Having thus evaded the distinct and far-sighted intention of the founders of the hospital, Dr. Sims proceeded to select his medical assistant upon grounds extraordinarily frivolous.
“The hospital had been opened about six months, when I told the board of lady managers that I must have an assistant. They told me to select the man. I offered the appointment to Dr. F. N. Johnson, Jr., who had just graduated.[[59]] He was about to be married, and was going to locate in the country near Cooperstown. I then offered the place to Dr. George F. Shrady. He too was about to be married, and for some cause or other he did not see fit to accept it. Soon after this, a young friend of mine at the South, was married to Dr. Thomas Addis Emmett, of New York. As I was looking for an assistant, I did not know that I could more handsomely recognize the friendship of former days, than to appoint the husband of Mrs. Emmett assistant. So to the accident of good fortune in marrying a beautiful Southern young woman, Dr. Emmett owes his appointment.”
Suffering womanhood undoubtedly owes much to Marion Sim’s inventive genius. But, on the other hand, Sim’s fame and fortune may be said to have been all made by women, from the poor slaves in Alabama who, unnarcotized, surrendered their patient bodies to his experiments,[[60]] to the New York ladies whose alert sympathies and open purses had enabled him to realize his dream, and establish his personal fortunes. It would have been an act both graceful and just on his part, at this crisis, to have shared his opportunities with the two women who, like himself, had been well buffeted in an opposing world,[[61]] and whose work and aspirations were so closely identified with his own. But this he failed to do; and the lost opportunity made all the difference to the pioneer women physicians, between brilliant and modest, between immediate and tardy professional success.
Unable elsewhere to obtain hospital opportunities, the Blackwells resolved to found a hospital that should be conducted not only for, but by women. The New York Infirmary, chartered in 1854, preceded the Woman’s Hospital by a year, and, like it, was the first institution of the kind in the world. For three years it consisted exclusively of a dispensary; then was added a tiny lying-in ward of twelve beds. At this moment the advance guard of women physicians received their fourth recruit, Marie Zakzrewska, a young midwife from Germany. She had been a favorite pupil of Dr. Schmidt, one of the state examiners of the school for midwives in Berlin, and chief director of the Charity Hospital. He had been so impressed by the talents of his pupil, as to entrust her with the responsibility of teaching his own classes, when ill-health compelled him to resign his work. Discouraged, however, by some intrigues which sprang up after the death of her powerful friend, Fräulein Zakzrewska decided to abandon the home where a career seemed ready marked out for her, and to seek a wider horizon and larger fortunes in America. Here she arrived in 1853. Her pluck and courage carried her safely through the first difficult year of an almost penniless exile; then the generous kindness of Elizabeth Blackwell secured her a place among the advance guard of women physicians, taught her English, and procured her admission to the Medical School at Cleveland. She assisted the Blackwells in the task of collecting from an indifferent or hostile community the first few hundred dollars with which to found the New York Infirmary, and in this served as physician for a year; was thence invited to lecture on midwifery at the Female Medical School at Boston; was finally summoned to build up the New England Hospital, which for many years was almost identified with her name and with that of Dr. Lucy Sewall,[[62]] and of Dr. Helen Morton. This, the second hospital to be conducted by women physicians, was founded in 1862.
The fifth pioneer was Ann Preston, a Quaker lady of Philadelphia, an ardent abolitionist, as it was the inherited privilege of the Friends to be.[[63]] Miss Preston had become early habituated to interest herself in the cause of minorities. Small and fragile in body, she possessed an indomitable little soul; and when the suggestion had once been thrown out, that a medical college for women might be opened in Philadelphia, Ann Preston never ceased working until had been collected the meagre funds considered sufficient for its establishment. This was in 1850; and the sixth annual announcement of the school mentions Dr. Preston as already installed as professor of physiology. This position she held till the day of her death.
