A Woman's Quest: The life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D.Zakrzewska, Marie E. (Marie Elizabeth)
History
A Woman's Quest: The life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D.
Zakrzewska, Marie E. (Marie Elizabeth)
Women physicians -- United States -- Biography; Zakrzewska, Marie E. (Marie Elizabeth), 1829-1902
To be seen and noticed in these circles was an advantage to medical
women and to our little hospital, for, in spite of our very simple
diet and the plain living of the patients, we were always in debt; and
we had to make great efforts to raise money, holding even a little
Sale again before Christmas. This Sale was held in our own wards,
the patients being removed for a whole week, but we raised the two
thousand, six hundred dollars which was the cost of our first year’s
experiment, not including the rent which was pledged, as already told.
It was a great oversight and much to be regretted, that we considered
this hospital experiment and ourselves of so little importance in
themselves that no printed report had been preserved until the year
1868, that is, eleven years from the time we opened the Infirmary.
I have also only very imperfect private notes, but I find that the
expense, all in all, including the board of the students, was a little
over two thousand, six hundred dollars, from May 1, 1857, to May 1,
1858; and that the average morning dispensary attendance was thirty;
while the in-door patients were about one hundred during the year. But
we had a very large out-door practice, one of the four students alone,
Dr. Mary E. Breed, attending fourteen cases of childbed in one month;
while I was often sent for in the night to assist them with advice when
their knowledge was not sufficient.
The practical gain to these young women was so great that they were
not only devoted, hardworking and conscientious in their professional
duties, but they were more than willing to bear great physical
discomfort, as well as the ridicule which they encountered when they
attempted to demand the recognition and the respect due to their
calling. Everywhere among the better situated people, they met with
discouraging remarks and questions, giving evidence that the opinion
was that the practice of medicine by women would, in the course
of time, be impossible, even if the present few were received as
exceptions, or as the novelties of a fad. And the greatest tact was
called for in accommodating ourselves and our work to the need of even
the poorest people.
I may here describe one picture which memory recalls. Dr. Breed had
been attending a difficult case of childbirth, in a negro quarter, and
she called on me for consultation and assistance.
I entered a room which seemed filled with people of all sizes, and with
faces shading from pitch black through all colors to what seemed pure
Caucasian. This latter was the woman in the corner, near the table on
which stood the lamp, and she was just being delivered of a mulatto
baby by the doctor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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