Women Doctors

Elizabeth Blackwell, a blue-eyed blonde, was a sister-in-law of Lucy Stone, the famed 19th-Century feminist. In 1847, after trying in vain to enter eleven medical schools, she was admitted to Geneva Medical College, at Geneva, N. Y. (now Syracuse University Medical School). At Geneva, the entire student body had demanded her admission. A Boston medical journal spoke of her with arch masculinity as "a pretty little specimen of the feminine gender . . . [who] comes into the class with great composure, takes off her bonnet . . . exposing a fine phrenology." In due time Elizabeth graduated, became the first woman M.D. in the U. S. Dr. Blackwell opened a hospital in New York (Infirmary for Women and Children), moved to England after the Civil War. She be came an honored London professor, died at Hastings in 1910 at the age of 89.

Other U. S. women who tried to follow her example had a hard time. In Philadelphia, women doctors were outlawed by male colleagues, and druggists refused to fill their prescriptions. When their patients died a few were even mobbed. Today there are almost 200,000 men doctors in the U. S., only 7,500 women doctors. It is still very difficult for a woman to enter medical school, or for a "hen medic" to get hospital and university connections. Yet in spite of their handicaps, a number of women doctors in the U. S. have made remarkable contributions to the progress of medicine.

Last week one of these women was honored, another oldtimer died. In Philadelphia Dr. Catharine Macfarlane, professor of gynecology at Women's Medical College (only exclusively women's medical school in the world) won the Gimbel award of $1,000 for her clinic to control cancer in women (TIME, June 5, 1939). In Haddam, Conn., death came to Dr. Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, 73, sentimental historian of women doctors (Medical Women of America; A History of Women in Medicine). Among the noted women whose careers she noted:

> Dr. Florence Rena Sabin, 69, has a long career of firsts: first woman to graduate from Johns Hopkins, first woman to teach there, first woman member of the Rockefeller Institute, first woman member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is famed for her discovery of the origin and processes of the lymphatic system, her studies in tuberculosis. Dr. Simon Flexner, former head of the Rockefeller Institute once called her "the greatest living woman scientist and one of the foremost scientists of all time."

> Dr. Josephine Bicknell Neal, 60, of Manhattan's famed Neurological Institute, is one of the pioneers in sulfanilamide treatment for meningitis. Dr. Neal has also done important research in epidemic encephalitis (sleeping sickness), has recently reported hopeful treatment of chronic cases with Bulgarian belladonna.

> Dr. Alice Hamilton, 71, first woman on the Harvard faculty, is No. 1 U. S. authority on industrial poisons. Her books (Industrial Poisons in the U. S.; Industrial Toxicology) are classics.

> Dr. Eleanor Albert Bliss, 41, worked with Dr. Perrin Long of Johns Hopkins in bringing sulfanilamide to the U. S. She is also one of the chief authorities in the newer sulfa-drugs, is known as one of the best-dressed women in Baltimore.

> Drs. Helene Deutsch, 51, of Boston and Karen Horney, 55, of Manhattan are probably the outstanding women psychiatrists in the U. S. Until she left Austria in 1935, Dr. Deutsch was head of Freud's International Institute for Psychoanalysis. Now practicing successfully in a hushed, modernistic office, she deplores New England's pinched emotions. Dr. Horney, unlike Dr. Deutsch, does not relate most neuroses to a childhood love for parents, but claims that harsh society ultimately produces many mental ills.

> Bacteriologist Justina Hamilton Hill, 47, though no doctor, is the chief woman working in urology in the U. S. Miss Hill makes all the bacterial tests in the Brady ("Diamond Jim") Urological Institute of Johns Hopkins, is now trying to find out how sulfanilamide works. She recently published a popular book on bacteriology (Germs and the Man). Hearty, exuberant Justina Hill is one of the most colorful of U. S. medical women.

> Other well-known women doctors: Dr. Gladys Dick of Chicago who discovered the scarlet fever germ, famed Princeton Pediatrician Sara Josephine Baker, founder of New York City's Bureau of Child Hygiene, Columbia University Surgeon Barbara Bartlett Stimson, Philadelphia Public Health Expert Martha Tracy, Head of the American Women's Hospitals Esther Pohl Lovejoy, and Chicago's Surgeon Bertha Van Hoosen (TIME, Nov. 4).

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