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From The First Generation: Anna
Myers Longshore-Potts (1829-1912)
The earliest formally-trained American medical
women sought interesting work and independence,
and wanted to make medical care by women an option
for women patients. Some intended to teach women
the workings of their bodies and the ways of health.
Offering women lectures on hygiene both filled
a need and provided fledgling women physicians
a source of income.
A graduate in the first class of the Female (later
Woman's) Medical College of Pennsylvania (founded
in 1850), Dr. Longshore-Potts practiced in Philadelphia,
Illinois, and Michigan. Feeling a need to teach and to wander, she became an
internationally known lecturer on what now might be called "women's health," traveling
as far as Australia and New Zealand. Later, she resided in Arizona and California
and wrote several books on similar themes, aimed at women readers. |
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Doctors and Reformers
at Hull House:
Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) and
Rochelle Slobodinsky Yarros (1869-1946)
American
women contributed vigorously
to reform movements of
the Progressive Era and
beyond. Numerous medical
women used their training
and standing to advance
causes aimed at bettering health and curing societal
ills. Many worked in the "child saving" movement.
Their efforts spanned neighborhood dispensaries to
national organizations.
Alice Hamilton, a University of Michigan medical
graduate, became an international authority on occupational
poisons (particularly lead) and the "dangerous
trades," which she explored in the field and laboratory. She created industrial
medicine in the U.S. For many years she lived in Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago,
partaking of its intellectual stimulation and devotion to helping the poor. In
1919, Dr. Hamilton became the first woman faculty member at Harvard. Later, she
traveled the world to inspect areas of famine and to advocate peace.
Another resident of Hull House was Rachelle Slobodinsky Yarros, whose youthful
radicalism forced her to flee her native Russia when a teenager. After some years
of factory work, she won her M.D. from WMCP in 1893. In Chicago, she practiced
and taught obstetrics and gynecology. Working at a West Side dispensary surrounded
by poverty, crowding, and misery, she turned her attention to "social hygiene." Encouraged
by Margaret Sanger, in 1923 she opened the first birth control clinic in Chicago.
Her book Modern Woman and Sex expresses the voice of a "feminist physician." |
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Organizers for
Women Physicians:
Bertha Van Hoosen (1863-1952)
and Esther Pohl Lovejoy (1869-1967)
Impatient with continuing discrimination against
women physicians, Chicago surgeon and obstetrician
Bertha Van Hoosen founded the Medical Women's National
Association (later AMWA, the American Medical Women's
Association) in 1915, although most American medical
women of that period favored gender assimilation. Van
Hoosen and AMWA soon found a cause when patriotic women
physicians were refused the opportunity to enter the
U.S. military during World War I.
Some adventurous American women doctors did find a way to serve in devastated
Europe, most through the American Women's Hospitals, founded under the auspices
of AMWA by surgeon Rosalie Slaughter Morton in 1918. It was physician, suffragist,
writer, and administrator Esther Pohl Lovejoy who long directed the activities
of the American Women's Hospitals Services (it's later name) as it provided medical
care, public health measures, and other services throughout the world and impoverished
areas of the American South and Appalachia. Lovejoy headed AWHS until she was
97 years of age.
AMWA continued to serve American medical women and today promotes their rights
and opportunities, while offering educational programs (many centered on women's
health) through its annual meetings, publications, and new website. |
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Medical Missionary
to India: Ida S. Scudder (1870-1960)
Nothing attracted the broad support of American
women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
as much as the Christian overseas mission. Numerous
women physicians went to China, India, and other locations
to practice medicine and surgery, establish hospitals
and clinics, teach hygiene, and spread the gospel.
Recent attitudes decry the linkage of cure with conversion,
but few can doubt the heroism of young women who, often
fresh out of medical school, journeyed afar to treat
women whose culture often prohibited examination by
male physicians.
Ida Scudder, born into a missionary family in Madras, India, received her M.D.
from Cornell Medical College in 1899 and promptly returned to Vellore, India.
