From the Laboratory to the Streets
Anatomy class with Dr. Florence Sabin, Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, circa 1905. (Chesney Archives)
Female physicians and scientists wanted to be judged not by their gender, but by their contributions to medicine.
However, it became clear that no amount of professional achievement could overcome gender-based barriers, and this motivated many at Hopkins, from the prominent anatomist Dr. Florence Sabin to first-year medical students, to join suffrage actions.
They engaged in moderate tactics such as canvassing and marching in parades, but Dr. Lilian Welsh described more radical civil disobedience as “useless and much of it foolish.”
Florence Rena Sabin with microscope, 1929 (Chesney archives)
Dr. Florence Sabin was a protégé of anatomist Franklin Mall, who supported her student work on the first three-dimensional model of the newborn brainstem. Female physicians were strongly discouraged from pursuing research careers, and her fellowship at Hopkins was funded by local feminist activists who also encouraged her to engage with the suffrage movement. “There are no reasons against woman suffrage, only feelings," Sabin remarked in a speech before the Johns Hopkins nurses alumnae association in 1908.
In 1917, after fifteen years as an assistant professor, Sabin became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Hopkins. However, she was passed over for the chair of the anatomy department in favor of her male student. She later left Hopkins for a research position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. The next woman appointed as a full professor at Hopkins was Helen Taussig in 1959.
Drs. Mary Sherwood and Lilian Welsh in the laboratory of the University of Zurich, 1890 (Public domain)
Suffragist at work on election day at the corner of Maryland and Lafayette avenues, Baltimore Sun, November 11, 1911 (Baltimore Sun)
Baltimore physician Mary Sherwood and Lilian Welsh met while studying medicine in Zurich, and became lifelong partners. Sherwood worked in the pathology laboratory of Dr. William Welch at Johns Hopkins, and attended Susan B. Anthony when she fell ill during her 1906 visit. Due to bias against woman doctors, Sherwood and Welsh's private practice in Baltimore was unsuccessful, and instead they ran a free clinic. Welsh taught at Goucher College, while Sherwood established Baltimore’s Bureau of Child Welfare and promoted tuberculosis prevention.
Drs. Sherwood, Welsh, and Sabin, nurse Ellen LaMotte, and other members of the Just Government League did early morning rounds at Baltimore’s polling places on election day in 1911, encouraging male voters to support pro-suffrage candidates. Newspaper coverage of these efforts included commentary about the women’s beauty and their “trying ordeal” in staying awake for the late-night ballot count. Objectification and infantilization were common strategies for discrediting suffragists’ demands.
Ethel Collins Dunham and Martha May Eliot during medical school in 1915 (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)
Martha May Eliot with patient, 1945 (Chesney Medical Archives)
Madge Thurlow Macklin surrounded by colleagues in a 1937 Smithsonian photograph of the “Most Famous Cancer Researchers in the World” (Wikimedia Commons)
Student participation
Many female medical students had attended women’s colleges, and become involved in suffrage there. The demands of medical school made it difficult to remain politically active. In a male-dominated culture, speaking out may have seemed like a risk. However, at least twenty-three have left a record of public work for the suffrage cause. It’s likely that more women and men who graduated from Hopkins before 1919 participated in some way.
Among them were Ethel Collins Dunham and Martha May Eliot, who met at Bryn Mawr College in 1910. With the guidance of Bryn Mawr president M. Carey Thomas, they entered the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1914, where they continued to canvas and march with local suffrage groups.
Eliot and Dunham became giants in the fields of pediatrics and public health. Eliot did important research on preventing rickets in impoverished communities. In 1924, she took a post at the National Children’s Bureau and engineered the child and maternal health policies built into the Social Security Act of 1935.
Madge Thurlow was an avid suffrage speaker during her undergraduate years at Goucher College. This involvement dwindled when she entered the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1914. Her interest in social reform instead led her to the study of heredity and eugenics. She would become known as the “founding mother” of medical genetics, while also promoting egregious eugenic policies such as forced sterilization of the “unfit”. Her trajectory is an extreme example of the medical paternalism and hereditarian thinking that was present in many Progressive circles.