Cincinnati school-teacher,[51] than of the kind-hearted but
short-sighted men, who in Boston were then trying to establish the
Female Medical Education Society!
It was in 1845 that the plan of studying medicine became with Elizabeth
Blackwell a settled resolution; and she was thus the first person on the
American continent to whom such an idea did come.
It is worthy of note, that the originality of the main idea was
sustained by an almost equal originality of view in regard to the true
nature of a medical education.
Only a few years ago an eminent New York professor[52] showed that it
was both practicable, and a common thing to do, for men to graduate,
even from New York schools, after only ten months attendance upon
lectures, of which the second five months was a mere repetition of the
first: and without ever having seen a sick person. If this were true of
New York,—where, after all, it is possible to do otherwise,—it may be
imagined what would be true of the multitude of small schools scattered
through the country, where the resources for either clinical or didactic
instruction were confessedly inadequate. And if this were true in 1880
the status of 1850 may be divined.
It was at this time that Elizabeth Blackwell recognized that preparation
for medical practice demanded the sanction of test examinations at a
respectable school; not a few months, but years of study; and above all
abundant clinical experience. Rather than accept as final the
indorsement of little schools established _ad hoc_, or exclusively for
women, she applied to be admitted as student at twelve medical schools
throughout the country, and among these found one, the school at Geneva,
N. Y., to grant her request. The faculty referred the matter to the
students, and they decided to invite the courageous applicant. Poor,
dependent entirely upon her own exertions, and with others more or less
dependent upon her, she nevertheless found means to devote five years to
the study of her profession, of which two were spent in Europe, at that
time a rare extravagance.[53] Uninstructed or informed by the laws and
customs of the entire country that attendance on didactic lectures was
sufficient to justify a medical diploma, and hospital training was
superfluous,—her native common sense perceived the absurdity of this
theory, and left no stone unturned to secure such fragments of hospital
training as were obtainable for her in either hemisphere. During the
term of study at Geneva, she utilized a vacation to seek admittance to
the hospital of the Blockley almshouse at Philadelphia, and obtained it
by skillful manipulation of the opposing political influences which
prevailed among the managers of the institution.[54] After graduating at
Geneva in 1849, the first woman in America or of modern times to receive
a medical diploma, Miss Blackwell immediately went to Europe, and by
exceptional favor succeeded in visiting some of the hospitals of both
London[55] and Paris. In Paris, moreover, she submitted for several
months to the severe imprisonment of the great school for midwives, La
Maternité.
Emily Blackwell was refused admission to the Hobart College at Geneva,
which had graduated her sister; but was allowed, for one year, to study
at the Rush College of Chicago. For this permission, however, the
college was censured by the State Medical Society, and the second term
was therefore refused to the solitary female student. She was, however,
enabled to complete her studies at Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated thence
in 1852. During one of her vacations, she obtained permission to visit
in Bellevue Hospital, where Dr. James Wood was just initiating the
system of regular clinical lectures. After graduation, Emily Blackwell
also went to Europe, and had the good fortune to become the private
pupil of the celebrated Sir James Simpson of Edinburgh. She remained
with him for a year, and when she left he warmly testified to her
proficiency and competence for the work she had undertaken. The
testimonial is worth quoting entire:
“MY DEAR MISS BLACKWELL:
“I do think that you have assumed a position for which you are
excellently qualified, and where you may, as a teacher, do a great
amount of good.
“As this movement progresses, it is evidently a matter of the utmost
importance that female physicians should be most fully and perfectly
educated; and I firmly believe that it would be difficult or
impossible to find for that purpose any one better qualified than
yourself.
“I have had the fairest and best opportunity of testing the extent of
your medical acquirements during the period of eight months, when you
studied here with me, and I can have no hesitation in stating to
you—what I have often stated to others—that I have rarely met with a
young physician who was better acquainted with the ancient and modern
languages, or more learned in the literature, science, and practical
details of his profession. Permit me to add that in your relation to
patients, and in your kindly care and treatment of them, I ever found
you a ‘most womanly woman.’ Believe me, with very kindest wishes for
your success,
“Yours very respectfully,
“JAMES G. SIMPSON.”[56]
Miss Blackwell received similar testimonials from several distinguished
physicians in London and Paris, in whose hospital wards she faithfully
studied. Thus equipped, she returned to New York in 1855 to join her
sister, with a fair hope of success in the arduous undertaking before
them.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, with the aid of a few generous friends, had
opened a little dispensary for women and children,—which after three
years’ existence, and one year of suspension, developed into the New
York Infirmary. This was first chartered in 1854. But when Emily
Blackwell returned from Europe, no opportunities existed for either of
the sisters to secure the hospital medical work, whose continued
training is justly regarded of such inestimable advantage to every
practicing physician. This was recognized even at a time that hospitals
were regarded as superfluous in undergraduate education.
