“During this period she read medicine with her brother. When her pupils were sick, she would generally be called in before a physician. She also was connected with the ‘Moral Reform Society,’ with Mrs. Margaret Pryor, and visited the sick and abandoned, often prescribing for them in sickness.”
Mrs. Lozier graduated at the Eclectic College, of Syracuse, in 1853, having attended her first course of lectures at the Central College, Rochester. From that time until her death, in 1870, she continued to minister to the sick and afflicted in the city of New York.
At the commencement of this article we stated that Mrs. Lozier was a modest woman. This she continued to be to the end. Those leading physicians who often met her in consultation, with the thousands of patients who from time to time have been under her treatment, the students before whom she lectured during several years, the numerous friends who thronged her parlors, and the Christian professors with whom she mingled,—all, all testify to this fact. “She denied both the expediency and practicability of mingling the sexes” in deriving a medical education. “Woman physician for women,” was her motto. It was not always possible for her to refuse to prescribe for male patients, as many can testify. The efforts of some, far down in the scale of life, to connect the name of Mrs. Lozier with those disreputable practices by which the majority of female physicians—the parasites of the profession—subsist, yea, even gain a competence, in this city, and, consequently, respectability,—“for gold buys friends,”—have utterly failed, and her name to-day, as it ever will, stands out boldly as belonging to one who was a self-denying, God-fearing, honorable, and successful female practitioner.
Mrs. Lozier is said to have been a skilful surgeon, “having performed upwards of one hundred and twenty capital operations.” In 1867-8 Mrs. L. visited Europe, where she was received with great marks of esteem by eminent men, and admitted to the hospitals.
Her son, Dr. A. W. Lozier, is in practice in New York city.
Doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell.
The first female who received a medical diploma from any college in the United States was Miss Elizabeth Blackwell.
This lady, who now stands only second in years of experience to Miss Hunt, of Boston, and second to no female in medical knowledge and usefulness, came to this country from England in 1831, when she was ten years of age. [A lady, of whom I made some inquiries respecting the above, assured me “it was only those females who were eligible as nurses, or prospective widowhood, which would make them eligible, were desirous of concealing their true age.”]
Being persuaded that her “mission” was to heal the sick, Miss Elizabeth applied, by writing, to six different physicians for advice as to the best means to obtain an education, and received from all the reply that it was “impracticable,” utterly impossible, for a female to obtain a medical education; “the proposition eccentric,” “Utopian,” etc.