Keep Cycling To Tomorrow: In 1869, ›
the dean of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania proudly brought her students to the Saturday teaching clinics in general surgery at the Pennsylvania Hospital. She had, for years, been seeking permission for her female students to be able to attend and benefit from observing the great clinicians at work. At last, the managers had agreed. But the young women did not receive a hospitable welcome. As reported in the Philidelphia Evening Bulletin:
The students of the male colleges, knowing that the ladies would be present, turned out several hundred strong, with the design of expressing their disapproval of the action of the managers of the hospital particularly, and of the admission of women to the medical profession generally.
Ranging themselves in line, these gallant gentleman assailed the young ladies, as they passed out, with insolent and offensive language, and then followed them into the street, where the whole gang, with the fluency of long practice, joined in insulting them …
During the last hour missiles of paper, tinfoil, tobacco-quids etc., were thrown upon the ladies, while some of these men defiled the dresses of the ladies near them with tobacco juice.
source: Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, November 8, 1869, Quoted in Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine, Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez
