March is Women’s History Month, a good time to recall that though Elizabeth Blackwell – the first woman physician of modern times – obtained her medical degree in 1849, American medicine remained an overwhelmingly male preserve well into the 20th century. While most U.S. medical schools were co-educational by the 1920s, social expectations and professional resistance retarded the entry of women into medicine and slowed their advancement once they began practicing.
All the more remarkable, then, that so many women physicians active in the first half-century of what was then called the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center attained such distinction. While they were predominantly in fields seen as more “fitting” for women – pathology, pediatrics and psychiatry among them – and were more often researchers than clinicians, these women thoroughly rebuked the notion that the female sex was incapable of distinguished achievement in medicine.