In 1850, Dr. Marion Sims, arriving as an exiled invalid from Alabama,
with a brilliantly original surgical operation as his “stock in
trade,”—succeeded, with the aid of some generous New York women, in
founding the first Woman’s Hospital in the world. It was just seven
years since the first imperfect medical school for women had been opened
in Boston: six years since the first woman physician had graduated at
Geneva: five years since a permanent school for women had been founded
in Philadelphia. The coincidence of these dates is not fortuitous. There
is a close correlation between the rise of modern gynæcology, and the
rise of the movement for readmitting women to the medical profession,
where they once held a place, and whence they had been forcibly
extruded. While it is far from true that women physicians are intended
only for obstetrics and gynæcology, it is unquestionably true that these
two great branches of medicine peculiar to their sex constitute the
great opportunity, the main portal, through which women have passed, and
are destined to pass, to general medicine. It would have been well if
those who conducted the one movement had frankly allied themselves with
the leaders of the other. Unfortunately, the more important, and
especially the more lucrative, the new medical spheres[57] seemed likely
to be,—the more eager were those who engaged in them to keep out women.
Dr. Sims thus describes the circumstances of the founding of the Woman’s
Hospital:
“As soon as they (the New York surgeons) had learned how to perform
these operations successfully” (those that Sims had invented), “they had
no further use for me. My thunder had been stolen, and I was left
without any resources whatever. I said to myself, ‘I am a lost man
unless I can get somebody to create a place in which I can show the
world what I am capable of doing.’ _This was the inception of the idea
of a woman’s hospital._”—“Story of My Life.”
When the New York women organized the hospital they framed a
by-law,—which has since passed into oblivion,—to the effect that the
assistant surgeon should be a woman. Emily Blackwell was the woman who
should have been chosen. She had had an education far superior to that
of the average American doctor of the day, a special training under the
most distinguished gynæcologists of the time,—Simpson and Huginer—and
had received abundant testimonials to capacity; while there was really
not another person in New York possessed of either such opportunities or
of such special testimonials. At her return, informal inquiries were
made to ascertain whether the second woman physician in New York would
be allowed a footing where she so justly belonged, in New York’s first
Woman’s Hospital. The overtures were rejected: Dr. Sims passed by these
just claims to recognition, and evaded the mandatory by-law of his
generous friends, in a way that is most clearly shown in his own words:
“One clause of the by-laws provided that the assistant surgeon should be
a woman. I appointed Mrs. Brown’s friend Henri L. Stuart, who had been
so efficient in organizing the hospital. _She was matron and general
superintendent._”[58]
Having thus evaded the distinct and far-sighted intention of the
founders of the hospital, Dr. Sims proceeded to select his medical
assistant upon grounds extraordinarily frivolous.
“The hospital had been opened about six months, when I told the board of
lady managers that I must have an assistant. They told me to select the
man. I offered the appointment to Dr. F. N. Johnson, Jr., _who had just
graduated_.[59] He was about to be married, and was going to locate in
the country near Cooperstown. I then offered the place to Dr. George F.
Shrady. He too was about to be married, and for some cause or other he
did not see fit to accept it. Soon after this, a young friend of mine at
the South, was married to Dr. Thomas Addis Emmett, of New York. As I was
looking for an assistant, I did not know that I could more handsomely
recognize the friendship of former days, than to appoint the husband of
Mrs. Emmett assistant. So to the accident of good fortune in marrying a
beautiful Southern young woman, Dr. Emmett owes his appointment.”
Suffering womanhood undoubtedly owes much to Marion Sim’s inventive
genius. But, on the other hand, Sim’s fame and fortune may be said to
have been all made by women, from the poor slaves in Alabama who,
unnarcotized, surrendered their patient bodies to his experiments,[60]
to the New York ladies whose alert sympathies and open purses had
enabled him to realize his dream, and establish his personal fortunes.
It would have been an act both graceful and just on his part, at this
crisis, to have shared his opportunities with the two women who, like
himself, had been well buffeted in an opposing world,[61] and whose work
and aspirations were so closely identified with his own. But this he
failed to do; and the lost opportunity made all the difference to the
pioneer women physicians, between brilliant and modest, between
immediate and tardy professional success.
