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amount of taxes she pays, however respectable her character or useful her life—
can ever attain. Wherein, your remonstrant would inquire, is the justice, equality, or wisdom of this?’’∂≥
When the forty-nine-year-old Hunt was introduced to Zakrzewska in the fall of 1854, she felt as though she had met a kindred spirit. She had heard of the young German woman studying in Cleveland but had known little more about Zakrzewska. ‘‘[W]hen I met her,’’ Hunt later remarked, ‘‘an electric communication was instantly established between us. I felt that here was a combination of head and heart, which was as uncommon as it was beautiful.’’∂∂ Zakrzewska must have felt the same way, for a warm friendship developed between the two women over the years. Through Hunt Zakrzewska began to understand the connection between her own struggles to pursue a medical career and the battles of women’s rights advocates both to gain legal rights for women and to alter not only the way men thought about women but also how women thought about themselves. This education continued when Zakrzewska visited Hunt in Boston in the fall of 1855, right around the time of a New England Woman’s Rights Convention over which Hunt presided and that met to review the legal status of women in the various states. Whether Zakrzewska attended this convention is unknown, but she did spend her days meeting and socializing with Sarah Grimké, Angelina Grimké, Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. She also met Walter Channing, one of Boston’s elite physicians, who would later become one of her staunchest supporters. Indeed, many of the people she met during this stay would provide critical support to her when she returned to Boston at the end of the decade to found her own hospital. ∂∑
By the time Zakrzewska visited Hunt in Boston, she was well aware of how much she was personally benefiting from the social and political goals of this circle of reformers. In fact, it was Hunt who had informed her of the female support network that had made her study of medicine possible. Zakrzewska had, of course, appreciated the generosity of the Severances, but she had been unaware that more was going on than the willingness of some good people to open their home to a young medical student. What she learned was that Severance had joined together with a group of prominent Cleveland women in November 1852 to form the Ohio Female Medical Education Society, which had been established explicitly for the purpose of promoting women’s entry into the medical field by helping them to defray much of the expense of acquiring an education. Severance was elected secretary of the group, and a board of man-
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agers was established, whose task it was to screen applicants and ascertain who would be most likely to succeed.∂∏ This is the group Blackwell had contacted when she sought to help Zakrzewska defray some of the expenses of a medical school education.
The Ohio Female Medical Education Society was clearly modeled after early nineteenth-century women’s benevolent associations, but rather than assist the poor and hungry, it was helping middle-class women enter an area of public life traditionally restricted to men. As Zakrzewska soon learned, many individuals who were otherwise committed to social reform nevertheless found this goal threatening. During her second year in Cleveland, she boarded with the Vaughan family, former southern slaveholders who had moved to Ohio in the 1840s and freed their slaves but who had avoided the more radical wing of the abolitionist movement. Among their friends, even among those who claimed to be supportive of women’s rights, Zakrzewska found ‘‘the same prejudice . . .
against all women who attempted to step out of the domestic sphere.’’∂π She
found it puzzling that the same women who would join in political discussions and articulate their views intelligently, even in opposition to their husbands or fathers, would speak disapprovingly of her decision to study medicine. ‘‘I was often,’’ Zakrzewska later remembered, ‘‘taken by surprise when, on the brink of forgetting that these manifestations of independence could exist side by side with the most ludicrous prejudice against me and my medical companions, I would be seriously questioned, ‘Do you want to turn women into men?’ ’’∂∫
These are words Zakrzewska penned later in the century, as she was looking back on her days in Cleveland. Chances are she would not at the time have phrased things in this way, addressing directly the way her actions subverted traditional gender roles. Only over time did she come to understand the deeply gendered meanings ascribed not only to specific behaviors but also to mental and moral attributes. She would eventually challenge such gendered meanings, believing that only in this way would women ever gain the freedom to pursue their own interests. But such insights took time to develop. More than likely in the years Zakrzewska spent in Cleveland she did not yet fully understand why her study of medicine posed such a threat to men and women who were otherwise committed to reform.
Fortunately for Zakrzewska, though, whatever resistance she may have encountered from the Vaughans and their circle of friends was o√set by the support she received from the Severances, Hunt, and other advocates for women’s rights. How di√erent her experience must have been from the one Elizabeth
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Blackwell had had to endure in Geneva, where she had spent two years living and studying in relative isolation. How di√erent as well from her own ordeal in Berlin, where, once Joseph Hermann Schmidt died, she had lost all protection.
During her two years in Cleveland, Zakrzewska came to understand that she might never have even gotten into medical school without the support of others who were fighting not simply for the education of a handful of women physicians but for radical changes in gender relations. She recognized that the roots of what she had once viewed as her own personal battle went far deeper than she had imagined and that her own personal success would mean little if legal, social, and gender barriers remained largely intact, just opening a crack to let her through. Thus Zakrzewska’s initial resistance to a Woman’s Rights Convention gradually dissolved, and she came to see that despite her earlier view of these women as ‘‘hens which want to crow,’’ she ‘‘had tried to crow as hard as any of these women without realizing it.’’∂Ω
Zakrzewska’s greatest support came from the community of women’s rights advocates, a fact she well appreciated, but others encouraged her as well. As previously mentioned, she felt welcome at the Independent Christian Church, where she found a community of like-minded individuals most of whom supported her e√orts. She also felt particular gratitude toward the Reverend Mayo.
Zakrzewska once wrote that there was no one in Cleveland among her ‘‘many dear and valued friends’’ to whom she owed more, for although he had little, he had given willingly when she was in need. Finally, she also received much encouragement from John J. Delamater, dean of Cleveland Medical College, professor of midwifery and diseases of women and children, and a committed abolitionist. In short, Zakrzewska’s support network during the two years she spent in Cleveland, and indeed during the rest of her life, consisted of men and women who both shared and helped shape the political goals she came to value most highly.∑≠
. . .
John J. Delamater became Zakrzewska’s mentor almost as soon as she arrived in Cleveland. It was, as one historian has suggested, as though she had re-created the same kind of relationship she had had with Schmidt, one based on fondness and mutual respect, from which she received substantial protection.
Zakrzewska remembered Delamater receiving her ‘‘like a father,’’ taking her under his wing, and helping her to feel ‘‘perfectly at home.’’∑∞ It is easy to understand why she would have been drawn to her new mentor. Active in the temperance and abolitionist movements most of his adult life, Delamater had
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been a member of the college since its establishment in 1843 and was the leading force behind Cleveland Medical College’s decision to open its doors to women.
As a result,
in the six years Cleveland experimented with coeducation nine women matriculated, of whom six received the M.D.∑≤ Delamater had thus succeeded in putting the college on the map, albeit briefly. The year Zakrzewska graduated the school changed its policy. Not until 1880 did it grant another woman an M.D.∑≥
In trying to understand Cleveland’s decision to end its experiment with coeducation, one must separate the question of why it opened its doors in 1850
from why it closed them six years later. Linda Lehmann Goldstein has argued persuasively that the willingness to experiment had come about because of the presence on the faculty of several powerful individuals, none more important than Delamater, whose general commitment to social and political reform translated as well into a specific interest in promoting the higher education of women. At various times Delamater had received important backing from Jared Potter Kirtland, professor of the theory and practice of medicine and a committed abolitionist as well. The two men had known each other from the early 1840s when both had taught at Willoughby Medical College in Chagrin, Ohio, twenty miles east of Cleveland. Both had left that school in 1843, along with two other faculty members, to found Cleveland Medical College, the medical arm of Western Reserve University, still located at that time in Hudson.
As Goldstein demonstrates, these two men were primarily responsible for convincing the other members of their department to accept female students. Still, as she also shows, Cleveland’s openness to women never became o≈cial policy; rather, it always depended upon the presence of particular individuals willing to persuade their colleagues, quietly and from behind the scenes, of the importance of this cause. ‘‘It was,’’ she wrote, ‘‘as if an equal medical education is what happened to six talented women while the faculty debated the Woman Question.’’∑∂ The greatest support for this claim was Cleveland’s decision to close its doors to women in 1856, just about the time that Delamater and Kirtland were nearing retirement and no longer able to exert as great an influence on their colleagues.∑∑
But more may have contributed to Cleveland’s decision to reverse its policy.
Indeed, what remains puzzling in this account is Kirtland’s ambivalence toward the ‘‘Woman Question,’’ for one year after recommending that women be accepted as students he turned around and suggested that it might be inadvis-able to admit any more women. A resolution that he submitted to the faculty to
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this e√ect passed unanimously. Then, two years later, in 1853, he submitted another resolution recommending that the dean be given ultimate authority to admit women on a case-by-case basis.∑∏ Kirtland’s behavior may, however, be explainable if we take into account the opening of the Western College of Homeopathic Medicine in Cleveland in 1850. Since unorthodox medical schools, as we have already noted, sometimes demonstrated a greater openness to female students than regular institutions, coeducation and unorthodoxy were perceived by some to go hand in hand. Thus when Cleveland Medical College accepted two women in 1850, it risked blurring the boundary separating its institution from the newly founded Western College of Homeopathic Medicine.
The fact that Cleveland’s medical faculty explicitly distanced itself from homeopathic institutions in 1851, the same year Kirtland judged it unwise to admit any more women students, suggests how strongly these two issues were linked in the
minds of the faculty.∑π
Thus, the reversal in 1856 of Cleveland Medical College’s policy toward women may not have rested solely on Delamater’s and Kirtland’s declining power within the medical faculty. After all, Delamater continued teaching until 1861, Kirtland until 1864. What may also have changed was their perception of the threat posed by the neighboring homeopathic institution. In fact, during the six-year period in which women studied at Cleveland, total enrollments dropped from a high of two hundred to a low of seventy-two.∑∫ Although this
decline cannot be, and apparently was not, ascribed directly to the presence of women, the medical faculty, including Delamater and Kirtland, reacted by trying to distinguish its institution more definitively from homeopathic schools.
If that meant abandoning coeducation in order to rid itself of the taint of unorthodoxy, so be it.
The reaction of male regular physicians to female physicians cannot thus be understood without paying attention as well to contemporary concerns about the professionalization of medicine.∑Ω For at least some men, perhaps even for many, the question was not so much whether women were capable of practicing medicine as what e√ect their inclusion, both in institutions of medical learning and afterward in medical practice, would have on physicians’ professional image. Even those men who favored the advancement of women never attributed as much importance to that goal as they did to the advancement of their profession. There is a noticeable parallel to the situation Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton encountered as their fellow abolitionists pressured them to table their fight for women’s su√rage until the civil rights of the black
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man could be secured. Women physicians, too, were being given the message that their battles had to be subordinate to those aimed at establishing a respectable and powerful medical profession.
. . .
Zakrzewska was lucky, however, and in the fall of 1854, two years before Cleveland closed its doors to women, she began her training in regular medicine.
Such training, whether at Cleveland or at any of the other mid-nineteenth-century American medical schools, was, as we have already mentioned, sorely lacking. Until the postbellum period, admission requirements at most medical schools in the United States, at least if one was white and male, often amounted to little more than the ability to pay tuition fees. The standard course of instruction typically involved two four-month terms, with the second session often being no more than a repeat of the classes one had attended the previous year.∏≠
With the exception of exercises in dissection, there was next to no laboratory instruction, and even dissection was not taught at every school. In addition, clinical instruction could be quite erratic. While some schools o√ered weekly clinics, it is not at all clear whether the students actually examined patients or whether the instructor merely lectured to the students from the bedside. Indeed, as late as 1878, one medical student complained that ‘‘at the clinics the patient is simply exhibited to the students.’’∏∞ In general, most schools expected their students to acquire clinical experience on their own, often by working under their preceptors’ tutelage during the summer months or by attending private courses or studying abroad. Still, as Kenneth Ludmerer has pointed out, students could graduate ‘‘without having attended a delivery, without having witnessed an operation, and often without having examined a patient.’’∏≤
Cleveland’s course of instruction followed this general pattern, although the apparent regularity with which it held dissection classes, its insistence that every student write a medical thesis, and the weekly clinical courses it held may have made it one of the better schools. Even though Zakrzewska later claimed that the subjects were ‘‘well known’’ to her, she felt as though she had benefited from the time she spent there.∏≥ Her only complaint was that clinical experience there, as elsewhere, depended upon the willingness of the instructors to take their students along when they attended the sick, and for female students that spelled disaster. ‘‘[E]ven our kind and beloved Dr. Delamater,’’ she explained,
‘‘could not often venture upon such an innovation as to take a female student with him, even when visiting the poorest patients.’’∏∂
During the first few weeks of the term, Zakrzewska lived with the Sever-
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ances and was the only female student in the school. But in November both of these situations changed. Another woman, Sarah Ann Chadwick, joined her at Cleveland Medical College, and the Severances, who had decided to move
to Boston at the end of the year, helped the two students find di√erent lodgings.
This turned out to be more di≈cult than expected, for not everyone was willing to take in female medical students, but Caroline Severance eventually found a boardinghouse for both Zakrzewska and Chadwick, and the two women roomed together for the rest of the term.∏∑
Once the regular term began, Zakrzewska spent six hours every day listening to lectures in anatomy and physiology, materia medica and botany, chemistry, surgery, the theory and practice of physic, and the diseases of women and children. She then went back to her room and studied another six hours before returning to the college in the evening to practice dissection. By the second week of the semester she had so impressed her teachers that they proposed to let her graduate at the end of the term provided she passed examinations in surgery and chemistry and wrote a thesis in English.∏∏ Their confidence in her speaks to the strength and sophistication of the knowledge she had acquired while in Berlin. Not only had she worked as an apprentice to her mother, but she had also received ten months of instruction at the Charité in medical topics related to midwifery; she had tutored younger students during her second year of instruction; she had delivered at least one hundred babies; and she had been the chief midwife of Berlin’s major city hospital for a six-month period. Few American medical students at the time brought such knowledge and skills with them to their studies.
That Zakrzewska did not graduate at the end of her first term rested most likely with her inability to master the English language quickly enough. Indeed, she claimed that during the fall when she lived in the boardinghouse, her language skills were so poor that she ‘‘never conversed with any one . . . , nor even asked for any thing at the table; but was supplied like a mute.’’∏π Preparing for examinations was not much better: at first she had to surround herself with four dictionaries when she studied, trying to figure out the English equivalents of the medical terms she had learned in German. Knowing she would need to return for a second year of study, Zakrzewska decided to spend the summer months in Cleveland. This was when she moved in with the Mayos, and, as we have seen, she found this experience to be extremely rewarding.
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