Female Physicians in Alabama Before World War I

HIDDEN LEGACY: EARLY FEMALE PHYSICIANS IN ALABAMA

A.J. Wright, M.L.S.
Clinical Librarian
Department of Anesthesiology Library
School of Medicine
University of Alabama at Birmingham
619 19th Street South, JT965
Birmingham AL 35249-6810

205-975-0158
205-975-5963 [fax]

ajwright@uab.edu

[last update: 29 February 2008]

NOTES:

SCOPE: In general, I am working on physicians who began practice in Alabama before 1920. I am adding physicians who began practice after that date as I run across them. I will also be adding early dentists and nurses in the state.

Some of this material formed the basis of a presentation, "Hidden Legacy: Black Physicians in Alabama before World War I," at the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science Second Annual Meeting, Birmingham, Alabama, February 18-19, 2000

Some of this material formed the basis of a presentation, "Female Physicians in Alabama before World War I," at the Alaama Women's History Forum, Birmingham, Alabama, March 10-11, 2000

Some of this material formed the basis of a presentation, "Hidden Legacy: Early Female and African-American Doctors in Alabama" at the 54th annual meeting of the Alabama Historical Association, Huntsville, Alabama, April 19-21, 2001

Some of this material formed the basis of a presentation, "Early Female Physicians in Alabama" to the UAB history class HY423, "Southern Women and Reality," October 29, 2001

Some of this material formed the basis of a presentation, "Early Black and Early Female Physicians in Alabama," at the 66th annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, August 19-25, 2002. My comments to this panel on the background of the project are here.

Some of this material formed the basis of a presentation to a group of University of Alabama School Of Medicine female internal medicine residents on January 9, 2003.

Some of this material formed the basis of "Early African-American Physicians in Alabama's Black Belt" presented April 22, 2005, at the Black Belt Symposium held at the University of West Alabama in Livingston.

Some of this material formed the basis of "Early African-American Physicians in Alabama's Black Belt" presented October 20, 2007, at the monthly meeting of the Black Belt African-American Genealogical and Historical Association held at the Selma-Dallas County Public Library.

See also:

*Hasbrouck, Stephanie. "Wright uncovers state's overlooked physcians. UAB Reporter 2002 August 19-25; 26(43):1, 4

*Monitor, Leigh Anne. Pioneering physicians: Black women were some of Alabama's early doctors. Birmngham Post-Herald November 13, 2002, B1, B3

*Wright AJ. Dr. Arthur McKinnon Brown. In: Jefferson County Heritage Book Committe. Heritage of Jefferson County, Alabama. Clanton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing, 2002, p. 190-191

*Wright AJ. Early female physicians in Jefferson County. In: Jefferson County Heritage Book Committe. Heritage of Jefferson County, Alabama. Clanton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing, 2002, p. 190

Laura Burton, M.D. [1876-1906]

Black Physicians in Alabama Before World War I

Alabama Medical History

American Medical Directory physician listings for Alabama:
1912, 1916 , 1918, 1921 , 1923 and 1931 [PDF files]

[Alphabetical listing of medical colleges and key table: 1912 ed./PDF file]

Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama
These volumes are available as PDF files: 1889 1900 1906 1913 1918

References and links on the general topic of women in medicine can be found at the bottom of this web page.

[abstract of presentation in Birmingham, March 2000]

Louisa Shepard of Dadeville, Alabama, was the first southern woman to be awarded a medical degree from a southern institution. She graduated from the Graefenberg Medical Institute operated in Dadeville by her father, Dr. Philip Madison Shepard, from 1852 until 1861. The school was chartered by the Alabama legislature. The female Dr. Shepard apparently received much resistance to her medical practice, and soon moved to Texas to marry and raise a family. (1-2)

Two black female physicians worked for relatively brief periods at Tuskegee Institute. Halle Tanner Dillon, born in Pittsburgh in 1864, came to Tuskegee in 1891, the year she graduated from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and received Alabama state board certification. Until she left Alabama later in the decade, Dr. Dillon provided care to the Institute's 450 students and the 30 officers, teachers and their families. Ionia R. Whipper, a 1903 graduate of Howard Medical School, came to Tuskegee that same year and spent a few years as physician to female students only. (3)

Other women known to have practiced in Alabama before about 1915 include Ella Elizabeth Barnes, an 1893 graduate of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, who received her certification that year from the Jefferson County Board of Medical Examiners and appeared on the county medical society membership roll for 1893-94. Dicia Houston Baker, who graduated from Cincinnati's Louvra Memorial Women's College in 1889, received certification from the same board in 1899 and appeared on the county medical society rolls from 1901 until 1905. That these two female physicians were members of the local medical society during these decades seems an unusual situation worth further investigation.