She founded a small hospital and saw patients throughout the countryside; these
informal rounds grew into a series of "roadside dispensaries." For
twenty-two years she did all the surgery for her hospital. Later, she established
what became the Christian Medical College and Hospital of Vellore. |
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Delivering Babies...Saving
the Children...Teaching Future Physicians:
Alice
Weld Tallant and Helen O. Dickens (1875-1968)
Nineteenth-century women physicians in the
U.S. usually found their practices limited to mostly
women and children; obstetrical skill was essential.
Men controlled the organized specialty of obstetrics-gynecology,
however, and women had no easy time entering it. Among
those who specialized in obstetrics, many became acutely
aware of the dilemmas presented by birth in the cradle
of poverty, and of the plight of unwanted children.
Alice Weld Tallant, a Johns Hopkins medical graduate, became a beloved professor
of obstetrics at WMCP from 1905 to 1923. At the College's maternity outpost in
Philadelphia's poorest district she stressed prenatal care and the need for medical
social work. Dr. Tallant was active with the American Association for the Study
and Prevention of Infant Mortality, later the American Child Health Association.
A newspaper obituary stated that she delivered over 3,000 babies in her private
practice.
Helen O. Dickens, a 1933 University of Illinois medical graduate, faced the dual
challenges of being a woman and an African-American in medicine. Choosing a career
in obstetrics and gynecological surgery, she rose to full professorship at the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1976. There she served as mentor
for numerous students, and from 1968 as Associate Dean for Minority Affairs.
Her clinical experience led to a concern for better sex education and the well-being
of pregnant adolescents, and her founding of the "Teen Clinic" within
her department's practice. Dr. Dickens combined this full career with marriage
and motherhood. |
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Career Investigator
to Medical College President: Louise Pearce (1885-1959)
Until recent decades, women found only occasional
welcome in the largely man's world of laboratory science,
though perseverance, or the aid of a male of female
mentor, could prevail. A Johns Hopkins medical graduate,
Louise Pearce spent almost her entire career at the
prestigious Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research
in New York, where she collaborated harmoniously with
male medical scientists, but never won the highest
title of full "Member." Her greatest of many
contributions was in the development of tryparsamide,
an effective agent to treat African sleeping sickness.
She conducted field trials in the Belgian Congo in
1920 and was later twice decorated by the Belgian government.
Though not a visible feminist, from 1946 to 1951 Dr.
Pearce served as part-time president of the Woman's
Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP), and helped
guide the nation's last women's medical school into
a new era of growth. |
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Family Practitioner
and Stateswoman of Medicine: Nancy Wilson Dickey
Earlier generations of women physicians repeatedly
faced exclusion from national and even local medical
societies. Such exclusion came to matter more than
symbolically as the American Medical Association gained
authority in the twentieth century, and as membership
in other societies became a criterion for speciality
status.
A Distinguished Alumna of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston,
Dr. Dickey has combined family practice, teaching, service to her profession,
and family life. She is educational director of the Brazos Valley Family Practice
Program, associated with Texas A&M University. Following two decades of work
within the American Medical Association, in 1998 she became its first woman president.
Her election signaled another landmark for the acceptance of women physicians,
while also exemplifying movement by the AMA toward a broader representation of
American physicians and their diverse viewpoints. |
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The Full Life of a
Medical Woman: Alma Dea Morani (1908-2001)
Plastic surgeon, teacher, leader, sculptor,
traveler - all of these describe Dr. Morani, a
1931 WMCP graduate and honoree of the "Renaissance
Woman Award" of the Foundation for the History
of Women in Medicine. Daughter of a prominent Italian-American
sculptor, she overcame family resistance to the
study of medicine, then later the barriers met
by a woman choosing a surgical career. She graduated
from WMCP in 1931. She trained in general surgery
in Philadelphia and plastic surgery at Barnes Hospital
in St. Louis. Although a lifelong medical feminist,
she often cited the help she received from male
mentors. She became the first woman member of the
American Society of Plastic Surgery. As a traveler,
Dr. Morani taught, and fostered international connections
among women doctors. She served as president of
the Medical Women's International Association and
the American Women's Hospital Services, and remained
a staunch friend of her medical alma mater. Yet,
as with many doctors, medicine was not enough:
she became an accomplished sculptor, a perfect
parallel career for the plastic surgeon. |
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