s t u d i e s i n s o c i a l m e d i c i n e Allan M. Brandt and Larry R. Churchill, editors
Arleen Marcia Tuchman
the life of
Marie
Zakrzewska, M.D.
The University of North Carolina Press • Chapel Hill
Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
∫ 2006 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Designed by Heidi Perov
Set in Baskerville and Copperplate by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
This volume was published with the generous assistance of Vanderbilt University and of the Greensboro Women’s Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. Founding Contributors of the fund: Linda Arnold Carlisle, Sally Schindel Cone, Anne Faircloth, Bonnie McElveen Hunter, Linda Bullard Jennings, Janice J. Kerley (in honor of Margaret Supplee Smith), Nancy Rouzer May, and Betty Hughes Nichols.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tuchman, Arleen, 1956–
Science has no sex : the life of Marie Zakrzewska /
Arleen Marcia Tuchman.
p. cm. — (Studies in social medicine)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8078-3020-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8078-3020-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Zakrzewska, Marie E., 1829–1902.
2. Women physicians—United States—Biography.
[dnlm: 1. Zakrzewska, Marie E. (Marie Elizabeth), 1829–1902.
2. Physicians, Women—history—Massachusetts—Biography.
wz 100 z218t 2006]
I. Title. II. Series.
r692.t83
2006
610.92—dc22
2005036098
10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
To my family and friends,
for reminding me of what is important in life
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
xi
i n t r o d u c t i o n
1
1. Aspiring Bourgeoisie 16
2. Master Midwife 36
3. This Land of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity 55
4. The First Hospital for Women and Children 80
5. Fashioning a Home 101
6. Writing Autobiography 121
7. The Standard of the School Was below Par 137
8. On Hospitals 156
9. The Hospital in Transformation 177
10. Scientific Medicine at the New England Hospital 199
11. The World Changes 229
12. I Wish to Have My Own Way in Taking Leave 247
n o t e s
261
b i b l i o g r a p h y
307
i n d e x
329
This page intentionally left blank
ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
i l l u s t r a t i o n s
Title page from Zakrzewska’s Introductory Lecture 150
New England Hospital for Women and Children 191
Marie Zakrzewska, ca. 1870s 204
Record of a patient at the New England Hospital for Women and Children 212
Marie Zakrzewska, ca. 1889(?) 231
Marie Zakrzewska, ca. the turn of the century 248
t a b l e s
1. Unwed Mothers at the New England Who Had Previous Pregnancies 183
2. ‘‘Colored’’ Patients at the New England (All Wards) 184
3. Percentage of Foreign-Born at the New England’s Dispensary and Hospital Compared with Massachusetts General 185
4. Percentage of Foreign-Born and Irish at the New
England’s Dispensary 188
5. Percentage of Foreign-Born and Irish at the New
England’s Hospital 189
6. Percentage of Charity Cases at the New England, the
Boston Lying-In, and Massachusetts General, 1877–1886 192
7. Percentage of Free Days at the New England Compared with Percentage of Charity Cases at Massachusetts General and the Boston Lying-In, 1887–1893 193
8. Percentage of White- and Blue-Collar Patients at the New England, the Boston City Hospital, and Massachusetts General, 1873–1894 194
9. Percentage of Single Mothers in the New England’s Maternity Wards Compared with the Boston Lying-In, 1872–1897 196
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The day has finally arrived when I get to thank everyone who has helped me to bring this book to fruition. This would never have happened without the support of funding institutions, research assistants, librarians, archivists, colleagues and friends near and far, and my family. It is with great pleasure that I now acknowledge them all.
Many funding institutions expressed their confidence in this project. I wish to thank the American Philosophical Society, the German Academic Exchange Service (daad), the National Endowment for the Humanities (RH-21250-95), and the National Institutes of Health (R01-LM06859-01) for their generous financial support. My own institution, Vanderbilt University, provided sabbati-cal leave and research grants at critical moments in the development of this book. I particularly appreciate the year I spent as a Fellow at Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities in 1994–95. Thanks to the members of the Seminar on Science and Society for stimulating conversations that were especially valuable in the early stages of this book. I wish to express my gratitude as well to the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for the wonderful fellowship year I spent there in 1995–96.
The research for this book benefited greatly from two research assistants: Marla Connelly, now Dr. Marla Doehring, spent a summer doing bibliographic research for me; and Daniel Sargent, a graduate student at Harvard University, helped me to compile the demographic information on hospital patient populations contained in Tables 1–9 in Chapter 9. I also appreciate the assistance of the archivists and librarians at the following institutions: the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt Universität, the Potsdam-Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv; the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Schlesinger Library; the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine; the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine and Homeopathy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xii ≤
at Drexel University; and the Library of Congress. Jack Eckert at the Countway and Barbara Williams at Drexel University made it particularly easy to secure copyright permissions. My warmest thanks to Virginia Elwood, who is currently completing a biography of Caroline Severance and who photocopied and sent to me letters from and pertaining to Zakrzewska in Severance’s correspondence. I am also grateful for all the help I have received from the sta√ in my department, especially from Vicki Swinehart and Brenda Hummel, neither of whom ever said no.
Parts of this book have been published in modified form in other venues.
Thanks to Isis and to the Journal of the History of Women for allowing me to replicate some of that material here.
I have had many conversations over the years with colleagues whose comments have shaped this book in ways I can no longer recapture. Their insights have simply become part of the way I now think about gender and medicine. I have benefited grea
tly from conversations with Rima Apple, Charlotte Borst, Carla Bittel, Beth Conklin, Martha Gardner, Janet Golden, Margaret Hum-phreys, Katherine Crawford, Judith Walzer Leavitt, Susan Lederer, Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Ellen Singer More, Steven Peitzman, Rebecca Plant, Naomi Rogers, Susan L. Smith, Valerie Traub, and Russell Viner. I had the good fortune to participate in the National Library of Medicine’s symposium ‘‘Women Physicians, Women’s Politics, and Women’s Health: Emerging Narratives’’ in March 2005, just as I was nearing the finish line on the final revisions of this manuscript. The feedback I received on my paper helped me to rethink my concluding chapter and to crystallize some ideas that were admittedly still vague. Thanks to the organizers of this conference, Elizabeth Fee, Ellen Singer More, and Manon Perry, and to all the participants for a wonderfully engaging two days. Thanks also to the members of the Medicine, Health, and Society group at Vanderbilt University, especially my colleague Matthew Ramsey, for their critical reading of my work. My department has provided a particularly nurturing and stimulating environment in which to work. I am grateful for the collegiality and friendship that define the culture of our department and for the lunchtime seminars, in which we read and critique each other’s written work.
I owe a special debt to those individuals who read all or parts of this manuscript. These include Michael Bess, Katherine Crawford, Mona Frederick, Janet Golden, Judith Walzer Leavitt, Mary Lindemann, Rebecca Plant, Naomi Rogers, Helmut Smith, and David Zolensky. Their substantive and editorial suggestions forced me to rethink many of the assumptions I brought to this
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
≤ xiii
work, to tighten my argument, and to cut, cut, and cut some more. I am deeply grateful to the two previously anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina Press, Regina Morantz-Sanchez and Ellen Singer More. Not only did their suggestions for revisions make this book much better, but the ongoing conversations I have had with both of these scholars over the past decade have profoundly shaped my understanding of the history of gender and medicine and contributed immeasurably to my intellectual growth. Thanks to Allan Brandt and Larry Churchill, editors of Studies in Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina Press, for their support of my project and to Sian Hunter, senior editor at the press, for her intelligent suggestions and pleasant demeanor. It has been a true delight to work with her.
I have dedicated this book to my friends and family, who have done a master-ful job keeping me sane throughout the many years I have spent on this project.
I am grateful to Vivien Fryd, Brenda Hipsher, Susan Johnston, Sue Kay, and Hedy Weinberg for being there when I needed them. Janet Golden always knew how to turn a mountain back into a mole hill, and Mona Frederick had the uncanny knack of finding the humor in every situation. I am truly blessed to have such good friends.
My greatest debt is to my family. I wish to thank my sister, Shendl Tuchman, for never doubting that I would some day finish this book. My stepchildren, Rachel and Peter Zolensky, came into my life while I was in the middle of writing this biography. Their patience and good humor have sustained me in more ways than they can imagine. As interested as they have been periodically in this unusual woman whose story I have told, I know they are relieved to no longer have Zakrzewska’s spirit at our dinner table. My son, Andrew, now five years old, was of course only vaguely aware of ‘‘mommy’s work.’’ Nevertheless, he was astute enough to extract the promise of a Scooby-Do sleep animal when
‘‘mommy sends o√ her manuscript.’’ Finally, my deepest thanks go to my husband, David Zolensky, who has been looking forward to the completion of this book almost as much I have. He has read and reread drafts of this book until his eyes have glazed over. I am grateful for his love, his friendship, and his killer editorial skills.
This page intentionally left blank
On 19 October 1942, radio listeners tuning in to the Du Pont radio series ‘‘The Cavalcade of America’’ would have heard the following introduction to that evening’s broadcast:
At a time in our history when women are doing the work of men in many fields—in science, industry and medicine—we recall another time when women had no equal place in the work of the world. Our story tonight is about a pioneer in medicine who fought to help achieve this equality.
Her name is Marie Zakshefska (sic!), a courageous Polish girl who became one of the greatest woman physicians and a path-finder in American
Medicine.∞
Zakrzewska’s name, which her contemporaries found unpronounceable and which the series’ producers noticeably misspelled, has now been all but forgotten. As late as World War II, however, Zakrzewska (pronounced Zak-chef-ska) remained famous enough to be chosen to symbolize women who had successfully crossed traditional gender lines. She earned this reputation by establishing herself as a physician, educator, and hospital administrator at a time when most medical schools and institutions were closed to women.
The producers of ‘‘The Cavalcade of America’’ apparently chose this nineteenth-century woman as an example to inspire women physicians to serve the nation by joining the waves (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and wacs (Women’s Army Corps). Focusing on her Polish ancestry rather than her German birth—hardly surprising during World War II—they fashioned her into the character they needed in order to promote a message that mixed patriotism with women’s rights. Courageous, determined, and successful in the face of adversity, Zakrzewska became the Rosie the Riveter of the world of female physicians. This broadcast in 1942 was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Zakrzewska’s name and her work would be associated
INTRODUCTION
2 ≤
with various social and political agendas of the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries.
Born in Berlin, Germany, on 6 September 1829, Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska trained as a midwife at that city’s famous Charité hospital and then spent six months working as the hospital’s head midwife before immigrating to America to pursue an M.D. This she received in 1856 from Cleveland Medical College in Cleveland, Ohio, a traditionally all-male medical school that briefly opened its doors to women. Thereafter she helped Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell establish the New York Infirmary for Women and Children; she spent three years as director of a new clinical department at the New England Female College in Boston; and finally, in 1862, she founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children, one of a small number of all-female institutions that o√ered women an opportunity to study medicine and gain clinical experience.
Zakrzewska directed the hospital for twenty-five years—some say with an iron hand—before handing over the reins. Unable, however, to let go of the institution she had created, she remained involved in hospital a√airs until shortly before her death in 1902.≤
Zakrzewska was known among her friends and students for her ‘‘magnetism’’
as well as her ‘‘fearless courage and persuasive tongue.’’≥ William Lloyd Garrison II, a close friend, once described her as ‘‘a woman of decided opinions and the frankest speech, a circumstance which gave zest and animation to any group in which she mingled.’’∂ Bold, outspoken, and often tactless, she forged a public persona that represented anything but the demure Victorian feminine ideal.
She had a biting sense of humor, once ridiculing a physician who claimed women’s small size, and thus small brains, rendered them unable to study medicine by asking him to lament with her ‘‘the death of the 600 pound man who died recently in New York and in whom we have certainly lost one of the greatest medical geniuses.’’∑ Many admired her for her forthrightness, others were intimidated, but most of her peers appreciated her willingness to fight for a woman’s right to enter the medical field.
I first became interested in Zakrzewska more than a decade ago, when, in preparing to teach a new course on the history of women, health, and sexuality, I began reading about women physicians in the United States. My previous work had focused on ninetee
nth-century European medicine and science, but my teaching was more eclectic, drawing on material from countries outside Europe as well. The literature on women’s battle to study medicine in the United States was particularly rich, o√ering a complex picture of the di≈culties
INTRODUCTION
≤ 3
women faced and the diverse strategies they pursued as they sought to challenge cultural stereotypes of themselves as physiologically and mentally unfit for the study and practice of medicine.∏ Founding their own schools and hospitals at the same time that they sought to integrate all-male medical institutions, women set out to change the terms of the debate over whether they should study medicine. As Regina Morantz-Sanchez has demonstrated in her foundational study of women physicians in the United States, one of the most e√ective strategies women adopted was to counter men’s claims that women’s sympathetic natures rendered them unfit for the grueling practice of medicine. They did this by defining medicine itself as the caring profession par excellence.
In this way they could argue that their possession of nurturing qualities placed them in a unique position to build a bridge between ‘‘sympathy’’ and ‘‘science,’’ making sure that the knowledge gained by science would be applied in humane ways.π
Zakrzewska, along with Elizabeth Blackwell, who was eight years her senior, and Mary Putnam Jacobi, who was thirteen years younger, is always featured in studies of the first generation of women physicians in the United States. She has attracted attention not only because of the powerful influence she exerted as director of a teaching hospital over women who pursued medical careers in the second half of the nineteenth century but also because of her unusual stance on women’s relationship to science. In marked contrast to the majority of her colleagues, who embraced the Victorian idea of unique feminine virtues, Zakrzewska insisted that all physicians, whether male or female, had first and foremost to develop their rational faculties and receive advanced training in the natural sciences. In her eyes, too much sympathy and compassion confused one’s ability to reason, thus making it impossible to provide good medical care.∫
Science Has No Sex Page 1