According to the Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama in the late 1890s and early 1900s, several other women were certified to practice in the state: Irene Ballon Bullard (Birmingham), Laura Evelyn Burton (Mobile), Justina Lorena Ford (Madison County), Orcema Simenia Fowler (Marion County), Ellen Lee Baret Ligon (Mobile), Alexandria Hamilton Oden (Cullman County), Edith Mindwell Phelps, and Blanche Beatrice Thompson (Tallapoosa County). A few other women are listed as being refused certification by either the state or county boards. (4) Seven other women physicians (including one member of the American Medical Association!) appear in a directory of U.S. women physicians published in 1910. (5)

In recent years some research has been published that examines female physicians in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (6-14 ) This paper will identify and examine the female physicians practicing in Alabama during this period and attempt to place them in larger regional and national contexts.

1. Bass E. Pioneer women doctors in the South. J Am Med Women's Assoc 2:556-560, 1947

2. Turner RH. Graefenberg, the Shepard family's medical school. Ann Med Hist series 2. 5:548-560-, 1933

3. Hine DC. Co-laborers in the work of the Lord: nineteenth-century black women physicians. In: Abram RJ, ed. Send Us a Lady Physician: Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920. New York: Norton, 1985, 114

4. Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, 1894, 1899, 1901-1905

5. Directory of women physicians in California, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Georgia, Arkansas and Colorado. Women's Med J 20(6):132-136, June 1910

6. Drachman VG. Women doctor's and the women's medical movement: feminism and medicine, 1850-1895. Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1976

7. Drachman VG. Female solidarity and professional success: the dilemma of women doctors in late nineteenth-century America. J Soc Hist 15(4):607-619, 1982

8. Drachman VG. The limits of progress: the professional lives of women doctors, 1881-1926. Bull Hist Med 60:58-72, 1986

9. More E. The Blackwell Medical Society and the professional of women physicians. Bull Hist Med 61:603-628, 1987

10. Draeger IJ. Women as physicians in the United States, 1850-1900. Bull Hist Med 16:72-81, 1944

11. Erickson SS. The image of the woman physician in ten Victorian American novels, 1871-1886. M.D. thesis, Yale University, 1991

12. Kaufman M. The admission of women to 19th-century medical societies. Bull Hist Med 50:251-260, 1976

13. Shifrin S. "The worst are women doctors": nineteenth-century attitudes toward the appearance and professionalism of women physicians. Trans Stud Coll Physicians Phila 16(5):47-65, 1994

14. Elder NC, Schwarzer A. Fictional women physicians in the nineteenth century: the struggle for self-identity. J Med Human 17(3):165-177, 1996

Hidden Legacy: Early Female Physicians in Alabama

A.J. Wright, M.L.S.
Clinical Librarian
Department of Anesthesiology
School of Medicine
University of Alabama at Birmingham

*Louisa Shephard, M.D.

    In 1836 Dr. Philip Madison Shephard, a Georgia native and graduate of the Georgia Medical College in Augusta, moved his wife and infant son John to Lafayette, Alabama. Over the next eight years Dr. Shephard established a medical practice and founded a "Students Institute" that helped prepare young men for medical school. In 1845 he and his family moved to Wetumpka, where he also lectured, organized medical debates, and performed anatomical dissection on cadavers. Late the following year the Shepards moved yet again and settled in Dadeville, a newly-incorporated town of about 700 in Tallapoosa County. Here Dr. Shephard bought some land, built a house and began to established a medical practice in his new home. Like many rural physicians of his time, Shephard also farmed to supplement his medical income. [Turner Roy H. Graefenberg, the Shepard family's medical school. Ann Med Hist series 2. 5:548-560-, 1933; a PDF version of this article is here; and Holley, Howard L. The History of Medicine in Alabama. Birmingham: University of Alabama School of Medicine, 1982, pp 77-81]

    By the summer of 1851 Dr. Shephard began his most ambitious efforts in medical education. He advertised the opening in Dadeville of the "Graefenberg Infirmary and Hydropathic Establishment" in a Montgomery newspaper. In February of the following year the Alabama legistature chartered his "Graefenberg Medical Institute of the State of Alabama, " whose graduates "were entitled to all the privileges accorded graduates of leading Medical Colleges." [Acts of Alabama, 7 February 1852, p260] Although other schools had been chartered by the legislature, the Graefenberg Medical Institute became the first medical school to actually open in Alabama. The board of trustees included several relatives of Shephard and his wife. Also connected to this enterprise was the Winston Male College, which had a military department with state-supplied arms; and the Octavia Walton Lee Vert Normal College for Young Ladies that trained school teachers.

