Female Medical College & Homeopathic Medical College of Pennsylvania Presented by Sylvain Cazalet

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New England Female
Medical College &

New England Hospital for Women and Children

Presented by Sylvain
Cazalet

New England Female Medical College:

Dr Israel T.
Talbot

President of A.I.H.

November,
1848: Dr Samuel Gregory opens with Dr Israel Tilsdale Talbot the
Boston Female Medical College, the first medical school for women in the
world. Twelve women enroll in the first class and graduate in 1850.

Renamed the New England Female Medical College, this
school for midwives was expanded in 1850 to include a full medical
curriculum, and began to grant medical degrees to women. Reaction by the
Boston medical establishment was swift and condemnatory. Members of this
group charged that women had insufficient stamina to deal with the
tension of medical practice. In response to this charge, Gregory
asserted, “Suppose physicians were as ignorant upon this subject as
females now are; they would then be easily alarmed and incapable of
rendering efficient and in case of emergency…the fact of being one of
the stronger sex does not render one competent.”

The nature of the medical education varied among the
early women’s medical schools. The New England Female medical College
required a “good English Education” and “a thesis on some
medical subject.” Six professorships were maintained in the
theory and practice of medicine, materiamedica/chemistry/therapeutics,
anatomy, principle and practice of surgery and medical jurisprudence,
obstetrics and diseases of women and children, and physiology/hygiene.
During the years that it granted the medical degree, classes ran for 17
weeks, 30 hours per week of instruction. Three years attendance was
required, with a preceptorialship under a physician supervision in the
college’s last two years of training. Few dissections were performed
because embalming was not yetdone, and it was illegal to
obtain cadavers. Frequently, French 160-part Auzomanikins and obstetric
manikins were used for anatomy instructors. On the other hand, the
Pennsylvania Women’s Medical College was one of the first medical
schools in the country to require physiology lab of every student.

1862:
Marie Zakrzewska, MD founds the New England Hospital for Women and
Children.

1866: Lucy E. Sewall, MD, and Anita E. Tyng,
MD, of the New England Hospital Staff apply for admission to Harvard.
Sewall had graduated from New England Female Medical College and Tyng
was a graduate of Philadelphia’s Women’s Medical College. They are
politely informed by Dean Shattuck that no provision has been made or
exists for the education of women in any department of the University.

1867-68: Susan Dimmock and Sophia Jex-Blake,
students at New England Hospital, request admission to Harvard. Their
application is turned down by a vote of seven to one of a Committee of
the Faculty. They persist and reapply in 1868. Jex-Blake even manages to
get three women medical students to join her in attending the lectures
of Dr. Hasket Derby at the medical school. The medical staff responds by
informing the President that, “this faculty do not approve the
admission of any female to the lectures of any professor.”

The drawing
above shows Boston University School of Medicine

and the old homeopathic hospital – now the Talbot Building –
late in the 19^th century.

The building on
the left is the original School building, erected in 1870-1871, (The C
Building) and torn down in 1968. To provide a clinical facility, the Homeopathic
hospital was built in 1876, with medical and surgical wings added over
the years until completion in 1907. In 1932 the building was named for
Dean Israel Tisdale Talbot (Dean, 1873-1899).

Over the next
25 years, this institution produced 98 graduates among whom was the
nation’s first African-American female physician, Rebecca Lee, class
of 1864.

In 1878 the New
England Hospital Medical Society became the first women’s medical
society in the United States. It began as a response to the
Massachusetts Medical Society being closed to women. In 1893 the Women’s
Medical Journal was founded and in 1915 the American Medical Women’s
Association began.

Money was raised to build the facility anyway, but
when Gregory died of tuberculosis in 1872, he left the college without
its most gifted fund-raiser and with a mortgage of $27,000. The trustees
explored affiliation with stronger institutions, including Harvard and
Boston University. The trustees voted for union with Boston University,
which was willing to take on the college and its debts without any money
up front. The Boston University School of Medicine opened its doors on
Nov. 5, 1873.

