At first the course of instruction was limited to two years; it has lately been extended to three; though it still has the serious defect of demanding no thesis from students as a condition of graduation. Clinical instruction has been necessarily inadequate in a small country town. It has been lately proposed to transfer this part of the curriculum to Detroit, where large hospitals furnish clinical material in abundance.
In Chicago, application to admit women was made in 1865 to the Rush College, where Emily Blackwell had studied during the winter of 1851. The appeal was refused.
In 1868, application was made at a rival school, the Chicago Medical College, and was accepted. For a year female students attended the lectures and clinics in company with young men. “The women,” observes a Chicago writer, “were all right; but the men students were at first embarrassed and afterwards rude. The mixed classes were therefore abandoned, but the woman’s movement, being essentially just and correct,”[[91]] was not abandoned, but led to the founding of a special school for women in 1869.
The pioneer woman physician in Chicago was Dr. Mary H. Thompson, who, having graduated at Philadelphia, and spent a year as interne at the New York Infirmary, settled in the West in 1863. At this period she was often introduced as a curiosity. Western curiosity, however, is rarely ill-natured, and in this case was soon exchanged for respect and a substantial sympathy, which enabled Dr. Thompson to establish the Hospital for Women and Children. In 1869, when the medical school was opened for women, its students found in this little hospital their first opportunities for clinical instruction. From 1869 till 1877, the collegiate course was conducted in a “small two-story building containing a dissecting room and one little lecture room furnished with two dozen chairs, a table, a portable blackboard, and a skeleton. There were scarcely any means for practical demonstration in the lectures, there was no money to procure them.”[[92]] Worse than all, several among those who had consented to teach the students seemed, strangely enough, to have done all they could to discourage them. “One lecturer only delivered two lectures in the entire term, and then took up part of the time in dwelling upon the ‘utter uselessness of teaching women.’ The professor of surgery went on the staff with great reluctance, and remarked in his introductory lecture that he did not believe in female doctors, and that the students were greatly mistaken if they imagined the world was waiting for them. His lectures chiefly consisted of trifling anecdotes.”[[93]] The class which graduated in 1871 under these discouraging circumstances consisted of three students. No one would study more than two years, “because it was found that in that time could easily be mastered all the college had to teach.” But in 1881, the graduating class rose to 17, and in 1889, to 24. There is now a Faculty of twenty members, with eight lecturers and assistants. There were 90 students in the current year, and it was announced that in twenty years had been graduated 242 pupils.
In 1863, the same year in which Dr. Thompson settled in Chicago, another graduate of the Philadelphia school penetrated still further west, and tried to establish herself in San Francisco. But this pioneer enterprise failed. In 1872, Mrs. Charlotte Blake Brown applied to be admitted to the medical colleges of San Francisco, but being refused, went to Philadelphia to study. In 1874 Mrs. Lucy Wanzer applied at the Toland Medical School. This had been founded by a generous millionaire, who presented it to the State University,—and as the State laws provide for the admission of both men and women to the State schools, the regents were compelled to receive Mrs. Wanzer, who thus was the first woman to graduate in medicine on the Pacific Coast. In 1875 the rival school, the Cooper Medical College, also opened its doors to women, Mrs. Alice Higgins being the first candidate. Both colleges now freely admit women, and there are about half a dozen in each class.
Three of the ladies at present practicing in San Francisco are, however, graduates of Paris.[[94]]
Two other medical schools, both in Western New York, have for several years admitted women: the school of the Syracuse University, and the school at Buffalo.
Finally, in 1882, a fourth woman’s school was opened in Baltimore, and has connected with it a hospital, which is not, however, managed by women. The total number of students annually attending the various institutions which have now been enumerated may be approximately tabulated as follows:
Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, report in 1890, 181 students.
Woman’s Medical College, N. Y. Infirmary, report in 1890, 90 students.