    In the early national and antebellum periods, medical education became more widely available in America. In the first three and a half decades after the founding of the country's first medical school, Medical College of Philadelphia, in 1765, the few small medical schools graduated less that 250 doctors. By the 1850s almost 18,000 physicians graduated in that decade alone; the 1830s had produced some 6800 doctors. [Cassedy, James H. Medicine in America: A Short History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, p 27] These huge numbers were not simply a function of growing population. After about 1815 new medical schools were often independent of colleges and medical societies. Faculty operated the schools for profit, and almost anyone who paid the fees could graduate. Critics of the day accused the schools of "business hucksterism" little connected with scientific education. Facilities of most schools were quite poor, and students were trained by lectures with little or no clinical exposure to sick people. Despite the explosion in number of these schools after 1830, only seven medical schools opened in the South before that year. Yet this constituted over half the thirteen founded in the entire U.S. prior to 1830. [Yeager, George H. Medical schools of Southern United States, 1779-1830. Ann Surg 171(5):623-640, May 1970] Of course, many "doctors" of this period did not attend medical school at all, but merely served a brief apprenticeship with a local physician.

    Given this situation, Dr. Shephard's Graefenberg Medical Institute was a remarkable medical school both for the time and its location in a small town in a very rural state. The medical and other schools occupied a large, three-story building that contained numerous anatomical specimens, a decent library, around 1,000 photographic plates, laboratory and medical equipment, a mineral cabinet, and classrooms and auditorium. Students saw patients in the infirmary or followed Dr. Shephard as he visited the sick in their homes. Students boarded with Dr. Shephard and his family. Two sessions were offered May to October and November to March at the rate of sixty dollars; cheaper rates were available for summer students. Only one session was required to graduate; however, the student had to pass a final examination open to the public that the Board of Trustees administered over three days and nights and which   included over 5,000 questions.

   About fifty students graduated from this school before Dr. Shepard's death closed it in 1861. Near the end of the century several of these graduates were still practicing medicine in Alabama: John F. Wise (1856) in Chilton County; S.H. Dennis (1858) in Pike County; Anderson Welcome Duke (1849 [sic]) and Erastus Hood McLendon in Randolph County; and Orlando Tyler Shepard (1854), Watt Francis Smith (1854), and Philip M. Shepard (1854) in Tallapoosa County.   [Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama (abbreviated Trans MASA hereafter) 1898, pp. 162, 213, 214, 221] John Calhoun Aikens (1846 [sic]) was listed as practicing in Macon County as late as 1904. [Trans MASA 1904, p. 546] In all likelihood the school would have closed during the Civil War anyway. In 1873 the building burned and destroyed the library, equipment, specimens and records. Yet among the school's graduates were three sons--John, Philip Madison, Jr., and Orlando Tyler--who joined their father on the school's faculty, and a daughter, Louisa, who was "[t]he first Southern woman to receive a degree as Doctor of Medicine from a southern school." [Bass, Elizabeth H. Pioneer women doctors in the South. J Am Med Women's Assoc 2(12): 556-560, December 1947] The female Dr. Shephard was prevented from joining her father and brothers on the faculty by opposition of the day to both female doctors and professors. Apparently Louisa could not establish a practice in the area, either; she soon married and left for Texas with her husband. Her fate there is currently unknown.

    Dr. Louisa Shephard was not the first female physician in the South. Mary Lavinder specialized in obstetrics and diseases of children in Savannah, Georgia, from about 1814 until her death in 1845. Sarah E. Adams practiced in Augusta, Georgia, for some years prior to her death in 1846. Elizabeth Cohen, an 1857 graduate of the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, began practice in New Orleans about the same time that Louisa was studying medicine in Dadeville, Alabama. [Bass, Elizabeth H. Pioneer women doctors in the South. J Am Med Women's Assoc 2(12): 556-560, December 1947] Yet female physicians remained a rarity all over the United States until late in the 19th century.

Photo courtesy of the Lake Martin Journal

Medical school's founder and family are buried in unmarked grave near school's site off Dudleyville Road (Lafayette Street). Photo courtesy of the Lake Martin Journal Some information about this cemetery can be
found here.

*Elizabeth Blackwell,M.D. [1821-1910]

    Only a few years earlier Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from a medical school in the United States. Blackwell was born in February, 1821, in a small town near the English seaport of Bristol. Here father Samuel owned a sugar refinery, and supported political and school reform as well as equal rights for women. When his refinery burned, he decided to leave the unrest and deteriorating economy in England behind. In the summer of 1832, Samuel, his wife Hannah and their children boarded a packet ship to America. By the time she was seventeen, the family had settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. Samuel soon died; and Hannah decided to remain and opened a school at which Elizabeth and two older sisters taught. The school operated for three years. Elizabeth then taught for a year in Henderson, Kentucky, but conditions of slavery there so upset her that she returned home. A friend, Mary Donaldson, was dying with cancer, and told Elizabeth she might have suffered less under the care of a woman doctor. She told Elizabeth to study medicine.