Unable elsewhere to obtain hospital opportunities, the Blackwells
resolved to found a hospital that should be conducted not only for, but
by women. The New York Infirmary, chartered in 1854, preceded the
Woman’s Hospital by a year, and, like it, was the first institution of
the kind in the world. For three years it consisted exclusively of a
dispensary; then was added a tiny lying-in ward of twelve beds. At this
moment the advance guard of women physicians received their fourth
recruit, Marie Zakzrewska, a young midwife from Germany. She had been a
favorite pupil of Dr. Schmidt, one of the state examiners of the school
for midwives in Berlin, and chief director of the Charity Hospital. He
had been so impressed by the talents of his pupil, as to entrust her
with the responsibility of teaching his own classes, when ill-health
compelled him to resign his work. Discouraged, however, by some
intrigues which sprang up after the death of her powerful friend,
Fräulein Zakzrewska decided to abandon the home where a career seemed
ready marked out for her, and to seek a wider horizon and larger
fortunes in America. Here she arrived in 1853. Her pluck and courage
carried her safely through the first difficult year of an almost
penniless exile; then the generous kindness of Elizabeth Blackwell
secured her a place among the advance guard of women physicians, taught
her English, and procured her admission to the Medical School at
Cleveland. She assisted the Blackwells in the task of collecting from an
indifferent or hostile community the first few hundred dollars with
which to found the New York Infirmary, and in this served as physician
for a year; was thence invited to lecture on midwifery at the Female
Medical School at Boston; was finally summoned to build up the New
England Hospital, which for many years was almost identified with her
name and with that of Dr. Lucy Sewall,[62] and of Dr. Helen Morton.
This, the second hospital to be conducted by women physicians, was
founded in 1862.
The fifth pioneer was Ann Preston, a Quaker lady of Philadelphia, an
ardent abolitionist, as it was the inherited privilege of the Friends to
be.[63] Miss Preston had become early habituated to interest herself in
the cause of minorities. Small and fragile in body, she possessed an
indomitable little soul; and when the suggestion had once been thrown
out, that a medical college for women might be opened in Philadelphia,
Ann Preston never ceased working until had been collected the meagre
funds considered sufficient for its establishment. This was in 1850; and
the sixth annual announcement of the school mentions Dr. Preston as
already installed as professor of physiology. This position she held
till the day of her death.
At the outset, the new medical school was scarcely an improvement upon
its Boston predecessor. Four months lectures,—composed of compilations
from three or four text-books,—the same repeated the following year,
constituted the curriculum. There was much zeal, but little knowledge.
Dr. Preston herself, philanthropist and excellent woman as she was, was
necessarily ignorant of her subject, because she had never had any
opportunity to learn anything about it. The other professors were not
more qualified, although without the same excuse of necessity. Ten years
after the opening of the college, the Philadelphia County Medical
Society found an apparently plausible pretext for refusing recognition
to the school, in the fact that the lecturer on therapeutics was not a
physician but a druggist,—who moreover presumed to practice medicine
over his counter, and “irregular” and advertised medicine at that. Even
more to the purpose than these accumulated crimes was the fact that his
lectures consisted almost exclusively of strings of prescriptions, and
had no real claim to be accepted as exponents of the modern science of
therapeutics.
The first adequate teacher to appear in the school was Emmeline
Cleveland, who, having graduated under its meagre instructions, was sent
to Europe through the generosity of two Quaker ladies,[64] to fit
herself at the Paris Maternité to lecture upon obstetrics. Dr. Cleveland
thus repeated the career of Dr. Shippen in 1762,[65] and like him found
in Europe the instructions and inspiration her native city would not
afford. Dr. Cleveland was a woman of real ability, and would have done
justice to a much larger sphere than that to which fate condemned her.
Compelled by the slender resources of the college to unite the duties of
housekeeper and superintendent to those of professor, she not
unfrequently passed from the lecture room to the kitchen to make the
bread for the students who boarded at the institution. Possessed of much
personal beauty, and grace of manner, she had married young; but her
husband had been stricken with hemiplegia early in their married life,
and it was the necessity of supporting him as well as herself, which led
the wife, childless and practically widowed, to enter the profession of
medicine.
Of the remaining typical members of the pioneer groups of woman
physicians, all were married, either already when they began their
studies, or immediately after graduation. The latter was the fortune of
Sarah Adamson, the second woman in the United States to receive a
medical diploma, and who a year later married Dr. Dolley, of Rochester,
where she at once settled and has been in successful practice for
thirty-eight years. Miss Adamson was a niece of the Dr. Hiram Corson,
who, in Montgomery County of Pennsylvania, was destined to wage a forty
years’ chivalrous warfare in defense of women physicians. At the age of
eighteen, having come across a copy of Wistar’s Anatomy, she devoted a
winter to its engrossing study, and became fired with enthusiasm for the
medical art, to which anatomy formed such a grand portal.[66] At that
time, 1849, the Philadelphia Medical School had not yet opened; but the
Eclectic School at Rochester had announced its willingness to receive
woman students, and to this Miss Adamson persuaded her parents to allow
her to go. She graduated in 1851.
