CHAPTER XXXIV
Opening of the Massachusetts Medical Society to women—Letter on the subject to Dr. Zakrzewska from Dr. Henry I. Bowditch—She declines to present herself for examination for admission, having already twice prepared herself and been refused examination because she was a woman—Dr. Zakrzewska’s reply to the question “whether to enforce obedience medicines should be administered to refractory prisoners in reformatories and prisons.” (1879-1884.)
It was in this same year of 1879, however, that the cause was heartened by the beginning of the tardy capitulation of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the council of which following in the wake of ten or a dozen of the other State medical societies, finally voted to admit women to membership on equal terms with men.
This society differs from most of the other State medical societies in that its membership does not consist, as does theirs, of delegates from the constituent county societies. Members join the Massachusetts Medical Society as individuals, and it aims to include all reputable members of the profession.
It had previously refused to recognize homeopathic and eclectic physicians, holding these latter as “irregular” practitioners of medicine, even though their diplomas were legalized by the same authority as that which had legalized those of its own members.
Its refusal to admit women to membership showed its intention to classify women also as “irregulars,” even women who had received their diplomas as regular classmates of men who were acceptable.
The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, of October 9, 1879, expressed itself characteristically in an editorial:
We regret to be obliged to announce that at a meeting of the councilors, held on October 1, it was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.... Enshrouded in her mantle of science, woman is supposed to be endowed with power to descend from that high pedestal upon which we men have always placed her, and to mingle with us unscathed in scenes from which her own modesty and the esteem of the other sex has hitherto protected her.
The editor seems to have forgotten that women had long mingled in those “scenes” as patients and as nurses; it was only as physicians that they were being “protected” from them.
However, the “protectors” were loath to discontinue their gallant services and, following the protest of the Suffolk District branch of the State Society, the Council rescinded its vote, thus relegating the medical women to their pedestals.
But the Society continued in a state of unrest, friends of the admission of women gaining in strength and their opponents losing proportionately, though by-issues were also injected. Eventually, the inevitable was foreseen; the question remained only as to the form which it would take.
The handwriting on the wall was visible when in 1883 the Pennsylvania State Medical Society (!) sent a woman (Dr. Alice Bennett) as delegate to the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society. She was accepted officially, and she sat through the proceedings, and nothing happened.
At the annual meeting of the following year, 1884, the By-Laws were amended so as to permit of the admission of women on an equality with men; and then that storm center cleared.
An editorial in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, June 19, 1884, loyally accepts the action of the Society but it cannot forbear a little overflow of emotion in the following words:
... We believe that women in this particular community are already aided and abetted in too many foolish fads and fancies. There is too much bad piano playing and too little good cooking and sewing taught them....
[Many years later, the editor of this book met the editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, and in discussing the subject of medical women, she is glad to say he admitted that he had “readjusted” his “point of view.”]
Dr. Henry I. Bowditch viewed the action of the Society in a different light, as is shown in a letter written to Dr. Zakrzewska after the details of this advanced step had been arranged and the women were preparing to take the Society examinations:
Boston, June 15, 1884.
My Dear Doctor:
I thank you for the letter received yesterday. The result was entirely unexpected, and I can only thank God and take courage for the future days and for opportunities to fight for simple right and justice.
For I assure you that all through these years since I have advocated the examination of women by the Massachusetts Medical Society, I have myself stood upon the eternal foundations of justice to every human being. My old anti-slavery warfare and its principles, with the experience gained in that fight against prejudice, have been of immense support to me.
... I have always consulted with honorable, educated women, in spite of all By-Laws. At first I believe some of the bigots thought I ought to be punished. But I cared not a farthing for the dark hints of discipline impending, feeling sure as I did that light would appear the next day and that with the element of Time and simple justice on my side, Right would certainly prevail.
But as I now look back upon this final victory, and mark the various tyrannical rulings of our presidents and the stupid arguments urged by the opponents and their victories up to the present hour, with their final and, if not graceful, certainly good-natured and boorish submission to the fact of being in a hopeless minority themselves—I marvel, and, as I said above, take courage for any future fight for the True and Right.
Some of the arguments by our opponents in the council were so weak that I think they injured their own cause.
For example, Dr. —— says: “Our fathers never meant that women should be members, and how absurd it would be for us to admit them! They are different from men and cannot properly become our associates in medicine, etc.”
Dr. ——, with becoming pompousness of manner after duly twirling his gray mustaches, said: “I am not in favor of women being admitted because they have never done anything original.”
Dr. Wyman suggested that the names of Mrs. Somerville, Mesdames Boivin and Lachapelle in France and Jacobi in America certainly proved that women were capable of high intellectual work.
“I do not admit that they are exceptions,” replied Dr. ——.
I was fool enough to forget to ask what original work had ever been done by members of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and especially by the speaker himself. That would have floored our antagonist very effectually.
But let us not think of the past, but prepare ourselves for the future that is opening so brightly before us.
I am glad that the young students are preparing for the race. As for yourself, I do not wonder at your decision. You do as I think I should do.
Your “pioneer” race and energy will always command the respect of the community and of the professional men who know you and who are not bigots to a “Code.”
I remain
Very truly yours,Henry I. Bowditch.