    Elizabeth Blackwell thus began her long struggle to obtain a medical education. Because family finances were tight, she moved to Ashville, North Carolina, in June 1845 to teach music at a school operated by Reverend John Dickson, who had once practiced medicine and had a sizeable medical library. Dickson closed his school the following year, and recommended her to Dr. Samuel H. Dickson of Charleston, South Carolina, who agreed to aid her studies while she taught and saved money for medical school tuition. By 1848 Elizabeth had begun sending applications; twenty-eight schools refused to admit her. She finally applied to Geneva Medical College in New York. The faculty did not want to offend Dr. Joseph Warrington, the prominent Philadelphia physician who wrote Blackwell's letters of support. So they decided to put the issue to a vote of the 150 students, who would surely reject a woman applicant. The students sensed a joke, and voted to accept Blackwell.

    Thus the first woman student was admitted to medical school in the U.S. She managed to endure the shocked sensibilities and insults of the school faculty and students as well as townspeople to graduate at the head of her class in January, 1849. Yet one of her diary entries from the previous month had noted, "I felt alone. I must work by myself all life long." [Blackwell, Elizabeth. Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women: Autobiographical Sketches by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. New York: Schocken, 1977, p. 72 Rpt. 1895 ed.] Blackwell spent two years in Paris and London gaining clinical experience, and then returned to New York to set up a practice. She never married, and retired from medicine in 1894; she died and was buried in the Scottish village of Kilman in 1910. [Gearin, Louis Murphy. The giant little woman: Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman US medical graduate. Journal of Medical Biography 6:89-96, 1998; Abram, Ruth J. Will There Be a Monument? Six Pioneer Women Doctors Tell Their Own Stories. In: Ruth J. Abram, ed. "Send Us a Lady Physician:" Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, pp 72-76] Emily Blackwell had followed her older sister into medicine, and graduated from Chicago's Rush Medical College in 1854. After two years in Europe, Emily joined her sister in New York City. Emily also died in 1910; by that time, there were more than 7,000 female doctors in the U.S.

    The Blackwell sisters, Louisa Shephard, and the few other antebellum women "orthodox" physicians in American achieved some support from individuals and institutions, but their efforts and presence in the medical profession were resisted and criticized. Before the Civil War a number of sectarian or irregular medical sects--such as the Thomsonians and Eclectics--were training women doctors, but these were not accepted by orthodox practitioners and societies. Women physicians at this time challenged the role of females in society, where outside the home or field women were restricted to teaching young children or factory work. Such doctors challenged orthodox medicine, both as females trying to enter a male profession and as a practitioner of an irregular medicine not to be adopted. Finally, the women's rights movement of the 1840s and 1850s formed the demands for even wider participation by women in the affairs of society. [Blake, John B. Women and medicine in ante-bellum America. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 39(2):99-123, March-April 1965] Both regular and sectarian female doctors formed what has been termed a "women's medical movement" that challenged orthodox medicine both in medical education and treatment of female patients. [Virginia G. Drachman, "Women Doctors and the Women's Medical Movement: Feminism and Medicine 1850-1895." Ph.D. dissertation, University of New York at Buffalo, 1976] Women were also considered to be physically and mentally unfit for medical training, and their attempts to receive it were met by the same objections as attempts by women to enter other areas of American life outside the home. [Susan Shifrin, "The worst are women-doctors": nineteenth century attitudes toward the appearance and professionalism of women physicians. Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 16(5):47-65, 1994]

   Yet not all reactions from regular male doctors during this period were negative, and during "the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even the more conservative men physicians appear to have recognized the futility of attempts to bar women altogether from the profession." [Shifrin, p58] One prominent Philadelphia physician, Alfred Stille, seemed enthusiastic. He began his lecture to medical students gathered in the surgical ampitheater of Philadelphia hospital on January 2, 1869, with the historic greeting, "Ladies and Gentlemen" and further noted "...so far as I am personally concerned, I not only have no objection to seeing ladies among a medical audience, but, on the other hand, I welcome them." [Clara Marshall, The Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. An Historical Outline. Philadelphia: P. Bkakiston, 1897, p17] In the 1840s Stille had been one of the founders of the American Medical Association, and served as its President in 1871. He had a private practice in Philadelphia for many years and was a professor at the Pennsylvania Medical College from 1864 until 1883. [R. Edwards, Stille, Alfred. In Martin Kaufman, Stuart Galishoff, Todd L. Savitt, eds., Dictionary of American Medical Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984, 2:720-721] Final acceptance of women among the ranks of regular physicians, however reluctant it might be for many physicians, required the approval of such leaders as Stille.

