In 1865, a medical college was added to the Infirmary; a new building was purchased for the hospital, which became enlarged to the capacity of 35 beds. For the first time it then began to receive private patients, chiefly from among self-supporting women of limited income, to hundreds of whom the resources of the Infirmary has proved invaluable. Their pay, though modest, has contributed materially to the resources of the hospital for the treatment of entirely indigent patients.[[77]]
The report for 1869 shows a hospital staff of: Resident physician, 1; internes, 3; visiting physicians, 3; associate physicians, 3; out-visiting physician, 1.
Total number in-patients, 342; Total number dispensary patients, 4825; Total number patients treated at home, 768.
The Woman’s Hospital at Philadelphia was founded in 1862 during the excitements of the great Civil War. It was the outgrowth of a singularly brutal incident. In 1861 the resources of the college became entirely exhausted; there was not enough money in the treasury to hire lecture rooms, and it was reluctantly decided that the lecture course must be suspended. Permission, however, had been obtained for the students to visit the wards at the Blockley almshouse, and thither they went under the tiny escort of Dr. Ann Preston. On one occasion, in order to effectually disconcert the women students, one of the young men suddenly introduced into the room a male patient perfectly nude. The insult stung the friends of the college to renewed exertions, which were not relaxed until funds were collected sufficient to purchase a house in which might be opened a hospital where women could obtain clinical instruction by themselves. A lecture room was rented in this house, and lectures were resumed in the fall of 1862. From this date, the obstetrical chair of the college, at least, was fairly supplied with clinical material. The double institution, college and hospital, was first lifted out of its period of depressing struggle, when, at the death of its generous president, the Hon. Wm. S. Pierce, it received a bequest of $100,000. With this, a really beautiful building was erected for the use of the college.
Adjoining the college, soon sprang up a separate building for a general hospital, which has, however, always been predominantly gynæcological. Later was added a special maternity pavilion. The report of 1889 reads as follows:
Hospital staff: Resident physicians, 1; internes, 6; visiting physicians, 6; district physicians, 12; in-patients, 583;[[78]] dispensary patients, 6365; patients treated at home, 695.
The woman’s hospital in Boston, the New England Hospital for Women and Children, was also founded during the war, and incorporated in 1862. The women who engaged in it were all heavily burdened by the great public anxieties of the time. But the very nature of these anxieties, the keen interest aroused in hospital work and in nursing organizations, helped to direct attention to the women’s hospitals. In New York, the first meeting to consider the organization of nursing for the army was held in the parlors of the Infirmary, and at the suggestion of Elizabeth Blackwell. This little meeting was the germ from which subsequently developed the splendid organization of the Sanitary Commission.
Dr. Zakzrewska was invited by the founders of the New England Hospital to preside over its organization;[[79]] and to do this, she left the Female Medical School, with which great dissatisfaction was beginning to be felt. Dr. Zakzrewska received powerful assistance for the work from one of the graduates of the school, Lucy Sewall, descendant of a long line of Puritan ancestors. This young lady seemed to have been the first girl of fortune and family to study medicine in the United States. Her romantic and enthusiastic friendship formed for Dr. Zakzrewska, while yet her pupil, led the young Boston girl to devote her life, her fortune, and the influence she could command from a wide circle of friends, to building up the hospital, where she might have the privilege of working with her.
This element of ardent personal friendship and discipleship is rarely lacking in woman’s work, from the day—or before it—that Fabiola followed St. Jerome to the desert, there to build the first hospital of the Roman Empire.
Other pupils of the rudimentary Gregory school also felt the magnetism of Dr. Zakzrewska’s personal influence, and entered a charmed circle, banded together for life, for the defense of the hospital,—Anita Tyng, Helen Morton, Susan Dimock, the lovely and brilliant girl whose tragic death in the shipwreck of the Schiller, in 1875, deprived the women physicians of America of their first surgeon. Dr. Morton spent several arduous years in the Paris Maternity, where she became chief assistant in order to fit herself for the medical practice at home in which she has so well succeeded. Dr. Dimock went to Zurich, and was the first American girl to graduate from its medical school. In the three brief years that she was resident physician at the New England Hospital, she exhibited a degree of surgical ability that promised a brilliant professional career. The three surgical cases published by her in the New York Medical Record (see Bibliographical List) are of real importance and originality.[[80]]