There was a great improvement in the financial condition of the Hospital during this year (1877); and among other items in the treasurer’s report occurs the following which speaks for itself as an interesting commentary on the policy developed by Dr. Zakrzewska in the Hospital, as we have already seen it developed in her private practice:
The executors of the late Mr. Augustus Hemenway devoted to us the liberal sum of fifteen thousand dollars from the sum left by his will to charities not promoting pauperism.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Dr. Zakrzewska and the other pioneer medical women find a new foe in an increasing number of medical women who are poorly educated and otherwise unfitted—She addresses the New England Women’s Club on the “Medical Education of Women”—Unsuccessful attempt to persuade the New York medical colleges for men to accept scholarships for properly prepared women—Opening of the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary—Further movement to open for women one of the great medical colleges for men—Dr. Zakrzewska’s comment on this proposition, with special reference to Harvard—The New England Hospital Medical Society—Action taken by Harvard University in 1879 on the question of admitting women students of medicine. (1865-1880.)
The pioneer medical women (Drs. Elizabeth Blackwell, Marie E. Zakrzewska, Emily Blackwell, and Ann Preston) to whose successful struggles are due, for the first time in the history of the world, the real opening of the profession of medicine to women equally with men, had no sooner begun to take breath after their first stupendous battle, than they found themselves confronted with a new foe.
This foe was within the ranks of their own sex, and its development threatened an undermining campaign which seemed almost more disheartening than the militant one from which they had just emerged. This new foe was the increasing number of women doctors, poorly educated and otherwise unfitted, who began to appear all over the country.
Because the evil was so insidious and was cloaked by the necessity and the desire for competent medical women which had been demonstrated and aroused throughout the country, it was most difficult to meet.
The Philadelphia women met it by striving even harder to bring up the standard of the Woman’s Medical College and to expand the field of the Woman’s Hospital.
The more eastern women, meaning those of New York and Boston at the New York Infirmary and the New England Hospital, met it by trying to establish a standard and by trying to educate both the profession and the laity to accept nothing lower than such a standard.
To these women, the simplest as well as the wisest procedure seemed to be an attempt to persuade some of the best of the already existing medical colleges to accept a number of properly prepared women students.