

“They might come in handy one day,” Beenhakker said. “There was no occasion – I think Mira just felt like giving them to me. I felt awesome when she did.”

Du Plessis sees herself in a good place, where she gets to solve problems, medical and metallurgical.

“I’m just really happy where I am in life right now,” she said. “I get to do what I love in studying medicine, be with some really awesome colleagues and professors. And then studying the art of blacksmithing with Steve Stokes. I get to take my friends out and teach them the ancient art of blacksmithing. I’m just having a lot of fun.”