The reference at the end of Dr. Bowditch’s letter is to the course upon which Dr. Zakrzewska had decided, after mature consideration of the question of taking the examination for admission to the Massachusetts Medical Society. She expresses this decision and the reasons for reaching it, as follows:
The Massachusetts Medical Society has within the last three months decided to admit women. The perseverance of women in the practice of medicine and surgery, their professional competency, the increase in their numbers, and the impossibility of ignoring them any longer, have led to the result that physicians of this Society acknowledge women in daily practice and have thus broken the rule which binds them to friendliness and coöperation with members only. Necessity, not acknowledgment of the principle of the right of woman to practice, has finally conquered, and the Massachusetts Medical Society is willing to allow women to present themselves for examination with the view of admission.
On the other hand, the regular women practitioners have found it necessary to protect themselves against being confounded with charlatans of every description, and have formed themselves into a society which adopts the name of the Hospital in which their practice started and now centers.
Besides the physicians living in Boston, a few scattered over the New England States are members of this society. Thus a union of reliable women practitioners is begun and promises to be of interest and usefulness. If a union with the Massachusetts Medical Society can be effected by them, it would be beneficial to both and, no doubt, to the profession at large.
The obstacles to such a union consist chiefly in the fact that any one wishing to become a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society has to present himself or herself for examination before a number of censors chosen by the Society, and at present in the Suffolk District Medical Society consisting of five of its youngest members, who have to examine the candidate in Obstetrics, Histology, Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Materia Medica, and Chemistry, that is to say, precisely in those branches for proficiency in which the candidate has received a diploma years ago.
It is well known that wisdom and experience acquired in practice push into the background textbook knowledge, and that most physicians after ten years of practicing life have gained a great deal of knowledge which is not in the textbooks and have forgotten a great deal which is.
It is therefore a question whether the amount of benefit gained by admission into the Massachusetts Medical Society is worth the waste of time necessary for reading and studying books which we have long laid aside and simply use occasionally for reference.
To young beginners, I would advise the seeking of this privilege but as for myself, I feel constrained to make the following statement:
When I came to Boston in 1859, eight years after my graduation in Berlin as accoucheuse and three years after graduation as physician from the Western Reserve Medical College of Cleveland, Ohio, and having been regularly employed in teaching classes and private pupils in medicine, consequently, in the full life of a student—I made application for examination to be admitted into this society and was refused.
Again, five years later, that is, in 1864, I made the same application, and was not so decidedly refused. Thinking there was a possibility of my being admitted, I set myself to work reviewing some of my studies in order to prepare myself to meet the high dignitaries in the shape of the young men members and censors of that venerable society; but after several months of discussion, I again received a refusal.
This last refusal I met with the declaration that “when the time comes for women to be received into this Society—and I know it will come before I have passed out of this existence—this venerable Society cannot have me as a candidate for examination but must give me an honorary membership if it wants me at all.”
To-day, its condescending proposal for my examination for admission has been made, and I am only a little more than fifty years old. But after twenty-six and one-half years of practice (that is, nearly at the end of my career), my only personal interest in this affair is that I am happy that the younger women can have the benefit of an association which is very desirable for all beginners, and most desirable in assisting women to gain the position for which they strive.
I have done my part, and I feel satisfied with the results achieved. I have aided the women of this country by word and deed, by example and sacrifice, and I am willing to retire, leaving them the field in which to sow and to reap where I have helped to plow, associated as I have been with the pioneer women of the medical profession.
It was about this time that, at one of the meetings of the New England Hospital Society, that body was asked to give an opinion upon a question which had arisen in reformatories and prisons, that is, “whether medicines which cause anesthesia, emesis or prostration should ever be administered to refractory prisoners to enforce obedience through their action.”
A unanimous “No” expressed the instinctive feeling among all members present of the absolute wrong in the use of such remedies to compel obedience. The discussion of this subject was continued to a subsequent meeting, and Dr. Zakrzewska was requested to prepare a written statement of her views upon this point. She writes:
I. From the medical standpoint, the administering of a pharmaceutical preparation for any other purpose than to aid in the restoration of health is malpractice. An emetic or an opiate might be easily given to a culprit who is in perfect health but who refuses obedience to the prison regulations; this could be done by deceiving the offender. But the administration of ether or chloroform would meet with opposition for the overcoming of which an application of force would be needed, which would be as much in the nature of corporal punishment as would the use of the rod.
No physician could sanction the use of remedies for any other than their legitimate purpose and must refuse such demand from the prison superintendent or warden.
II. From the legal standpoint, no prison official has a right to order for the purpose of enforcing obedience the administration of powerful medicines to a healthy individual, thus rendering her ill for hours or days, shocking a system otherwise in harmonious action, and thereby also possibly producing bodily injuries, internally or externally, which may after the release of the prisoner easily lead to a complaint in a court of law, a complaint which could well be sustained.
III. From the moral standpoint, the deception which is necessary either by disguising the medicine in some usual beverage or by false statement, pretending a necessity for some medical remedy, such as hypodermic injection of morphine, would at once awaken distrust of the whole official management and would thereby destroy the very principle upon which all prisons should be conducted, that is, the reformation of those intrusted to their care.
If we once admit that medical remedies can be used by the physician under the orders of the superintendent in order to enforce obedience or as punishment, where shall we stop? The physician and the superintendent can become in time accomplices in such practices as may lead to even fatal results, for such officials have almost absolute power in these institutions which are subjected to only occasional examinations by State committees.