The merger left the Female Medical College with a new
name, a new faculty and a new adherence to the doctrine of homeopathy,
which Boston University School of Medicine did not formally abandon
until after World War I. The new medical school, however, continued its
precursor’s commitment to educating women. In 1893, more than a third
of its students were female.

At its founding, the School of Medicine absorbed the New
England Female Medical College, which supported the homeopathic approach
to medicine. The School therefore had a large proportion of female
medical students, and homeopathy was practiced in addition to more
conventional medical treatments. The School of Medicine graduated its
first black student, Solomon Carter Fuller,
in 1897; Dr. Fuller went on to become the first black psychiatrist in
the United States.

1860: Mercy Ruggles
Jackson Bisbee (Marie Jackson 1802-1877) was a homeopath who
practiced without a degree in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for many years.
In 1861 she applied for membership in the American Institute of
Homeopathy (headquartered in Philadelphia) but was rejected on account
of her sex. Her annual reapplications were similarly rejected until June
1871, when the Institute admitted three women. Two years later she was
admitted to both the Massachusetts and the Boston homeopathic societies.
She received her M.D. degree from the New England Female Medical College
in 1860. In 1873 she was appointed adjunct professor of the diseases of
children at the newly opened Boston University School of Medicine. She
continued to practice medicine and to teach until her death. She was
also a temperance supporter and a woman’s suffragist.

Biographies:

The Boston Female Medical College held its first
classes in 1848. A total of 98 women earned their degrees from the
college over the next two decades, along with a larger number of
midwives and other allied professionals.

Graduates included Rebecca Lee Crumper, MD, the first
African-American woman to earn such a degree in the United States, and
Mary Harris Thompson, MD, who helped establish the Chicago Hospital for
Women and Children.

Rebecca Lee Crumper, Rebecca Lee
Crumpler was born in 1833. She worked from 1852-1860 as a nurse in
Massachusetts. Rebecca Lee Crumpler graduated from New England Female
Medical College, Boston in March 1864, as the first African American
women to earn a medical degree.

Dr. DeLavenna Burroughs (First woman
physician – Lyons, NY.). Dr. Burroughs was born in
Florence, Italy on 11 August, 1826. Her early life is not well-known,
except that she lived for a short while in Skaneateles and Elmira. She
attended the New England Female Medical College in Boston MA, graduating
in 1860. She then began practicing medicine in Lyons, and for many years
she was the only female physician in Wayne County. In the 1867-68 Wayne
County Directory, Dr. Burroughs is listed as an “eclectic
physician.” She was part of the movement within the medical field
called Eclecticism. Eclecticism or Reform Medicine, as it was also
called, was very popular in New England, Upstate New York, and Ohio. An
interesting facet of this movement is that it actually encouraged women
to study and practice medicine. Dr. Burroughs practiced in Lyons for
nearly 30 years. She died of tuberculosis on 11 September 1894, and is
buried in the Lyons Rural Cemetery.

Dr. Martha Thurston,
graduate of the New England Female Medical College in Boston, and
certainly one of the earliest women to practice in San Francisco.

Bertha Van Hoosen
(1863-1952): Obstetrician and surgeon from Stoney Creek, Michigan and
Chicago, Illinois; graduate of University of Michigan Medical School,
1888; intern at Women’s Hospital, Detroit, Michigan; resident at the New
England Hospital for Women and Children; professor at the Mary Institute
in St. Louis, Northwestern University Woman’s Medical School, Loyola
University School of Medicine, and the University of Illinois College of
Medicine; founder and first president of the National (later American)
Medical Women’s Association, 1917.

Amanda Sanford Hickey (?-1894). First woman
graduate of University of Michigan Medical School, 1871; studied at the
Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia, and interned at the New England
Hospital for Women and Children, before attending the University of
Michigan.

