was held in the parlors of the Infirmary, and at the suggestion of Elizabeth Blackwell. This little meeting was the germ from which subsequently developed the splendid organization of the Sanitary Commission.

Dr. Zakzrewska was invited by the founders of the New England Hospital to preside over its organization;* and to do this, she left the Female Medical School, with which great dissatisfaction was beginning to be felt. Dr. Zakzrewska received powerful assistance for the work from one of the graduates of the school, Lucy Sewall, descendant of a long line of Puritan ancestors. This young lady seemed to have been the first girl of fortune and family to study medicine in the United States. Her romantic and enthusiastic friendship formed for Dr. Zakzrewska, while yet her pupil, led the young Boston girl to devote her life, her fortune, and the influence she could command from a wide circle of friends, to building up the hospital, where she might have the privilege of working with her.

This element of ardent personal friendship and discipleship is rarely lacking in woman's work, from the day-or before it-that Fabiola followed St. Jerome to the desert, there to build the first hospital of the Roman Empire.

Other pupils of the rudimentary Gregory school also felt the magnetism of Dr. Zakzrewska's personal influence, and entered a charmed circle, banded together for life, for the defense of the hospital,-Anita Tyng, Helen Morton, Susan Dimock, the lovely and brilliant girl whose tragic death in the shipwreck of the Schiller, in 1875, deprived the women physicians of America of their first surgeon. Dr. Morton spent several arduous years in the Paris Maternity, where she became chief assistant in order to fit herself for the medical practice at home in which she has so well succeeded. Dr. Dimock went to Zurich, and was the first American girl to graduate from its medical school. In the three brief years that she was resident physician at the New England Hospital, she exhibited a degree of surgical ability that promised a brilliant professional career. The three surgical cases published by her in the New York Medical Record (see Bibliographical List) are of real importance and originality.t

*In the chapter on "Women in Hospitals," in this volume, Mrs. Ednah Cheney gives the details of the early formation of the New England Hospital.-ÉD.

"She was as fresh and girlish as if such qualities had never been pronounced incompatible with medical attainments. She had, indeed, a certain

The New England Hospital, like its sister institutions at New York and Philadelphia, outgrew, and more rapidly than they, its early narrow limits in Pleasant Street, and in 1872 the present beautiful little building was erected in the suburbs of Boston. The work was steadily enlarged, year by year. The report for 1889 shows:

Hospital staff: Resident physician, 1; advisory physicians, 3 visiting physicians, 3; visiting surgeons, 3; internes, 6. In-patients for year, 376; Dispensary patients, 3175.

In 1865, a fourth hospital for women and children was organized in Chicago, "at the request and by the earnest efforts of Dr. Mary H. Thompson, the pioneer woman physician in the city. Opened just at the close of the war, many of those to whom it afforded shelter, nursing, and medical attendance were soldiers' wives, widows, and children, and women whose husbands had deserted them in hours of greatest need. There came from the South refugees both white and colored." Thus in the West as in the East, we find repeated for the women physicians of the nineteenth century the experience of the men of the eighteenth; it was amidst the exigencies of a great war that their opportunities opened, their sphere enlarged, and they "emerged from obscurity" into the responsibilities of recognized public function.

In 1871, just as money had been collected to purchase a better house and lot for the small hospital, the great fire occurred; and when after it, "the remnants were gathered together, they were found to consist of one or two helpless patients, two housemaids, a nurse, a pair of blankets, two pil

flower-like beauty, a peculiar softness and elegance of appearance and manner. I have wondered whether she did not resemble Angelica Kaufman. Underneath this softness, however, lay a decision of purpose, a Puritan austerity of character that made itself felt, though unseen. "She ruled the hospital like a little Napoleon," said a lady who had been there. . . . . Both the surgical talents and surgical training of Dr. Dimock are certainly at the present date (1875), exceptional among women. It is on this account that our loss is irreparable, for at this moment there seems to be no one to take her place. Many battles have been lost from such a cause. But although ours be ultimately won, we would not, if we could, grieve less loyally for this girl, so brilliant and so gentle, so single of purpose and so wide of aim, whose life had been thus ruthlessly uprooted and thrown upon the waves at the very moment it touched upon fruition."-M. P. Jacobi in New York Medical Record, 1875.

Dr. Dimock, like so many of the early gynecological surgeons of America, was a Southerner, born in North Carolina.