*Women healers throughout history

In earlier centuries women had much wider roles in medicine in many cultures. Evidence from ancient Egypt and Thebes suggests that women were admitted to medical schools and performed surgery. [Pastena, Janis A. Women in Surgery: An Ancient Tradition. Archives of Surgery 128(6):622-626, June 1993] Throughout Europe during the middle ages women were excluded from the university training which male physicians received, yet served important nursing roles in hospitals and served as midwives. Although physicians were almost exclusively male, women did receive apprentice training as apothecaries and surgeons and achieved membership in the guilds for those trades. [Minkowski, William L. Women Healers of the Middle Ages: Selected Aspects of Their History. American Journal of Public Health 82(2):288-295, February 1992] Around 1408 a woman named Johanna appears on the Infirmarer's Rolls of Westminster Abbey; she was paid 40 shillings to provide medical care for 10 monks for one year. [Gordon, J. Elise. Some Women Practitioners of Past Centuries. Practitioner 208:561-567, April 1972] A number of female "surgeonesses" are known to have practiced in England and on the continent from the 15th century until well into the 18th, despite efforts by male counterparts to exclude them from practice. Some even obtained licenses. [Wyman, A.L. The Surgeoness: The Female Practitioner of Surgery 1400-1800. Medical History 28: 22-41, 1984]

*Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania opens in 1850

Within fifteen years after Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from medical school in 1848, several other milestones in the history of women physicians in America had occurred. On March 11, 1850, the Pennsylvania legislature passed an act to incorporate the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania---the first regular medical school for women in America. The Philadelphia institution was founded by four physicians and four philanthropists, several of whom were Quakers. By August of that year the men had rented space at 229 Arch Street and were seeking local physicians to join the faculty. Most established doctors of the city would not associate with this radical new enterprise; and of those physicians who did "most were young and inexperienced as medical teachers." [Steven J. Peitzman, A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, p14). On October 12 forty students were greeted by six faculty. In December of the following year eight women formed the first graduating class.

Within three years Hannah Longshore and Ann Preston, members of that first class, had joined the faculty. In 1867 the school became the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and managed to survive the changes in medical education in the early 20th century that forced many marginal schools, including numerous ones for women and African-Americans, to close. In 1970 the school became the coeducational Medical College of Pennsylvania. This school provided Alabama with several early female physicians.

Other Achievements After 1850

Other important events related to women physicians soon followed the establishment of the Female Medical Institute. On May 1, 1857, Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children---the first hospital in the United States operated by women. In 1861 Quaker women founded the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia to provide the Female Medical Institute with better clinical opportunities. Rebecca Lee became the first African-American female physician to graduate from a medical school when she finished studies at the New England Female Medical College in Boston in 1864. By 1900 about a dozen black women had graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and more than 100 had finished at U.S. medical schools. [Darlene Clark Hine, "Co-laborers in the work of the Lord: nineteenth-century black women physicians." In Ruth J. Abram, ed. "Send Us a Lady Physician:" Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, p107] After the Civil War medical schools such as those at the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa began to admit women students on a scattered basis. Yet, "[b]y 1893 only 37 out of the 105 regular institutions accepted them. Many of these were part of the major state universities, most of which were founded after the Civil War and were obligated by their charters to provide coeducation." [Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p.65] Additional women's medical schools opened in large cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Boston. In 1892 the medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore opened and included women in its first class. By 1881, seventeen state medical societies accepted women. Massachusetts was the first (1869), followed by Kansas, Iowa and North Carolina in 1872.

In 1890 more than 4500 female physicians were counted in the U.S. census; a decade later the number had risen to over 7300. [U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1911. 34th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912, p235] These numbers represent just over 4 per cent and 5.6 percent respectively of the total number of U.S. physicians counted by the census for these years. These early figures have been disputed; one recent estimate counts 3400 female physicians in 1900, or 2.5 percent of the total. [Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 203, n.92]. Between the early 1920s and early 1940s women students were limited to only 5% of American medical school admissions. [Weiskotten HG. Forty-second annual presentation of educational data by the Council on Medical Education and Hospitals. JAMA 119: 1263, August 25, 1942] By 1941, only about 8000 female physicians were practicing in the U.S. In fact, the number of female physicians in the U.S. remained in the four to six percent range until the 1960s.

