What’s the story?
In the 19th century, medical students would attend classes called clinical lectures to learn how to treat sick people. At a clinical lecture, a doctor and patient would appear onstage in an auditorium, and the doctor would show the student audience the patient’s illness or injury, and demonstrate how to heal or fix it. The doctors would present patients with a range of illnesses from broken legs to pneumonia and everything in between.Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) was started in 1850 because most medical schools around the country would not accept female students. WMCP was the only medical school for women in Philadelphia, and for many years one of the only medical schools for women in the nation. Almost 20 years later, in 1869, the number of female medical students and female doctors was still very small compared to the number of male medical students and doctors. On November 6, 1869, a group of about 20-30 female students from WMCP went to the Pennsylvania Hospital amphitheater to attend a clinical lecture also attended by several hundred male medical students. Their attendance drew a strong response from the male students, including jeering, and created a controversial debate about women’s presence in the clinical lectures. The incident and ensuing debate were widely covered in regional newspapers. This event came to be known among students, faculty, and alumnae of WMCP as the “The Jeering Episode.”
Sarah Hibbard, an 1870 graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP), was one of the women medical students who attended a clinical lecture at Pennsylvania Hospital in November 1869 and was met with harassment and “jeering” by the hundreds of male medical students also in attendance. She writes about how the incident, and the public response to it, had a lasting, and perhaps unintended effect – it made the women even more determined to pursue their studies, and caused the public to be sympathetic and supportive of the women’s right to do so.
Transcription
[page 1]Without going into the details of the past more than to gather up some facts upon the subject from the memorable years of 1869 and 70, I will say that the conduct of the male medical students of which so much has been said through the press, and their most unmanly deportment during the clinics of those winters, needs no comment further than to say that their “loss was our gain.” For certainly they did lose, and certainly we did gain, as the facts will show. But as to the manner of their abuse, I will not give the particulars, for the same reason that a San Francisco editor declined to publish the particulars of three murders, as “there was nothing original about the modes of death.” But if these poor fellows had sought to do us a life-long favor, they could not have done
[pages 2 and 3]
it more effectively than they did in their conduct towards us during those sessions. I say us, because I too, with others, have the pleasure of knowing that for two winters I sat an earnest listener to those clinic lectures: one in the old amphitheater at Blockley Alms House, and the other at the amphitheater of Pennsylvania Hospital, amid the groans and hisses of as ungentlemanly a set of fellows as one would care to meet, after paying just as much for our tickets of admission as they. And yet we bore all this for what? Simply that we might be the better fitted to minister at the bedside of our mothers, sisters, and friends throughout the land.
More details
theme: Unfinished Revolutionssubjects: Diaries; Sex discrimination in medical education; Women medical students; Blockley Almshouse; Pennsylvania Hospital (Philadelphia, Pa); Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania
contributing repository: Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center
submitted by: Chrissie Perella
Link to repository homepage