*Nineteenth Annual Report Chicago Hospital for Women and Children,

lows, and a bit of carpet."* The hospital "remnant," however, profited with others by the outburst of energy which so rapidly repaired misfortune and rebuilt the city. In 1871, a building was purchased by the Relief and Aid Society, for $25,000, and given to the hospital, on conditions, one of which was that it should annually care for twenty-five patients free of charge.

During the first nineteen years of its existence, up to 1854, over 15,000 patients had been cared for by the hospital, of which 4774 were house patients, 9157 were treated in the dispensary, and 1404 attended at home. The report of the hospital for 1888 gives a summary for four years.f There is a hospital staff, comprising attending physicians, 5; pathologist, 1; internes, 3. Annual average from four years summary: In-patients, 334; dispensary, 806; visited at home, 138.

The fifth woman's hospital was opened in San Francisco in 1875, under the name of the Pacific Dispensary, by Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown and Dr. Annette Buckle, both graduates of the Philadelphia school. During the first year, it contained but six beds. To-day, after fifteen years' untiring work, the enlisted sympathies of generous friends have developed it to a hospital for 110 beds, to which sick children are admitted gratuitously, and adult female patients on payment of a small charge. It is under the care of six attending physicians, who serve in rotation.

Finally, in distant Minneapolis, a sixth hospital has spurng up in 1882. At its latest report, only 193 patients had been received during the year. But the history of its predecessors, and the irresistible Western energy of its friends, predict for this a growth perhaps even more rapid than that possible in cities in the East.

It is worth while to summarize the actual condition of these six hospitals in a tabulated form:

* Report, loc. cit.

"To the fixedness and honesty of purpose of Dr. Mary H. Thompson, y be credited these satisfactory results of nineteen years' work. They mean a devotion and self-sacrifice on her part that few can estimate." Report of results from 1884 to 1888.

Thus, total number of women physicians engaged in six hospitals, 94; number renewed annually, 32; annual number indoor patients, 1828; annual number of dispensary patients, 15,171; annual number patients treated at home, 1601; total number patients, 18,600.

This represents the growth since 1857, when the only hospi tal conducted by women, in this country, was the lying-in ward of the New York Infirmary, containing twelve beds.

The foundation of these hospitals effected the transition for women physicians from the pre-medical period, when medical education was something attempted but not effected, to a truly medical epoch, when women could really have an opportunity to engage in actual medical work. Correlatively the theoretic education began to improve. In Boston, the Female Medical College was happily extinguished as an independent institution. In Philadelphia, the Faculty gradually struggled free of its inefficient or objectionable members, utilized its legacy of $100,000 to fully equip its beautiful college building, with amphitheatres, lecture rooms, and even embryo laboratories, museums, and libraries,-enlarged its corps of instructors until they numbered twenty-three, instead of the original and

meagre seven, and even, though more timidly, began to enforce something like a rigid discipline among its students, in regard to conditions of admission, examination, graduation, and terms of study. In 1885, Lawson Tait, the famous English surgeon, described the college building as "being very large and splendidly appointed. Last year twenty-six degrees of doctor of medicine were granted by the Faculty, and from the perusal of the curriculum, as well as from conversation with some of the graduates, and from discussion with both the friends and opponents of the school, I am quite satisfied that its graduates are quite as carefully trained as those in any other medical school. When I tell you that last winter 132 students matriculated in this school, that the amphitheatre in the hospital is large enough to seat 300 persons, and that every year about 4000 patients pass through this amphitheatre in the college clinics, I shall have said enough to prove to you that in the United States the practice of medicine by women has become an accomplished fact."*

In New York, after much hesitation, a charter was obtained in 1865 for the establishment of a medical college in connection with the Infirmary. "This step was taken reluctantly, because the desire of the trustees of the Infirmary, of Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, was not to found another medical school, but to secure the admission of women to the classes. for instruction already organized in connection with the medical charities of the city, and to one at least of the New York medical colleges. . . . The demand of women for a medical education had resulted in the founding of small colleges in different places, all, with the exception of the Philadelphia School, limited to the narrow and cheap standard of legal requirements, and producing equally cheap and narrow results. in the petty standard of medical education they were establishing among women students. Application was made to the College of Physicians and Surgeons for advice, and the case was laid before the Faculty. It was stated that a sufficient number of women were studying medicine to show that there was a demand for instruction that must be satisfied; that the

Tait.

Medical News, 1885. Reprint of address at Birmingham by Lawson

The establishment of such schools, professing to further the education of women, has continued to be the greatest bane to the movement for their effective education. So late as the current year (1890), a lady writes from Cincinnati: "The college already in existence is one of the unpardonable sins against a confiding public."