*Number of U.S. physicians

Year	Total	Male	Female
1890	104,805	100,248	4,557
1900	132,002	124,615	7,387

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1911. 34th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912, p235

*Alabama Medical Practice Act of 1877

The achievement of Lousia Shephard in antebellum Alabama is an important but anomalous one. Another woman did not join the ranks of regular physicians in the state until 1891. By that time the 1823 law which had governed medical practice had been replaced by the considerably stronger Alabama Medical Practice Act of 1877. [For the following discussion I am indebted to Howard Holley, The Historyof Medicine in Alabama. Birmingham, Ala.: University of Alabama School of Medicine, 1982, pp 252-261] Under the 1823 act, five medical boards were created in the state to license physicians by annual examination. The examination fee was five dollars and the license fee was the same. Examinations were apparently not very difficult. The act also had several exceptions that severely compromised its strength. Individuals practicing medicine in Alabama before 1823 were exempted from examination, as well as anyone who had practiced in another state for at least two years or graduated from a "regular" medical school. Also, the legislature passed numerous acts exempting individuals from the law. Thus the 1823 act provided minimal regulation at best of medical practice.

By the early 1870s Dr. Jerome Cochran had developed a plan to reorganize the state medical association that was approved by members. The reorganization created a Board of Censors at both the state and county medical society levels to govern those bodies. The 1877 act incorporated this structure into regulation of medical practice in Alabama. The law granted to the Medical Association of the State of Alabama the power to regulate by examination medical practice in the state. However, county society boards of censors were also allowed to examine applicants and licenses issued locally were valid throughout the state. Any applicant wishing to practice in Alabama could take the exam before the state Board of Censors in Montgomery or at any county board he or she chose. The annual volumes of the Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama provide lists of examinees at both the state and county levels and note whether the applicant passed or not. Based on the large numbers of individuals who were examined at state and county boards each year, we can assume that the tests did not differ substantially in difficulty at the two levels. Presumably, if county tests--or tests in particular counties--were significantly easier than the examination in Montgomery, few applicants would have taken the test before the state board.

*Halle Tanner Dillon, M.D. [1864-1901]

    On August 17, 1891, a young woman named Halle Tanner Dillon appeared before the state Board of Censors in Montgomery to begin her examination. In 1872 and 1880 two Alabama physicians, Paul de Lacy Baker and J.S. Weatherly, had expressed opposition to women physicians in speeches at the state medical association's annual meeting. [ J.S. Weatherly, "Woman: Her Rights and Her Wrongs." Trans MASA 1872, pp 63-80; Paul de Lacy Baker, "Shall Women be Admitted into the Medical Profession?" Trans MASA 1880, pp 191-206] Yet in April, 1889, Dr. Ruffin Coleman of Birmingham delivered the annual oration at the medical association's meeting and demonstrated a very different attitude. "Public opinion generally is against me, and our profession has ever been in an attitude of persistent hostility to the admission of woman into the higher learning and professions," Coleman noted. He observed that he understood such disagreements, and told the assembled Alabama physicians, "Rest assured, too, that it is not from any defect in my esteem of my honored profession that I deem woman worthy to enter its sacred precincts." Yet Coleman noted, "In medicine woman has made her way through the trials of ward and dissecting room to honorable distinction, and several, like Drs. Mary Putnam Jacobi and Grace Peckham have added lustre to our profession." After developing his arguments, Coleman summarized them at the end of his speech. "In justice, then, to woman's inalienable rights to freedom of choice; and in justice to her many intellectual triumphs of the past; in behalf of her own physical and mental elevation, and in behalf of the infinite good that will ensue for the entire human family from this elevation, I hold that woman should be admitted to all the higher privileges of academic and professional life." [Coleman, Ruffin. "Annual Oration." Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, 1889, pp 235, 245, 246] So by 1891 the physicians who determined access to medical licensure in Alabama were apparently ready to examine a female candidate.

    Halle Dillon was born on October 17, 1864, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, an AME minister and editor of church publications. [The following biography is based on Smith, Carney Jessie. Johnson, Halle Tanner. In: Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Facts on File Encyclopedia o Black Women in America: Science, Health and Medicine. New York: Facts on File, 1997] Halle was the eldest daughter among nine children; two died in infancy. Older brother Henry Ossawa (1859-1937) became a well-known painter of landscape and religious subjects. Halle married Charles E. Dillon of Trenton, New Jersey, in June 1886. Daughter Sadie was born the following year. Charles died soon after the birth of Sadie, and Halle and her child returned home. At age 24 Halle entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania; she was the only African-American in her class and graduated with honors on May 7, 1891.

    Booker T. Washington had written the college dean, Dr. Clara Marshall, about his need for a resident physician at Tuskegee Institute. Dr. Marshall must have brought the letter to Halle's attention, since she wrote Washington. The educator responded with a description of the position at Tuskegee. She was to begin on September 1, 1891, but she had to pass the Alabama certification exam first.

Booker T. Washington
[from the 1901 edition of Up From Slavery: An Autobiography]

    Washington knew how difficult passing the exam would be for Dr. Dillon; she would have to spend several days answering hundreds of questions from the white members of the board of examiners. So Washington arranged for her to study with Montgomery physician Cornelius Nathaniel Dorsette. Born in North Carolina in the early 1850s, Dorsette had been a classmate of Washington's at Hampton Institute and graduated from the University of Buffalo Medical School in 1882. Washington then persuaded Dr. Dorsette to come south and set up practice as the first licensed African-American physician in Montgomery and one of the first in the state. As far as I have been able to determine, only Dr. Burgess E. Scruggs of Huntsville preceded him. [Trans MASA 1880, p. 101] In 1890, Dr. Dorsette founded Hale Infirmary, the first hospital for African-Americans in Alabama which operated until 1958. Dr. Dorsette also served on the Board of Trustees of Tuskegee Institute from 1883 until his death in 1897.. [Cobb, W. Montague. Cornelius Nathaniel Dorsette, M.D., 1852-1897. Journal of the National Medical Association 52: 456-459, November 1960; Savitt, T. Dorsette, Cornelius Nathaniel. In: Martin Kaufman, Stuart Galishoff, Todd L. Savitt, eds. Dictionary of American Medical Biography. 2 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984, p211]

    After her period of study with Dr. Dorsette, Dillon sat for the medical licensure examination. Among the three references Dillon had listed was Dr. Clara Marshall, her medical school dean. The test began in Montgomery on August 17, 1891, and concluded on August 25. During those days she was examined on ten subjects by ten different examiners. [Alabama State Board of Medical Examiners. Examination Papers in the Case of Halle Tanner Dillon, MD. August 1891. Alabama Department of Archives and History.] Among those examiners were some of the most prominent physicians in Alabama.

    Dr. Peter Bryce, superintendent of Alabama Hospital for the Insane since 1860, tested her on medical jurisprudence. Dr. Jerome Cochran, state health officer and the primary force behind the Medical Licensure Act of 1877, examined Dr. Dillon in chemistry. Her examiner in natural history and diagnosis of diseases was Dr. George A. Ketchum, Dean of the Medical College of Alabama from 1885 until his death in 1906; he was also involved in creating the Medical Association of the State of Alabama in 1847. Dr. James T. Searcy, her examiner in hygiene, became superintendent of the state's hospital for the insane the following year after Dr. Bryce's death. Dillon was examined in obstetrical operations by Dr. J.B. Gaston, who had served as president of the state medical association in 1882.

    Dillon passed the examinations. As the Transactions of the state medical association noted in its annual report of examination results, "The case of H.T. Dillon is remarkable as that of the first colored woman examined in the state." [Trans MASA 1892, p. 128] Dr. Dillon served at Tuskegee from September 1, 1891, until sometime in 1894. "During her tenure she was responsible for the medical care of 450 students as well as for 30 officers and teachers and their families. Johnson was expected to make her own medicines, while teaching one or two classes each term. For her efforts she was paid six hundred dollars per year plus room and board; she was allowed one one-month vacation per year." [Hine DC. Co-laborers in the work of the Lord: nineteenth-century black women physicians. In: Abram RJ, ed. Send Us a Lady Physician: Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920. New York: Norton, 1985, 114]

    In 1894 Dillon married Rev. John Quincy Johnson, a mathematics teacher at Tuskegee. The following year Rev. Johnson was named President of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1900 he became pastor of an AME church in Nashville. The Johnsons had three sons. Dr. Johnson died on April 26, 1901, of dysentery and childbirth complications; she was 37. She is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Nashville. Apparently Dr. Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson ceased the practice of medicine after her second marriage. [Smith, Carney Jessie. Johnson, Halle Tanner. In: Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Facts on File Encyclopedia o Black Women in America: Science, Health and Medicine. New York: Facts on File, 1997]

    The state medical society's transactions had noted that Dillon was the first African-American woman examined in Alabama; does that phrasing imply that the board had previously examined a white woman? At some point between April, 1891 and April, 1892, Dr. Anna M. Longshore took the certification examination, but did not pass. [Trans MASA 1892, p142] One source claims that Dr. Longshore remained in Alabama to practice without a license, but that has not been confirmed. [Smith, Carney Jessie. Johnson, Halle Tanner. In: Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Facts on File Encyclopedia o Black Women in America: Science, Health and Medicine. New York: Facts on File, 1997]     What is known is that Dr. Longshore came to Alabama to take that examination after a long career in medicine elsewhere.

