Fighting for Life Read online

  In the beginning I was one of these weak sisters. It took about six weeks of unaccustomed and unpleasant work for me to be transformed to the place where I could honestly say to myself: “This is the one thing of all others that I will and must do.” I have never regretted it. Long hours of work both day and night, discouragement and rebuffs all seemed just part of a natural life and if it has been a difficult road to travel it has also been a deeply satisfying one.

  When I began my bashful and inefficient inquiries as to the way of getting a medical education my ignorance was colossal. Finally some courageous good angel—I wish I could remember who it was—told me that there was a women’s medical college in New York attached to the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. That was little enough to go on but it spurred me into going down to New York and timidly assailing the place. It was a pleasant building, on the corner of Stuyvesant Square at East Fifteenth Street, and, when I summoned up my courage to go in and ask questions, they treated me very well. It was a brisk, and yet a serious institution. I liked it and found with great relief that the people in charge—all women too—seemed to consider the study of medicine a reasonable career for a girl. But they made it clear that I should have to earn my opportunity. The certificate from Miss Thomas which would enable me to enter Vassar College was of no value here. This college required a certificate from the State Board of Regents covering a series of subjects which included elementary chemistry and biology. In order to get the required counts, I should have to pass examinations in all of the elementary subjects that belonged to my earliest school days.

  So back home I went and for the next year I studied continuously and renewed my acquaintance with arithmetic, geography and even spelling (which continues to be one of my weakest points). I was near enough to studies like Latin, French and the higher mathematics to have them cause me no difficulty. But the States bounding the Mississippi River and the Capital of Arkansas gave me a bit of trouble. During this whole year I was encouraged and stimulated by a running fire of sarcasm from my numerous relatives—all, that is, except my mother, who stood by me without a word once her mind had been made up. At the time I was very bitter about these Job’s comforters of mine. Now I know that they kept me so angry that they unintentionally furnished me with the added incentive I needed. At the end of this year of cramming I passed the Regents’ examinations, packed my bag and set out on my rather lonely great adventure. I knew that I had finally left my home and that I would never go back except for short visits. It was hardly comforting knowledge, but I could not let anyone know how little confidence I felt in myself or the possibility of my ever justifying the expenditure of that precious $5,000.

  In selecting the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, only because I knew of no other place to go, I had unwittingly put myself into direct contact with the fountainhead of all medical training for American women. On the third of February, 1821, in Bristol, England, Elizabeth Blackwell was born, the third daughter in a family of nine children. In August, 1832, the entire Blackwell family set out on the seven weeks’ voyage to America. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in modern times to be graduated in medicine and to receive the degree of M.D. (1849) and she was the first woman doctor to be placed on the British Medical Register (1859). She died in Kilmun, England, in 1910. She spent her early years teaching in America, in order to earn the money to carry out her long-conceived plan of studying medicine, and then made application to as many medical colleges as she could reach for this opportunity. The idea of a woman studying medicine was abhorrent to all of them. The answers to her request were invariably, emphatically “No.” Some friend of hers suggested her writing to a small medical college in Geneva, New York, and in October, 1847, she received a letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Geneva University telling her that her proposal had been submitted to the students who, acting independently and without any interference on the part of the Faculty, had invited her to join them. I feel that this resolution, opening as it did the medical profession to women students, is of such importance that it should be reproduced here:

  At a meeting of the entire medical class of Geneva Medical College held this day, October 20th, 1847, the following resolutions were unanimously adopted:—

  1. Resolved—That one of the radical principles of a Republican Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every branch of scientific education the door should be open equally to all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our class meets with our entire approbation; and in extending our unanimous invitation we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.

  2. That a copy of these proceedings be signed by the Chairman and transmitted to Elizabeth Blackwell.

  T. J. Stratton, Chairman*

  On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell received her degree, and to her every medical woman owes a debt of gratitude. After several years of graduate study in this country, England and France, Dr. Blackwell decided that other women must have the opportunity that she had earned for them. Her efforts to establish a private practice in New York City were more than difficult. Women passing her in the street held their skirts aside so that they would not be contaminated by touching her. She has stated that her early practice was very much a Quaker practice and the colony of Quakers in New York supported her during these trying early years and made possible the founding of the New York Infirmary. I am proud to be one of this grand sect. Elizabeth’s sister, Emily Blackwell, was graduated from the Medical College of Cleveland in 1854, and in 1856 these two pioneer women together with Dr. Marie E. Zackrzewska, who had also just graduated from the Cleveland college, rented a house at 64 Bleecker Street and opened it as a dispensary where women physicians could get the opportunities for clinical work denied them at other places. It was named “The New York Infirmary for Women and Children.” Later it was incorporated under this name and a medical college for women was also incorporated as part of its teaching plan. This was the college I had entered.

  Dr. Emily Blackwell was at the head of this college in my day. Her sister, Dr. Elizabeth, had gone back to England to do her part in opening equal opportunities for English women. Dr. Zackrzewska had gone to Boston to be instrumental in opening a hospital where women physicians could obtain their needed graduate work. I was later an interne at this hospital—the New England Hospital for Women and Children. A group of women in Philadelphia, in 1850, opened a medical college for women in that city and today, with almost universal co-educational opportunities for women wishing to study medicine, this latter is the only strictly medical college-for-women-only still in existence.

  Dr. Emily Blackwell, in her personality and appearance as well as in her achievements, belonged to the tradition of the great pioneers. She inspired us all with the vital feeling that we were still on trial and that, for women who meant to be physicians, no educational standards could be too high. It was a real advantage to be trained under that tradition. Years afterward, one night at a dinner, I sat next to Dr. William H. Welch, the much honored and greatly loved Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He confided to me that he had once belonged to the small group of medical men who prepared the examination questions for the students of the Women’s Medical College. “And,” he said, “I am now ashamed of the type of question we required those young women to answer. I am sure no one would have tolerated them in our own colleges. But our excuse must be that Dr. Blackwell demanded more difficult questions than could be submitted to our students, for she was determined that all women graduated from her college should be a carefully selected group.”

  I think that determination was clear all through our course. The New York Infirmary Medical College was the first to establish a chair for the teaching of hygiene. In 1859, it appointed a “sanitary visitor” whose duty it was “to give simple, practical instruction to poor mothers on the management of infants and the preservation of the healt
h of their families.” It was one of the earliest hospitals to establish a training school for nurses, and was the second medical college in the United States to require a four-year course before graduation—the first was Harvard University. In fact, all through those first years, not only were the highest standards maintained but the pioneering spirit persisted. I think not many of us realized that we were going out into the world as test cases, but Dr. Black-well did. Later I realized the wisdom and extent of her vision.

  I wish I might paint an adequate word-portrait of Dr. Emily Blackwell as I remember her. Tall, broad-shouldered and commanding in her presence, she was a striking figure, but I think few of us thought much about her general appearance. It was her face and her head that arrested your attention. I dislike to use the word “noble” in a physical description but it is the only adequate way to portray her face. Her hair was white when I knew her, and her whole personality was so striking and dominant that when she entered a room full of students, there suddenly seemed to be only one person in that room and that person was Dr. Blackwell. I never knew Dr. Elizabeth but I count it a great honor to have known Dr. Emily. Her voice was low and calm and of an uncanny quality: you could have heard the proverbial pin drop in any room where she was speaking. She looked into the future with prophetic clarity, and her great wisdom was nowhere more evident than when, one year after my own graduation, in 1899, she decided that a separate medical school for women was no longer necessary. In that year Cornell University established its medical school in New York City and, by the terms of its University Charter, it had to be co-educational. That was the first opportunity, in New York City, for women to work with men on equal terms, and Dr. Blackwell sensed its importance. She decided that the goal for which she and Dr. Elizabeth had worked was at last achieved: women must compete with and work with men in the medical profession. The day of separate education was over. From that time on a women’s medical college would retard rather than advance the best interests of women and so, after arrangements had been made for all of the students to be entered in their respective classes at Cornell, the college closed its doors.

  When I think back to those years so long ago, it is difficult to keep a proper sequence in mind. The idea of women in the medical profession is so familiar and commonplace to me now, and it was so strange and unconventional then. Possibly, my life should have been romantically exciting but I didn’t find it so. It was half terrifying and half boring for the first few months. I was not quite eighteen but quite old enough to worry over the time and money I might be wasting if I did not succeed. The other members of my class of thirty-five students seemed older and rather remote. Even the plodding and elementary work of learning the names of muscles and bones, trying to get some sane idea of elementary physiology and equally elementary chemistry, which were the starting points, did not wholly occupy my mind. I had too much spare time and nothing to do with it and only the chorus of “I told you so’s” which would have greeted me kept me from dropping it all and going home.

  Sometimes I sat brooding in Stuyvesant Square, which was then a quiet place with many flower-beds. Sometimes I sat in Union Square which was also a quiet place and aeons removed from the Communistic stamping ground and noisy, barren annex to Klein’s that it is now. But I soon found out that the best way to kill spare time was to climb up on the driver’s seat of one of the old Fifth Avenue horse-drawn busses, ride up to the car barns at Eighty-fourth Street and then, when the horses had been changed, ride back again. It would take all of an afternoon or an evening to make this trip. The busses were queer old vehicles. Inside they had long seats on either side seating possibly twelve or fourteen people. There was a little slotted opening up in the room in front and through this one put his quarter or fifty-cent piece and in time the driver would push back an envelope with the printed inscription: “Change for twenty-five cents,” or “fifty cents.” If you had the right change with you, your dime went into a glass contraption in the front of the bus and a bell rang to vouch for your honesty in paying your fare. But the seat outside with the driver was the vantage point. There was room for three people in all but, as it required a good deal of athletic prowess to climb up, it was reserved for the elect. The drivers of those days are now an extinct race—they have disappeared as have the old-time London busmen—but while they lasted they had a flavor and quality of language, and of information too, that made them rare and illuminating companions for a lonely girl.

  Fifth Avenue is now completely altered; in my early days it was solidly filled with brownstone houses, of varying sizes but with an appalling uniformity for all that. The driver knew who lived in each one and had anecdotes galore to fit the different families. I knew a few of these families myself but had sworn a solemn vow that there were to be no social contacts in my new life, so I neither went to see them nor let them know that I was in town as a medical student. From Twenty-third Street to Fifty-ninth Street there were no shops; just the tightly closed houses of what was then the traditional residence district of Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred.” Famous names and huge fortunes came from the driver’s mouth to the accompaniment of the rattle of the bus wheels on the cobblestone pavement. Down each side-street stretched double rows of brownstone houses with high stoops, all exactly alike—at once dismal and charming in the bright autumn sunlight or the early gas-light of the evening. Everything leisurely and solid. That was not the same New York I came to know later, the New York of hurrying politics and crowded tenements. The old reservoir—looking like a mediaeval fortification—still covered the block at Forty-second Street where the public library now stands. Above Fifty-ninth Street great new mansions in the lavish pre-war style were building, but most of them were flanked on both sides by vacant lots.

  Several times each week I would spend the afternoon or evening at Proctor’s Vaudeville Theatre on West Twenty-third Street. Some weeks I went every day seeing the same show over seven times before it changed at the end of the week. You have to be either very lonesome or terribly fond of vaudeville to endure such an ordeal. I was both. But the people near me would probably have been startled to know that the small and shrinking young girl next them, wearing a street-sweeping skirt and an elaborately feathered hat, like everyone else, was nursing a bag of human bones in her lap all the time the comedians were going through their hilarious acts on the stage. Bones are the breath of life to the first-year medical student and I usually carried my collection with me, as a Chinese Mandarin carries his favorite bit of jade, to mull over them and attach imaginary muscles to them at odd moments.

  I lived in a boarding house in West Seventeenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It filled several houses thrown together and offered very little in social contacts. But there were a few isolated young men and women like myself there, all with little enough money and all starting out to carve their respective ways in the world. Most of them became very successful and some of them wealthy—a typical American start and finish. We used to pool our resources and go to as many plays as the money allowed. Boarding houses, which were common enough at that time, seem to have almost entirely disappeared. They offered a refuge for the unattached young man or young woman and for young married couples without enough money to start housekeeping on their own. There were always a few much older people, couples usually, who had not been treated too well by time, and to them the boarding house was a haven of refuge. They were often dull places and the food was the subject of constant witticisms and jokes but I cannot think that there is now any sufficient substitute for all that they offered. Today, these people would be living isolated in small apartments on intimate terms with the can-opener. But in the eighteen-nineties the modern apartment house was still in an embryonic stage. About the only social occasion I remember with much vividness out of that first year is being at a party which included the famous Julia Ward Howe; a very impressive and delightful old lady. Some one asked her to recite The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I have a very clear picture of Mrs. Howe
arising from her chair and giving us that immortal hymn. It gave me a never-to-be-forgotten impression of its grandeur. Ever since, I have been chronically unable to understand why it should not be the American national anthem. It is not only that the words are far more impressive than those of The Star Spangled Banner, but the tune is superb, far more singable, and a native American product. But then I suppose the American nation would have to have a national anthem beginning “Oh, say. . . .”

  My fellow-students at the College not only were older than I was, with few exceptions, but they were seriously absorbed in their work. There was little feminine consciousness apparent. The student who asked me to subscribe to a suffrage paper was the only one who ever showed signs of that future fever. There was nothing for me to do but to get absorbed in work too. I managed that fairly gracefully and gradually the homesickness and the loneliness disappeared and I found myself becoming intensely interested and busy as the real meaning of the course of study began to emerge. Dissecting, which proved to be strangely impersonal, threatened to be a difficult hurdle to scale, but actually it never worried me and from that time I was heart and soul bound by the interest and fascination of it all. Gradually I began to make friends. Five of them are still my friends, though I do not see them now as often as I should like: Dr. Caroline H. LeFevre who became a highly successful surgeon, Dr. Marie Louise Lefort who has been for many years at the head of the American Hospital at Rheims, France, Dr. Alice Asserson with whom I worked in the Children’s Welfare Federation for many years, Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar who has achieved distinction as the only woman staff surgeon in a man-staffed hospital in New York City and who has a record of distinction that may well be envied by any medical man or woman, and Dr. Florence M. Laighton with whom I lived and practiced for many years. All splendid women who, even in their student days, were marked for future success.