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SUMMARY: The male founders and early faculty of Philadelphia's Woman's Medical College were mostly abolitionist physicians, zealous moralists for whom medical feminism formed only one of the cherished causes they could "manfully" and righteously defend. Male faculty of the late nineteenth century comprised "self-made" men, mostly new specialists, for whom strict sexism probably seemed inconsistent with progressive medicine. For some of these physicians-obviously a small minority-defending medical women and breaking the barriers of fraternity could be consistent with "manly" responsibility. The outcome of the collaboration of women and the dissident men physicians in nineteenth-century Philadelphia amounted to another seeming paradox: the majority of the male medical profession, both locally and nationally, tyrannically hindered women's entry into the profession, yet medicine opened its doors in advance of law and the clergy; and where this first occurred, such as in the community centered on Woman's Medical College, a novel gender rearrangement arose based on collaboration and friendship.
KEYWORDS: women physicians, medical education, masculinity, Philadelphia, gender
Reflecting on his adventures as a maverick champion of Philadelphia's pioneering women's medical school during the 1860s and 1870s, when most of Philadelphia's medical men chose to dismiss the school and its women, physician-educator Henry Hartshorne wrote: "For a medical man to be connected at that time with the Woman's Medical College required pluck, and, this time very clearly, pluck won."1 Pluck, a kind of resourceful or cheeky courage, meant much to nineteenth-century American men. So did winning. But they did not typically express these values by defending the movement of women into previously all-male domains.2
The recent body of scholarship dealing with the history of women physicians in the United States began with Mary Walsh's "Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply": Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975 (1977) and Virginia Drachman's Hospital with a Heart: Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862-1969 (1984).3 As these titles suggest, early and important efforts to begin the retrieval of the history of American medical women correctly recounted the opposition and discrimination by the male medical establishment, and the consequent reliance on female separatism. No doubt exists as to the extent of that sexism, nearly universal in the mid-nineteenth century, and still extant today in...