    Anna Mary Longshore was born in Langhorne, Pennsylvania on April 16, 1829. She was a member of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania's first graduating class, finishing with seven other graduates in December, 1851. She established a practice in Philadelphia, but health problems forced her to return to Langhorne in 1857. There she met and married businessman Lambert Potts. Within a few years Dr. Longshore-Potts, as she called herself, had moved to Adrian, Michigan, and developed a lucrative practice. Since she felt that preventing disease was an important part of a physician's duty, she began to give talks on health topics to private groups of her patients. By 1876 Dr. Longshore-Potts had moved her talks to public venues. These efforts were so successful that she took her lectures on women's health topics on the road, appearing to great acclaim in San Francisco in 1881, followed by other west coast cities.

    In May, 1883, Dr. Longshore-Potts sailed to New Zealand to begin a lecture tour there. She did not return to the United States until October, 1887. In those years she lectured to large crowds not only in New Zealand, but Australia and Great Britain as well. Her lectures continued in the United States, and she also self-published at least two books on related topics. [Willard, Frances Elizabeth. A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life. Buffalo: Moulton, 1893, pp 586-587; Longshore-Potts, Anna. Love, Courtship, and Marriage. San Diego: by author, 1891; Longshore-Potts, Anna. Discourses to Women on Medical Subjects. San Diego: by author, 1897] She finally settled in San Diego, where she owned some property and had built a house. Dr. Longshore-Potts helped found the Paradise Valley Sanitarium in that city. She died of "senile debility" on October 24, 1912. [Obituary: Longshore-Potts, Anna Mary. Journal of the American Medical Association 59(20):1809, 1912]

    Thus when she came to Alabama in 1891 or 1892 to take the physician certification exam, Dr. Longshore-Potts had already established a successful career as a doctor, followed by another career as medical lecturer that had made her both famous and wealthy. We can only speculate as to why this successful woman, in her early 60s, took this arduous test under her maiden name. Perhaps Dr. Longshore-Potts saw herself as some sort of pioneer in this situation; yet what is known about her activities elsewhere does not give us a portrait of a radical reformer.

*After Dr. Dillon

During the 1890s a few other female physicians began practices in Alabama.

[Additional material to be added here!!]

Another physician who appeared in Alabama at this time was Ionia R. Whipper. "In 1903, Ionia R. Whipper, a member of the 1903 graduating class of Howard Medical School, succeeded Johnson and became the second black woman resident physician at Tuskegee Institute. Reflecting social change, however, Whipper was restricted to the care of female students at the institute. After leaving Tuskegee, Whipper returned to Washington, D.C., where she established a home to care for unwed, pregnant, school-age black girls." [Hine DC. Co-laborers in the work of the Lord: nineteenth-century black women physicians. In: Abram RJ, ed. Send Us a Lady Physician: Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920. New York: Norton, 1985, 114] So far, I have been unable to confirm Whipper's presence at Tuskegee. She is not listed among Macon County physicians for either 1903 or 1904 in the Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama.

[Additional material to be added here!!]

Early Alabama Female Physicians: Table 1

Name	b/d dates	medical college	county	city	certification/date
Atkinson C	?-10/16/1932	Univ Iowa	Baldwin	Fairhope	"retired" ca. 1910
Baker D	1863(5)?-1907	Laura Mem Woman's MC Cincinnati	Jefferson	Birmingham	county/1898[9?]
Barnes E	?-6/1898	Woman's MC Penn	Jefferson	Birmingham	county/1893
Barfield JM	?-6/1937 [?]	Atlanta Col Phys Surgs	Clay	Lineville	county/1901
Bascom A	?-1909		Madison	Huntsville
Board O			Jefferson	Birmingham
Bullard IB		Univ Mich	Jefferson	Birmingham	county/1905
Burton L	b. Jan. 12, 1876 d. April 9, 1906	Hosp Med Coll Louisville	Mobile	Mobile	county/1904 or 5
Chapman N		Am Sch Osteo			state refused, 1902
Craighead F		Boston U	Mobile	Mobile
Dillon H	1864-1901	Woman's MC Penn	Macon	Tuskegee Inst	state/1891
Dinkins P		Woman's MC Penn	Dallas	Selma	state/1919
Edwards EM	?-9/1926 [?]	Bennett Med Col Chicago	Mobile	Grand Bay
Farrington A		Boston U Sch Med			state/1897
Fisher-Cooper M		Univ of Iowa	Baldwin	Robertsdale	"illegal" ca. 1910
Ford JLC	1871-1952	Herring Med Coll	Madison		county/1900
Fort M		Tulane	Limestone		county/1905
Fowler O		Memphis Hosp MC	Marion		county/1904
Jones M		Woman's MC Penn	Montgomery		county refused, 1895
Ligon ELB	?-1/1932	Am Sch Osteo	Mobile	Mobile	state/1903
Ligon G [same as above?]			Mobile	Mobile	state/1903
Longshore A	1829-1912	Woman's MC Penn			state refused, 1892
Moorman M		Chattanooga MC<