‘This history is here’: Philadelphia was home to the first college established to grant medical degrees to women
To mark Women's History Month, Margaret Graham, the director of Drexel's Legacy Center, spoke about the importance of preserving Philadelphia’s rich history of women’s medical education.
For women who hoped to become physicians in the mid-1800s, Philadelphia was the place to be.
They came from all over the world to attend the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
In 1849, a year before the college’s founding, Elizabeth Blackwell made history as the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. But Woman’s Med was the first college founded specifically to grant women medical degrees.
Students at Woman’s Medfought for equal access to medical education, sometimes enduring harassment from men.
Records from the school are now preserved at Drexel University’s Legacy Center, whose archival collection comes from two historic Philadelphia medical schools that eventually merged with the university — Hahnemann University and the Woman’s Medical College.
To mark Women’s History Month, Margaret Graham, the center’s director, spoke to The Inquirer about Woman’s Med and the importance of preserving the city’s rich history of women’s medical education.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How was the Woman’s Medical College founded?
It was founded in 1850, with the first graduating class in 1851. The school was founded by local physicians, Quakers, philanthropists — a combination of people, mostly men, with some women, influencing and advising. Philadelphia was already an evolving hub both for healthcare and for medical education that was just going from more of an apprentice kind of learning to formal education and training.
Just a couple of women had gotten medical degrees at that point. [Women worked as] midwives, caring for families, caring for friends — women have always been healers. But at this point, there was no formal training dedicated to women’s education. Woman’s Med was founded as the first place dedicated to women getting an MD.
What was day-to-day life like at Woman’s Med?
We’ve got amazing photographs — the students were taking pictures at the med school. There’s some really cool scrapbooks that show their point of view in these snapshots, basically.
They lived in boarding houses, so there are some photos in their rooms. They shot photographs of their dissection cadavers, which we share in a more limited way now than we used to, because they are bodies, usually, that were there without consent.
There are laboratory shots. There are street shots, with streetcars and people on bikes.
We have this pillow sham about two feet by two feet square that a class in the 1890s embroidered to give to their dean. It has all of the names of the graduating class, and then these different icons — bikes, a skull and crossbones, a mortar board, a thermometer, a stethoscope.
They’re becoming physicians. They’ll go on to practice medicine, but they’re using this very traditional woman’s craft to express themselves.
How were students at Woman’s Med treated by their male counterparts?
In 1869 at Pennsylvania Hospital, women attended the clinical lectures, where it usually was all male medical students. The women were jeered and catcalled.
There are hundreds of articles written in newspapers across the country about this happening. Some articles favored the men — “The men exhibited terrible behavior, but they were right, because what were the women doing there?”
But the other public opinion was that these men were out of line. That you shouldn’t treat women that way. And that was the stronger opinion.
So society was kind of policing bad behavior, and the women were just continuing to stand up for themselves.
I don’t think that they were calling it equality or equity at the time. They just had specific things that they thought the women should be able to do, like attend clinical lectures, have the same kind of access to quality training.
What did students at Woman’s Med do after graduation? Did they stay in Philadelphia?
The women who came in the very beginning were quite local, and they largely stayed in the area. But women came from all over. We’re talking not just about coming from Bucks County or Ohio, but coming from California, and then coming from the South, and coming internationally.
Not exclusively, but largely, they were getting training and going back to their communities in order to improve healthcare where they came from.
Women also became medical missionaries, starting in the 1860s and going forward, largely in the Middle East and the Far East to work. They were really there to improve healthcare and to train people there to care for their communities.
How does the Legacy Center preserve this history?
We are constantly working to share the history here, and we’re open to anyone who wants to come and do research. We’re very much about women’s history — obviously, it’s a history of science, it’s a history of medicine, but it’s really about women’s place [in medicine] and how they accomplish what they have done.
A lot of people in Philadelphia don’t know that this history is here — there’s a lot to be proud of here, and it goes beyond our city.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.