And an epoch is begun. Outside on a high scaffolding there are masons and carpenters at work. See them up there against a golden Indian summer sky. They are putting the finishing touches on a new $80,000 building addition. And the ringing of their hammers and chisels, the scraping of their trowels is but significant of larger building operations on a stupendous scale not made by human hands.
A LOOK BACKWARD IN MEDICINE
This is the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, which after more than a hundred years of history has decided to enlarge its accommodations and add a paragraph to its catalog announcing the admission of women. To understand the significance of this departure from custom and precedent we should recall the ostracism which women have in the past been obliged to endure in the medical profession. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman of modern times in any land to achieve a medical education, knocked in vain at the doors of some twelve medical colleges of these United States before one reluctantly admitted her. She was graduated in 1849 at the Geneva Medical College now a part of Syracuse University. The entrance of this first woman into the medical profession created such a stir that Emily Blackwell the second woman to become a doctor, following in the footsteps of her sister, found even more obstacles in her path. The Geneva college having incurred the displeasure of the entire medical fraternity now closed its doors and refused to admit another woman. Emily Blackwell going from city to city was at last successful in an appeal to the medical college of Cleveland, Ohio, which graduated her in 1852. So great was the opposition now to women in the profession, that it was clear that they must create their own opportunities for medical education. In turn there were founded in 1850 the Philadelphia Medical College for Women with which the name of Ann Preston is associated as the first woman dean; in 1853 the New York Infirmary to which in 1865 was added the Woman’s Medical College both institutions founded by the Drs. Blackwell; in 1863 the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women. “Females are ambitious to dabble in medicine as in other matters with a view to reorganising society,” sarcastically commented the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Society as also the medical profession coldly averted its face from these pioneer women doctors.
“Good” women used to draw aside their skirts when they passed Elizabeth Blackwell in church. When she started in practice in New York City she had to buy a house because no respectable residence would rent her office room. Dr. Anna Manning Comfort had her sign torn down in New York. Druggists in Philadelphia refused to fill prescriptions for Dr. Hannah Longshore. Girl medical students were hissed and jeered at in hospital wards. Men physicians were forbidden by the profession to lecture in women’s colleges or to consult with women doctors. Not until 1876 did the American Medical Association admit women to membership. How medical men felt about the innovation, which State after State was now compelled to accept, was voiced by the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1879 which said: “We regret to be obliged to announce that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it was voted to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.”
Syracuse University, recovering from the censure visited upon it for receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first of the coeducational institutions to welcome women on equal terms with men to its medical college. Other coeducational colleges in the West later began to take them. In 1894 when Miss Mary Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University with half a million dollars on condition that its facilities for the study of medicine be extended to women equally with men, a new attitude toward the woman physician began to be manifest. From that time on, she was going to be able with little opposition to get into the medical profession. Her difficulty would be to get up. Now no longer was a woman doctor refused office facilities in the most fashionable residential quarters in which she could pay the rent. Her problem however was just that—to pay the rent. A medical diploma doesn’t do it. And to practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and financially, without a hospital training and experience is about as easy as to learn to swim without going near the water. The most desirable opportunities for this hospital experience were by the tacit gentleman’s agreement in the profession quite generally closed to women.
Until very recently, internships in general hospitals were assigned almost exclusively to men. Dr. Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung herself aboard the padded seat in the rear of the Gouverneur Hospital ambulance, the first woman to receive an appointment as ambulance surgeon in New York City. Twice before in competitive examinations she had won such a place, but the commissioner of public charities had declined to appoint her because she was a woman. In 1908 another girl doctor, Dr. Mary W. Crawford in a surgeon’s blue cap and coat with a red cross on her sleeve, answered her first emergency call as ambulance surgeon for Williamsburg Hospital, Brooklyn. It happened this way: the notification sent by the Williamsburg Hospital to Cornell Medical College that year by some oversight read that the examination for internship would be open to “any member of the graduating class.”
When “M. W. Crawford” who had made application in writing, appeared with a perfectly good Cornell diploma in her hand, the authorities were amazed. But they did not turn her away. They undoubtedly thought as did one of the confident young men applicants who said: “She hasn’t a chance of passing. Being a girl is a terrible handicap in the medical profession.” When she had passed however at the head of the list of thirty-five young men, the trustees endeavoured to get Dr. Mary to withdraw. When she firmly declined to do so, though they said it violated all established precedent, they gave her the place. And a new era in medicine had been inaugurated.
Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to be admitted to examinations for internships. They exhibited an embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had “no accommodations for women doctors” which simply meant that all of the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the country to open to women the competitive examination for internship, again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the eighty-three men of the staff.
This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences. Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle containing a kidney preserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout the medical fraternity with the entire credit for the kidney.
“And it isn’t his. It’s our kidney,” I heard the girl doctor say with flashing eyes. “You’ll take it easier than that when you’re a little older, my dear,” answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition.