Women's Struggles to Practice Medicine in Antebellum America

Women’s Struggles to Practice Medicine in Antebellum America: The Troubled Career of Boston Physician Harriot Kezia Hunt myra c. glenn N 1847 and again in 1850, Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805–1875) I unsuccessfully sought to attend lectures at Harvard’s medical school. Now little remembered, Hunt was a notable figure in antebellum America. She was a committed feminist who sought to empower women in various ways.1 She became the first woman in Massachusetts to publicly protest the injustice of taxing propertied women while denying them the right to vote. Her annual petitions declaring “no taxation without rep- resentation” were widely reprinted in newspapers throughout the Northeast and Midwest.2 Hunt also played a prominent I thank Patricia Cline Cohen, Lisa Francavilla, Beth Salerno, and Tamara Thornton for their helpful comments on my work. I also thank the anonymous reader for comments on this essay. Harvard University Archives (hereafter HUA) kindly granted per- mission to quote from their sources. Numerous archivists and librarians have helped me with my research, especially when they sent me various documents from their repos- itories. Particular thanks to Robin Carlaw at HUA and Jack Eckert at the Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine (hereafter Countway Library). Papers I delivered at the annual conventions of the American Historical As- sociation (2016) and the New England Historical Association (2015) helped clarify my thinking about topics discussed in this essay. Thanks also to the library staff at Elmira College and the State University of New York at Buffalo. 1Hunt’s autobiography, Glances and Glimpses; Or Fifty Years Social, Including Twenty Years Professional Life (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856), details her various endeavors and remains the most important source of information for her. Quotations from this text will note the pages parenthetically. 2Harriet H. Robinson, Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: A Gen- eral, Political, Legal and Legislative History from 1774 to 1881 (1881; repr., London: The New England Quarterly,vol.XC,no.2 (June 2017). C 2017 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00604. 223 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00604 by guest on 01 October 2021 224 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY role in the annual woman’s rights conventions of the 1850s, championing health reform, female doctors, higher education for women, and their enfranchisement.3 Hunt was also the first woman to establish a successful medical practice in the United States.4 Although denied the oppor- tunity to earn a medical degree, she began treating patients, women and children, in Boston in 1835. By the time Elizabeth Blackwell, the first licensed female doctor in the United States, earned her degree from Geneva Medical College in 1849, Hunt already had a flourishing medical practice, where she pioneered an early form of psychotherapy.5 Hunt’s accomplishments both as a female doctor and woman’s rights advocate earned her accolades from leading nineteenth-century feminists. When the first volume of the now classic work History of Woman Suffrage appeared in 1881, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other authors honored Hunt by including her in the list of women activists to whom they dedicated their book. Hunt’s name appeared with those of Mary Wollstonecraft, Lucretia Mott, Margaret Fuller, and other founding mothers of modern feminism.6 This essay will focus on Hunt’s innovative medical career and her repeated but failed efforts to study at Harvard’s Med- ical School to explore first, the fractious and gendered na- ture of medicine in antebellum America by discussing how Forgotten Books, 2012), 22; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, 3 vols. (1881; repr., New York: Arno & The New York Times, 1969), 1:259-60, reprints Hunt’s first protest in 1852. 3See, for example, Speech of Harriot K. Hunt to the 1851 Women’s Rights Con- vention, Assembled in Worcester, MA in The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Con- vention, Held at Worcester, October 15th and 16th, 1851 . (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1852), 59-62; Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000: Scholar’s Edition, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, accessed January 29, 2017, http://asp6new.alexanderstreet.com. 4Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), xiv, 1. Walsh offers the most detailed and scholarly treatment of Hunt’s medical practice to date. See esp. 20-34. 5Susan Wells, Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 28-30. 6Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, 1: dedication page. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00604 by guest on 01 October 2021 HARRIOT KEIZA HUNT 225 the development of alternative health therapies in the early republic challenged the efforts of licensed physicians to pro- fessionalize medicine and render it masculine. Second, the essay investigates how concerns about professionalism, gender roles, and student retention thwarted Hunt’s efforts to study at Harvard. Third, it explores how fears about interracial mixing also shaped Harvard’s response to Hunt’s request—her second petition in 1850 occurred at the same time as three African- American male students sought admission to the medical lectures. Fourth, this essay discusses how the American public’s growing acceptance of women doctors in the 1850s pressured the male medical establishment, especially in Boston, to recog- nize grudgingly female physicians, including Hunt. The article ends by surveying how Hunt helped the next generation of women doctors, those who had the benefit of formal study and professional accreditation. Examination of the above issues illuminates how seemingly disparate issues—the professional- ization of medicine, the emergence of alternative health therapies, concerns about gender and racial hierarchies, and the struggle for woman’s rights—intersected in antebellum Amer- ica to shape the careers of female physicians. Hunt’s medical practice was part of a populist revolt that contested the authority of the male medical profession. She belonged to a vibrant and eclectic alternative health care movement that trumpeted women’s traditional roles as healers. Dis- cussion of these developments provides a necessary context for understanding how Hunt created a pioneering medical career in antebellum Boston and why she felt empowered to challenge Harvard Medical School’s exclusion of female students. American medicine was a diverse, contentious, and gendered activity in the early republic. This was especially evident in large urban areas like Boston where different kinds of medical practitioners competed for patients and often criticized each other. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century medical schools, many of them fledgling institutions, tried Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00604 by guest on 01 October 2021 226 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to establish a monopoly over the practice of medicine. They sought to discredit traditional healers, including herbalists and other practitioners of folkloric remedies. They also successfully pressured state legislatures to restrict the practice of medicine only to licensed doctors and to penalize those without proper medical credentials. In 1806, for example, the Massachusetts State Legislature prohibited doctors from consulting with “un- licensed practitioners” and in 1827 the New York State Legis- lature declared that no person could receive a medical degree unless he gave proof that he had studied for three years under a “regular physician.”7 Committed to establishing their professional status, doctors in the early republic continued to prescribe therapies popu- larized in the late eighteenth century—bloodletting, blistering, purging, and harsh, often addictive medicines such as mer- cury, calomel, arsenic, and opium. Although growing numbers of physicians in Boston and other cities began to decrease their use of these “heroic therapies,” they were still widely employed. Fortunately countless Americans rebelled against such prac- tices and the physicians who relied on them. A growing cho- rus of people argued that many doctors used dangerous and overly harsh medicines that made patients sicker or even killed them.8 The 1830sand1840s were the heyday of popular alternative therapies. Various patent medicines and do-it-yourself manuals promising to cure ills without consulting doctors became widespread. Gunn’s Domestic Medicine: The Poor Man’s 7 William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), esp. 30-78; Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Insti- tutions, 1780-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), esp. 181-83. 8 Catherine L. Thompson, Patient Expectations: How Economics, Religion, and Mal- practice Shaped Therapeutics in Early America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), esp. 1-48; John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (1986; repr., Princeton:

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