Besides Miss Adamson, four other ladies availed themselves of the
liberality of the “irregular” eclectic school at Rochester, but of these
only one graduated. Even more than her Quaker colleagues, did this lady
represent a distinctive type among women physicians, for she was already
married when she began her studies. Mrs. Gleason was the wife of a young
Vermont doctor, who opened an infirmary in the country for chronic
invalids, shortly after acquiring his own diploma. In the management of
his lady patients, the young doctor often found it an advantage to be
assisted “by his wife as an intermediary, on the one side to relate the
symptoms, on the other to prescribe the directions.” Thus the wife
became gradually associated with the husband’s work, while he on his
part remained generously alive to her interests. He it was, who, in
order to secure an opportunity for his wife for some kind of systematic
medical education, persuaded the eclectics, assembled in council, to
open the doors of their new school to women. “In his opinion, the
admission of women was the reform most needed in the medical
profession.” “I remember vividly,” writes Mrs. Gleason, “the day of his
return, when he exclaimed, with enthusiasm, ‘Now, wife, you can go to
medical lectures.’”[67] The husband and wife have practiced medicine in
harmonious partnership ever since this early epoch. Their sanitarium at
Elmira still exists to sustain its old and honorable reputation.[68]
There is something idyllic in this episode. Here in western New York was
realized, simply and naturally, the ideal life of a married pair, as was
once described by Michelet, where the common interests and activities
should embrace not only the home circle, but also professional life. It
is the secret ideal of many a sweet-natured woman, hitherto attained
more often when the husband is a clergyman than when he is a physician,
but in America is by no means unknown in the latter case. By Mrs.
Gleason’s happy career, the complex experiment in life which was being
made by the first group of women physicians was enriched by a special
and, on some accounts, peculiarly interesting type.
The two remaining women of the group were also married, and the husband
of one, Mrs. Thomas, was also a physician.[69] She and her sister, Mrs.
Longshore, both graduated in the first class sent out from the Woman’s
Medical College of Philadelphia.[70] Dr. Longshore was the first woman
to settle in practice in this city, and her sign was regarded as a
monstrous curiosity, collecting street idlers for its perusal. On one,
and perhaps more than one, occasion, a druggist refused to fill a
prescription signed by the “female doctor,” and took it upon himself to
order her home “to look after her house and darn her husband’s
stockings.”[71] But Dr. Longshore ultimately established herself in a
lucrative practice. Mrs. Thomas, the sister, first began to study
medicine privately, with her husband, a practitioner in Indiana. For
four years, while caring for a family of young children, Mrs. Thomas
“read medicine” at all odd minutes; and at last, upon hearing that a
medical college had been opened for women in Philadelphia, she made a
grand final effort to secure its advantages. She sewed steadily until
she had provided her family with clothes for six months in advance, and
then started for the East. Returning with her coveted diploma, Mrs.
Thomas began to practice medicine with her husband at Fort Wayne, and
continued to do so until her death about a year ago (1889). During eight
years she held the position of city physician, and for twelve years was
physician to a home for friendless girls.
The married women physicians of the West, with protection and sympathy
at home, and encountering abroad only a good-natured laxity of
prejudice, were in a favored position compared with their colleagues in
Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. At the time that the tiny New York
infirmary was opened (1857) the name of “woman physician” had become a
by-word of reproach, from its usurpation by a notorious abortionist,
“Madame” Restell. So wide a stain could be diffused over innocent
persons by a single evil reputation, that it was difficult for Drs.
Blackwell and Zakzrewska to obtain lodgings or office room; their
applications were refused on the ground that their business must be
disreputable. Scarcely more than fifty years had elapsed since the
practice of obstetrics at least was entirely in the hands of women: yet
the recollection of this had so completely faded away, that the women
who now renewed the ancient claim to minister to the physical
necessities of their sex, were treated as reprobates.[72] The little
group of women who nevertheless dared to face this opprobrium, contained
collectively nearly all the elements necessary for success, although in
no one member of the group were these united. Instinctive enthusiasm for
the science of life, instinctive predilection for medical practice,
enlightened resolve to elevate the intellectual capacity and enlarge the
practical opportunities of women,—the habit of progressive
philanthropy,—personal interest in the pursuits of the nearest friend,
the husband; literary training, exceptional among the uncultivated
physicians of the day,—the tradition of centuries in the discipline of
the practical European midwife,—all these were representative, and
certainly none could have been spared. What was most conspicuously
lacking was systematic education, which might have enabled the medical
students to judge more critically of the medical education which was
offered them. However, even without adequate intellectual preparation,
there was a complex representation of interests which sufficiently
showed that the enterprise was no isolated eccentricity, but sprang from
roots widely ramifying in the permanent nature of things, and in the
changing circumstances of the day.