392 WOMEN OF OHIO body (to which only unmarried men were admitted) remained dead letter for many years. By special decree of Frederick the Great, the University of Halle granted a medical degree to Frau Dortliea Erxleban in 1754, the first in the history of any German University. Frau von Siebold and her daughter took the degree of doctor of obstetrics, at Giessen in 1816 and 1809 respectively. Both had very large practices in obstetrics, the mother officiating at the birth of Queen Victoria. In the American colonies, the history of medical women began deplorably for it is recorded that in the colony of Massachusetts Bay was one Margaret Jones, a female physician accused of witchcraft. Is it not poetic justice that to Massachusetts should belong the credit of establishing the first school of medicine for women in the world? The history of medicine in America since 1849, when Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell graduated at Hobart College, Geneva, New York, is a fa- miliar tale that cannot be told too often. How she was refused per- mission to study at all colleges in Philadelphia and New York until finally the faculty of Geneva put the matter before the student body and they voted to extend to her a unanimous invitation to become a member of their class. The New York Infirmary for Women and Children was established in 1857 by the sisters Dr. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and a group of those who believed in them; later followed by the opening of the Woman’s College of New York Infirmary in The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania had been founded fifteen years earlier and was the first college in the world established for the medical education of women. Its first graduating class con- sisted of eight members. The Paris E ’cole de Medicin, actually, though not nominally, closed to women for centuries, was opened by Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi of America and Dr. Garrett Anderson, dean of the London Medical School for Women in 1867. It would take too much space to enumerate the college and hospital positions held by women physicians in the world today. All medical colleges in the United States, with the exception of two, receive women
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WOMEN OF OHIO
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