Susan Dimock
(1847-1875) was a surgeon at the New England Hospital for Women and
Children. There she founded the Nursing School, which Mary Eliza Mahoney
attended. She liked reading and thinking and studying Latin. When the
Civil War started, her father died, so she and her mother came to Boston
from their home in North Carolina. When she was 17 she went to Europe to
become a doctor. She died in a shipwreck when she was only 28. She was
beloved by everyone. Dimock Street and Dimock Community Health Center
are named after her. Boston has
named a street in her honor. In New York, women were admitted to the state
medical society in 1877. In Massachusetts the question first arose in
1872 with reference to the application of Dr. Susan Dimmock, a graduate
of New England Female Medical College and the University of Zurich
Medical School.

Hannah E. Myers Longshore, 1819-1901:
first woman faculty member at an American medical school.

Longshore
received her medical degree from the Female Medical College of
Pennsylvania in 1851. She was Philadelphia’s first woman
physician. The following year she was hired by the New England
Female Medical College in Boston as the first female instructor of
anatomy.

Hannah E.
Longshore Myers, one of the early woman physicians and mother of
two children, enrolled at the age of thirty-one in the Female
Medical College of Pennsylvania and received her M. D. in 1851,
all with the unfailing support and encouragement of her teacher
husband Thomas Elwood Longshore. His brother Dr. Joseph S.
Longshore, of Philadelphia, was one of the founders of the first
woman’s medical college.

Elizabeth Blackwell, 1821-1910: first woman
ever to be graduated with a medical degree any where in the modern
world. Elizabeth Blackwell was also turned away from the Harvard
Medical School as well as several others before finally being
admitted in 1847 to the Geneva College of Medicine in Geneva, New
York. Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Women and
Children and later instituted training for other women physicians,
one of whom Marie Zakrewska, opened the New England Hospital for
Women and Children in 1862 in Boston

Marie Elizabeth, 1829-1902: founder of the
New England Hospital for Women and Children.

Trained in her native Germany
as a midwife and experienced as an instructor of midwifery,
Zakrzewska immigrated to America in 1853. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
arranged for Zakrzewska to attend Cleveland Medical College where
she was among the first women in the country to obtain a medical
degree. Returning to New York, Zakrzewska helped Blackwell build
her new hospital. Adept at fundraising, Zakrzewska traveled to
Philadelphia and Boston for Blackwell’s hospital. Offered a
teaching position at the New England Female Medical College in
Boston, Zakrzewska moved to Boston and was outraged to discover
that the school was little more than a place to train midwives.
She lead the effort to create a new teaching hospital, founding
the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1862. Her
school was of such a high caliber that after 1881, she only
admitted women who had already earned an MD. She was also a
founding member of the New England Woman’s Club, one of the two
original study clubs that would serve as models for the twentieth-
century woman’s club movement.

Cordelia Agnes Greene 1831-1905:

She
taught in country schools until her father opened a water-cure
sanitarium in Castile, New York in 1849. Greene quit teaching and
went to work for her father as a nurse in the sanitarium. She
moved to Philadelphia and enrolled in the newly-opened Women’s
Medical College of Pennsylvania, where she became their first
student to receive a medical degree, in 1853. She continued her
studies in Cleveland, where she graduated with honors from
Cleveland Medical College (later Case Western Reserve) in 1856.
One of the three women in her class was Marie Zakrzewska, who
later went on to found the New England Hospital for Women and
Children. Greene
returned to Upstate New York after her graduation and assumed a
position as the assistant to Dr. Henry Foster, a fellow graduate
of Cleveland Medical College who owned the water cure
establishment in Clifton Springs.

Cordelia
Greene was a respected member of the medical community. She often
gave lectures on preventive medicine, and at one point chaired the
Educational Committee of the Woman’s Medical Society of New York
State. A member of the American Medical Association (AMA), she
served on the AMA’s Committee for Preventive Medicine. She was
also a member of the New York State Medical Association, and
served as president of their Wyoming County branch, which often
held their meetings at her facility. One of her assistants at the
Sanitarium, Dr. Clara Swain, was a sister graduate of the Woman’s
Medical College of Pennsylvania who later went on to become a
medical missionary in India, where she was to establish the first
hospital for women in Asia.

Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, 1842-1906:
leader in the study of women’s health.

From the
wealthy and well-connected Putnam publishing family, Putnam was
determined to become a physician. Since she came of age just as
the Civil War began, she expected greater opportunities than women
who had come before her. She acquired her medical degree from the
Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1863. After working at
the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston and went
to France for post-graduate training. After 2 years of efforts,
she became the first woman of any nationality to be admitted to
the prestigious Ecole de Medecine. She graduated with
high honors and won an award for her thesis. When she returned to
the US in 1871, Putnam was better educated than most physicians of
either sex. Due to her family’s connections, she was able to
develop a strong private practice. One by one, she was admitted to
the most prestigious medical organizations. She continued her
research, publishing over 100 scientific papers. Unusual for her
time, Jacobi continued her medical practice after she married and
had 3 children. She organized the Advancement of the Medical
Education of Women in 1874 and served as president for most of her
life. An active suffragist, her “Common Sense”
Applied to Woman Suffrage became a classic for the suffragist
movement.

Mary Harris Thompson, 1st American woman
surgeon.

1829-1895:
founded Chicago Hospital for Women and Children and was the first
female surgeon in the U.S. She studied a year with Elizabeth
Blackwell, the first American woman doctor.

At the
outset the hospital was fairly well sustained through private
benefactions, and in 1870 largely through Dr. Thompson’s efforts a
college was organized for the medical education of women
exclusively. The hospital building was totally destroyed in the
great fire of 1871 but temporary accommodations were provided in
another section of the city. The following year, with the aid of
$25,000 appropriated by the Chicago Relief and Aid Society a
permanent building was purchased and in 1885, a new commodious and
well planned building was erected on the same site, at a cost of
about $75,000.

Mary Eliza Mahoney, 1845-1926: first African
American graduate nurse.

Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first
African-American registered nurse in the U.S.A. She worked for
fifteen years at the New England Hospital for Women and Children
in Roxbury, Massachusetts as an unofficial nurse’s assistant. In
1878, at the age of thirty-three, she was admitted as a student
into the hospital’s nursing program established by Dr. Marie
Zakrzewska. Sixteen months later, she was one of four who
completed the rigorous course (of forty-two who started with her).
She ended her nursing career as director of an orphanage in Long
Island, New York, the position she had held for a decade. She
never married.

In 1896, Mahoney became one of the original
members of a predominately white Nurses Associated Alumnae of the
United States and Canada (later known as the American Nurses
Association or ANA). In 1908 she was cofounder of the National
Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN).

New England Hospital for Women
and Children

(now the
Dimock Community Health Center)

Dr. Samuel Gregory
and his brother George
issued pamphlets advocating the education and employment of
women-physicians, and, in 1847, Dr. Gregory delivered a series of
lectures in Boston upon that subject, followed in 1848 by a school
numbering twelve ladies, and as association entitled the “American
Female Medical Education Society.”

Dr Samuel Gregory, who thought it was indecent for
men to be delivering babies, was reluctant to allow women any say in the
management of the college. That mindset, in addition to his attacks on
male practitioners and the mediocre level of training offered at the
school, led the college into controversy, even among women.

But this and other all-female institutions helped
women achieve a level of training that would not have been otherwise
possible. Because the medical establishment denied graduates of these
schools access to clinical experience in the public hospitals, most
women’s colleges founded their own companion hospitals to further
enhance their training.

In 1857, Elizabeth Blackwell, who eight years earlier
became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States,
established the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, the first
American hospital staffed completely by women. Blackwell ran the
facility with two other pioneering woman physicians, her sister Emily
and Marie Zakrzewska.

A professor of
Medicine as well as the most well known female physician of her time in
America, Dr. Zakrzewska specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. In
1859, she moved to Boston to teach at the New England Female Medical
College. She was the first female physician in New England. Dissatisfied
with the level of medical education offered at the school, she
masterminded the opening of a new teaching hospital-The New England
Hospital for Women and Children. Opening in 1862, the hospital had an
all-female staff. In 1872, this hospital opened the first professional
nursing school in the country, accepting the first African-American
nursing students in the country. Dr. Zakrzewska’s goal was to
administer a medical college for women that was superior to medical
schools for male students. By 1881, her school was so renowned that she
could limit her resident students to those women who already had their
M.D. degrees.In 1878 she founded the New England Hospital Medical
Society (the first formed by a woman), and became its President.

Stefania Berlinerblau: When Russian women
studying medicine at Zurich were ordered to leave in 1873 by Tsar
Alexander II, one of them, Stefania Berlinerblau, went to Bern to
complete her medical training. Under the name of Fanny Berlin, she moved
to the United States where she became “chief surgeon at the New
England Hospital for Women and Children.”

Sarah
Marinda Loguen Fraser (Syracuse University College of Medicine, 1876)
Sarah Marinda Loguen (1850-1933) studied diligently under her family
physician, Dr. Michael D. Benedict”s tutelage, and as the result of
her hard work and his influence, she had no trouble getting admitted to
the Syracuse University College of Medicine that fall. When Sarah
received her M.D. in the spring of 1876, she became one of the first
African-American women physicians in the nation. The U.S. Census of 1920
listed only 65 African-American women active in medical practice.

In September
1876 Sarah began her internship at Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her
warm manner endeared her to the children in the wards, who called her
“Miss Doc.” Besides pediatric and obstetric cases, she also
frequently encountered nervous or mental patients on her rounds. In the
fall of 1878 Sarah moved to Boston to fill a six-month vacancy in an
internship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Sarah
opened an office for private medical practice in a room on 13th Street,
N.W.

Ednah
Dow Cheney [1824-1904].
Ednah was responsible of the New England Women’s Club and the reform
activities associated with it. She was president of the board of the New
England Hospital for Women and Children for thirteen years; the
secretary of the New England Freedman’s Aid Society, a friend of
Harriet Tubman. She organized a teacher’s program for the
Freedmen’s Bureau from 1867 to 1875. Perhaps the major advance of the
NEWC was the organization of the Women’s Education and Industrial Union
in 1877, under the direction of Dr. Harriet Clisby.

Carolina Seymour Severance
(1820-1914), was very much a part of the city’s network of reformers.
She served on the first board of the New England Hospital for Women and
Children. In 1873 she was one of the founders and first president of the
Moral Education Association. She was a founder of the New England
Woman’s Club, a vehicle for reform which helped to establish the Girls’
Latin School and the Co-operative Building Association.

Sophia Jex-Blake (1840 – 1912). Sophia
was not committed to teaching, and in Boston she volunteered at
the New England Hospital for Women and Children. She found medicine ‘a
cause worth fighting for, a way of life and a field of service that
should be open to all women’. She was rejected, as a woman, from Harvard
Medical School and from others in England, and instead became the first
woman to register at the Women’s Medical College of New York Infirmary.
In 1874 Sophia founded the London School of Medicine for Women. In 1877
she graduated from the University of Bern, with a thesis on puerperal
fever. She was the first woman doctor in Scotland. Two years later she
opened her own medical school for women in Edinburgh, and a great
ambition was achieved when the Edinburgh Medical School, through her
influence, admitted women in 1894.

First American nurse training schools

As
American health care advanced, so did nursing. Although rudimentary
efforts to educate nurses did exist in the mid-1800s, it was not until
1872 that the first training schools for nurses opened at the New
England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston and the Women’s
Hospital Training School for Nurses in Philadelphia. These were followed
in 1873 by the opening of the first nursing schools to incorporate
Florence Nightingale’s model of nurse education: the Bellevue Training
School for Nurses in New York, the Connecticut Training School for
Nurses in New Haven, and the Boston Training School for Nurses.

These
three schools were founded and run by nurses in response to the
deplorable conditions in US hospitals and were the first to stress
clinical techniques of sanitation and safety. The opening of the Johns
Hopkins Hospital school of nursing further attested to the importance of
employing skilled nurses when practicing modern medicine and performing
more complicated procedures. Graduates of these more sophisticated
nursing schools would be instrumental in shaping the future of the
profession.

U.S. Army:
Before Florence Nightingale established nursing as a profession that
“respectable” women were trained for and engaged in on a
full-time basis, most military nursing duties were carried out by camp
followers, civilian volunteers and members of religious orders. During
the Civil War Doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell trained nurses for
the U.S. Sanitary Commission. In 1873 the first professional nurse in
the US graduated from the Nursing School of the New England Hospital for
Women and Children and trained nurses became increasingly important to
the military.

Florence Nightingale – 1858.

America’s first registered woman
nurse, Linda Richards, trained at Dimock.

Linda Richards

America’s First Trained Nurse

Linda Richards was born on July 27, 1841, the
youngest daughter of Sanford Richards, an itinerant preacher, and his
wife, Betsy Sinclair Richards. Her parents were married in Newport,
Vermont in the mid-1830s and moved to a farm near the Racquette River in
West Potsdam, NY. Linda was christened Malinda Ann Jusdon Richards by
her father in hopes she would someday be a missionary like Ann Judson
Hasseltine.

When Linda was four the family moved west to the
Wisconsin territory where her father had purchased land in what is now
Watertown, WI. He died six weeks after the family arrived from a lung
hemorrhage. Mrs. Richards and her three daughters returned to Newbury,
VT where they lived with Linda’s grandfather until they bought a small
farm in the area. Linda’s mother became ill with tuberculosis, the same
disease which had killed her father. Linda nursed her mother through her
final illness and was only 13 when her mother died.

Linda’s training as a nurse began under the
supervision of Doc Currier, the family doctor who took care of her
mother. From him she learned some medical knowledge. She lived with her
grandfather until she was 15 when she enrolled in the St. Johnsbury
Academy for a year of teacher training. Although not happy at St.
Johnsbury, Linda did complete her training and taught school for several
years in Newbury.

Linda met and became engaged to George Poole in 1860,
but George went to the Civil War with the Green Mountain Boys before
they married. He came home wounded in 1865 and Linda spent the next four
years nursing him till his death in 1869.

After George’s death, Linda moved to Boston where she
was hired as an assistant nurse at the Boston City Hospital. Nurses were
treated as little better than maids at the hospital and she left after
only 3 months because of poor health. Some months later Linda noticed an
advertisement for a nurse-training program to be offered at the New
England Hospital for Women and Children. The resident physician, Miss.
Susan Dimock, had studied medicine since she was 15 and had trained for
surgery at the University of Zurich. Linda was one of five students who
sign up for the course.

After a year of training, Linda Richards, the first
student to enroll, was the first to graduate from the nursing program.
Her diploma is in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC. Upon graduation, Linda became the night supervisor at
Bellevue Hospital in New York City where she met Sister Helen, a nun of
the All Saints Order, who had trained in the Nightingale System in
London. At Bellevue Linda created a system for charting and maintaining
individual medical records for each patient. This was the first written
reporting system for nurses which even the famous Nightingale System
adopted.

By 1874 Linda was ready to take over the floundering
Boston Training School. Her administrative experience with Sister Helen
helped her turn the program around and it became one of the best nurse
training programs in the country.

In 1877 Linda traveled to England for seven months of
intensive study. She spent two months at St. Thomas’s Hospital in
London, the hospital Florence Nightingale had established in 1860. It
was during this time that she was able to meet Miss Nightingale herself,
who suggested Linda study at King’s College Hospital and the Edinburgh
Royal Infirmary in Scotland. Dr. Joseph Lister, the father of antiseptic
surgery, was working at the Edinburgh Infirmary during this period.

She returned to Boston in 1878 to work at the Boston
College Hospital where she established a nurse training school.
Following some health problems brought on by overwork, Linda used her
experience to establish the first nurse-training program in Japan. She
began in 1886, at first working through an interpreter. She stayed in
Japan for 5 years before returning to America.

Linda Richards continued to establish nurse training
programs and schools in Philadelphia, Massachusetts and Michigan. She
retired in 1911 at age 70 when she wrote her autobiography,
Reminiscences of Linda Richards. She suffered a severe stroke in 1923
and lived the remainder of her life at the New England Hospital for
Women and Children where she had done her first training. She died on
April 16, 1930 in Boston.

Linda Richards was inducted into the National Women’s
Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY. Her portrait hangs in the lobby of the
Canton-Potsdam Hospital, just a few miles from where America’s first
trained nurse was born.

Biographie of Mary Eliza Mahoney

“First
African-American Nurse” 1845 — 1926

Mahoney
apparently worked as a maid at the New England Hospital for Women and
Children in Boston before being admitted to its nursing school in 1878.
She received her diploma in 1879, becoming the first black woman to
complete nurse’s training. At the time of her graduation, seriously ill
patients were routinely treated at home rather than in a hospital, and
Mahoney was employed for many years as a private-duty nurse. One of the
first black members of the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United
States and Canada (subsequently renamed the American Nurses Association,
or ANA), she later joined the National Association of Colored Graduate
Nurses (NACGN) and addressed its first annual convention in Boston
(1909). The association awarded her life membership in 1911 and elected
her its national chaplain.

From 1911 to
1912 Mahoney served as supervisor of the Howard Orphan Asylum for Black
Children in Kings Park, Long Island, New York. Returning to Boston, she
is reputed to have been one of the first women in that city to register
to vote after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Ten
years after her death in 1926, the NACGN honoured her memory by
establishing the Mary Mahoney Medal, an award to a member for
distinguished service to the profession. After the NACGN merged with the
ANA in 1951, the award was continued. It is now conferred bienially on
an individual who has made a significant contribution to opening up
opportunities in nursing to minorities.

Mahoney was
named to the Nursing Hall of Fame in 1976 and to the National Women’s
Hall of Fame in 1993.

Dr. Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska

(1829-1902), physician

The Dimock Community Health Center
Complex’s opened as the New England Hospital for Women and Children in
1862 to meet women’s medical needs, and to train women nurses and
doctors in the practice of medicine. Marie Zakrzewska, a
Prussian-trained midwife, immigrated to America and received her medical
degree in 1856. After her graduation, Dr. Zakrzewska worked in New York
for three years, but she left for Boston in 1859 to accept a teaching
position at the newly founded New England Female Medical College. Three
years later, Dr. Zakrzewska opened the doors of the New England Hospital
for Women and Children, one of the few hospitals in the country where
women performed surgery and other medical practices. Starting with only
10 beds, Zakrzewska’s endeavor proved successful, and N.E.H.
eventually purchased its present 9-acre site in 1872. During a 36-year
career of teaching and healing, Dr. Zakrzewska’s high standards of
medical training helped educate thousands of doctors and nurses, and she
contributed greatly to the eventual acceptance of female physicians.
Through the years, N.E.H. prospered, and by 1932, the complex consisted
of today’s 8 buildings, a picturesque collection Victorian Gothic,
Stick Style and Classical Revival buildings. After Zakrzewska’s
retirement in 1899, the hospital continued its mission until 1972, when
the institution’s name and purpose changed. The Dimock Community
Health Center Complex, named after one of N.E.H.’s most respected
students, testifies to its predecessor’s success: by helping women gain
experience and acceptance in the medical community, N.E.H. was no longer
needed as a teaching hospital for women.

Dr Samuel Gregory
(1813-1872)

GREGORY, Samuel, philanthropist, born in Guilford, Vermont, 19 April,
1813; died in Boston, Massachusetts, 23 March, 1872. He was graduated at
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been the first institution in the world for the exclusive medical
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death. In 1874 it was merged in the medical school of Boston University
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