At the outset, the new medical school was scarcely an improvement upon its Boston predecessor. Four months lectures,—composed of compilations from three or four text-books,—the same repeated the following year, constituted the curriculum. There was much zeal, but little knowledge. Dr. Preston herself, philanthropist and excellent woman as she was, was necessarily ignorant of her subject, because she had never had any opportunity to learn anything about it. The other professors were not more qualified, although without the same excuse of necessity. Ten years after the opening of the college, the Philadelphia County Medical Society found an apparently plausible pretext for refusing recognition to the school, in the fact that the lecturer on therapeutics was not a physician but a druggist,—who moreover presumed to practice medicine over his counter, and “irregular” and advertised medicine at that. Even more to the purpose than these accumulated crimes was the fact that his lectures consisted almost exclusively of strings of prescriptions, and had no real claim to be accepted as exponents of the modern science of therapeutics.
The first adequate teacher to appear in the school was Emmeline Cleveland, who, having graduated under its meagre instructions, was sent to Europe through the generosity of two Quaker ladies,[[64]] to fit herself at the Paris Maternité to lecture upon obstetrics. Dr. Cleveland thus repeated the career of Dr. Shippen in 1762,[[65]] and like him found in Europe the instructions and inspiration her native city would not afford. Dr. Cleveland was a woman of real ability, and would have done justice to a much larger sphere than that to which fate condemned her. Compelled by the slender resources of the college to unite the duties of housekeeper and superintendent to those of professor, she not unfrequently passed from the lecture room to the kitchen to make the bread for the students who boarded at the institution. Possessed of much personal beauty, and grace of manner, she had married young; but her husband had been stricken with hemiplegia early in their married life, and it was the necessity of supporting him as well as herself, which led the wife, childless and practically widowed, to enter the profession of medicine.
Of the remaining typical members of the pioneer groups of woman physicians, all were married, either already when they began their studies, or immediately after graduation. The latter was the fortune of Sarah Adamson, the second woman in the United States to receive a medical diploma, and who a year later married Dr. Dolley, of Rochester, where she at once settled and has been in successful practice for thirty-eight years. Miss Adamson was a niece of the Dr. Hiram Corson, who, in Montgomery County of Pennsylvania, was destined to wage a forty years’ chivalrous warfare in defense of women physicians. At the age of eighteen, having come across a copy of Wistar’s Anatomy, she devoted a winter to its engrossing study, and became fired with enthusiasm for the medical art, to which anatomy formed such a grand portal.[[66]] At that time, 1849, the Philadelphia Medical School had not yet opened; but the Eclectic School at Rochester had announced its willingness to receive woman students, and to this Miss Adamson persuaded her parents to allow her to go. She graduated in 1851.
Besides Miss Adamson, four other ladies availed themselves of the liberality of the “irregular” eclectic school at Rochester, but of these only one graduated. Even more than her Quaker colleagues, did this lady represent a distinctive type among women physicians, for she was already married when she began her studies. Mrs. Gleason was the wife of a young Vermont doctor, who opened an infirmary in the country for chronic invalids, shortly after acquiring his own diploma. In the management of his lady patients, the young doctor often found it an advantage to be assisted “by his wife as an intermediary, on the one side to relate the symptoms, on the other to prescribe the directions.” Thus the wife became gradually associated with the husband’s work, while he on his part remained generously alive to her interests. He it was, who, in order to secure an opportunity for his wife for some kind of systematic medical education, persuaded the eclectics, assembled in council, to open the doors of their new school to women. “In his opinion, the admission of women was the reform most needed in the medical profession.” “I remember vividly,” writes Mrs. Gleason, “the day of his return, when he exclaimed, with enthusiasm, ‘Now, wife, you can go to medical lectures.’”[[67]] The husband and wife have practiced medicine in harmonious partnership ever since this early epoch. Their sanitarium at Elmira still exists to sustain its old and honorable reputation.[[68]]
There is something idyllic in this episode. Here in western New York was realized, simply and naturally, the ideal life of a married pair, as was once described by Michelet, where the common interests and activities should embrace not only the home circle, but also professional life. It is the secret ideal of many a sweet-natured woman, hitherto attained more often when the husband is a clergyman than when he is a physician, but in America is by no means unknown in the latter case. By Mrs. Gleason’s happy career, the complex experiment in life which was being made by the first group of women physicians was enriched by a special and, on some accounts, peculiarly interesting type.