Women Pioneers of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center: An Exhibit
March 13-April 28, 2023
Knowledge Center, A.C. Long Health Sciences Library
Hammer Building, Lobby Level
Archives & Special Collections at the A.C. Long Health Sciences Library is pleased to announce a new exhibit, Women Pioneers of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, which may be seen in the Knowledge Center on the lobby level of the Hammer Building. This one-case exhibit celebrates Women’s History Month in March.
Though Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician of modern times, obtained her medical degree in 1849, American medicine remained an overwhelmingly male preserve well into the 20th century. While most U.S. medical schools were co-educational by the 1920s, social expectations and professional resistance retarded the entry of women into medicine and slowed their advancement once they began practicing.
All the more remarkable, then, that so many 20th century women attained distinction at what was then called the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. While they were predominantly in fields seen as more “fitting” for women – pathology, pediatrics and psychiatry among them – and were more often researchers than clinicians, these women thoroughly rebuked the notion that the female sex was incapable of distinguished achievement in medicine.
Among the seven women profiled are Dorothy Andersen, who did groundbreaking research in cystic fibrosis; Hattie Alexander, who developed the first successful treatment for influenzal meningitis in infants; Margaret Morgan Lawrence, a distinguished child psychiatrist and among the first African American women to become a certified psychoanalyst; Margarita Silva-Hunter, a leading medical mycologist; and Anna Maxwell, the first dean of what is now the Columbia University School of Nursing who is known as the “American Florence Nightingale.”
The exhibit was curated by Stephen E. Novak, Head, Archives & Special Collections. Contact us for more information.
Above: Hattie Alexander, 1963. Photo by Elizabeth Wilcox.