Category: Archives for Women in Medicine

Edris Rice-Wray Papers Open to Research

The Center for the History of Medicine is pleased to announce that the Edris Rice-Wray papers, 1937-1983 (inclusive), 1960-1970 (bulk) are now open to research.

Edris Rice-Wray was born in 1904 in New York City, New York and received her bachelor’s degree from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1927. She went on to attend Northwestern University Medical School and receive her M.D. in 1932 with a focus on public health work.

In 1948, Rice-Wray went to Puerto Rico as a health district director. In 1950, she was appointed Director of the Public Health Training Center, a Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Puerto Rico, and as Medical Director of the Puerto Rico Planned Parenthood. During her time in Puerto Rico, Rice-Wray collaborated with John Rock (1890-1984) and Gregory Pincus (1903-1967) on the trials of oral contraceptives on Puerto Rican women.

In 1957, Rice-Wray joined the World Health Organization and moved to Mexico to work as Medical Officer for Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In 1958 she founded and became the President of the Asociación Pro-Salud Maternal, the first family planning clinic in Mexico. She held this position until 1972 when she became Honorary President and Chief Technical Consultant for the Asociación. During the 1970s, she moved from Mexico City to Cholula in Puebla, Mexico, where she continued to work in reproductive medicine and held a teaching position at the University of the Americas Puebla.

Rice-Wray was married and had daughters. She died in 1990 in San Andres Cholula, Puebla, Mexico.

The collection consists of records created or collected by Edris Rice-Wray in the course of her career working with family planning institutions, primarily in Mexico including letters and enclosures from individuals and groups, including corporations, government offices, and academic institutions. Topics include conferences, professional visits to Rice-Wray’s Mexico City clinic, clinical trials of various types of contraceptives, the activities of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the politics of birth control in Mexico. Also included are records of publications Rice-Wray authored and co-authored in various stages of preparation, including final reprints.

Papers are in English and Spanish.

Announcing the 2019-2020 Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation Fellow

By , July 2, 2019

The Archives for Women in Medicine and Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation are pleased to announce the 2019-2020 Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine Fellow: Heather Munro Prescott, Ph.D.

Heather Munro Prescott, Ph.D. 2019-2020 Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation Fellow

Heather Munro Prescott is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. She specializes in the history of women in medicine and women’s health issues with an emphasis on the post-World War II era. Her first book, A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine, which drew on archival materials in the Countway Library and Boston Children’s Hospital, received the Will Solimene Award of Excellence in Medical Communication from the New England Chapter, American Medical Writers Association. Her most recent book is The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception, published by Rutgers University Press in 2011. She has also published articles on the history of medicine in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and Technology and Culture. She has also received numerous grants and awards, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Fellowship in the History of American Obstetrics and Gynecology, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and publication grants from the National Library of Medicine. Her Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation Fellowship will be used to conduct archival research for a book on the cultural history of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.


The Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation Fellowship is offered in partnership with the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation (formerly the Foundation for the History of Women in Medicine). Information regarding the Fellowship program is available at http://www.wimlf.org/fellowships and https://www.countway.harvard.edu/chom/archives-women-medicine-fellowships.

The Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation was founded with the strong belief that understanding our history plays a powerful role in shaping our future. The resolute stand women took to establish their place in these fields propels our vision forward. We serve as stewards to the stories from the past, and take pride in sharing them with the women of today. Our mission is to preserve and promote the history of women in medicine and the medical sciences, and we look forward to connecting you to our collective legacy that will empower our future.

A program of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, the Archives for Women in Medicine actively acquires, preserves, promotes, and provides access to the professional and personal records of outstanding women leaders in medicine and the medical sciences.

Remembering Amalie Kass

By , June 10, 2019

It is with great sadness that I report that Amalie Moses Kass passed away on May 19, 2019. Amalie was a great friend to the Archives for Women in Medicine and Countway Library, both as a patron but also as a researcher and writer. Amalie was a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and a historian of medicine. She published Midwifery and Medicine in Boston: Walter Channing, M.D., 1786-1876 (a short biography of Dr. Channing written by Amalie was published in Harvard Magazine) and co-authored Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Thomas Hodgkin, MD with her late husband Edward H. Kass.

Amalie (right) and Eleanor Shore speaking at “Celebrating 10 Years of the Archives for Women in Medicine”

Amalie was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1928, and attended Wellesley College. She received her master’s degree in education from Boston University, and spent many years teaching high school in Newton. In addition to her position at Harvard Medical School, she was the first woman to chair the Massachusetts Historical Society’s board, and served as an associate editor for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. In addition to her academic pursuits, Amalie raised eight children. She had five children with her first husband, Malcolm Hecht Jr., and welcomed three stepchildren when she married fellow widower Edward H. Kass in 1975.

I met Amalie in 2015 when I became the Archivist for Women in Medicine. She and her research partner, Eleanor Shore, were working on a piece about the life of Anne Pappenheimer Forbes (1911-1992). Dr. Forbes was a pioneer in endocrinology, a Harvard Medical School professor, and a mother of five. Eleanor and Amalie dove into the Forbes papers and painstakingly looked at every document in the collection in order to illuminate her story. The duo were fixtures in the reading room, and their tireless efforts led to an article in Harvard Medicine and a presentation at the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Archives for Women in Medicine attending by many of the Forbes children and other descendants.

Next, the research duo moved on to Mary Ellen Avery (1927-2011). Dr. Avery was the first woman to head a major clinical department at Harvard Medical School and physician-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital; among her many achievements and contributions, her identification of surfactant saved the lives of countless premature babies suffering from respiratory distress syndrome. Amalie and Eleanor’s meticulous research led to an article on Dr. Avery’s life and achievements, published in the Harvard Magazine.

Amalie (left) and Eleanor, conducting research in the archives, from The Benefactor, Spring 2017

Amalie’s presence and dedication to highlighting the overshadowed achievements of women will be missed at the Center for the History of Medicine. Her passion for the history of medicine and telling these stories was only matched by her generosity. A 2016 $500,000 gift from Amalie has supported advancing the mission and work of the Archives for Women in Medicine to collect, preserve, and share the achievements of women leaders in medicine. Her philanthropy, in addition to her research in the archives, has empowered the history of medicine to inform and shape contemporary medicine and society. I can only hope that her legacy will inspire others to follow in her footsteps.

May 16: Measures of Power? Gender, Phrenology and 19th Century Cultures of Medicine

By , May 6, 2019

Measures of Power? Gender, Phrenology and 19th Century Cultures of Medicine

Join us for the 2019 Fellow’s Lecture with Carla Bittel, PhD, Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University

Illustrated diagram of the phrenological faculties from How to Read Character by Samuel Roberts Wells, 1890.

Phrenology, considered a “science of the mind” in the nineteenth century, purported to measure the “power” of human mental faculties. This talk will examine the role of gender in the making of those measurements, and demonstrate how middle-class women—as practitioners and consumers—merged phrenology with multiple forms of medical and domestic knowledge.

May 16, 2019
4:00 – 4:30pm – Reception / Meet and Greet
4:30 – 5:30pm – Welcome and Lecture
5:30 – 6:00pm – Reception Continues

Minot Room, fifth floor
Countway Library of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
10 Shattuck Street, Boston MA 02115

Free and open to the public, registration is required. Register online now through Eventbrite.

Sponsored by the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation, in partnership with the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library.

About Carla Bittel, PhD

Carla Bittel, Ph.D.

Carla Bittel is Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is a historian of nineteenth-century America, specializing in the history of medicine, science, and technology.

Her research focuses on gender issues and she has written on the history of women’s health, women physicians, and the role of science in medicine.

Bittel is the author of Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America, published with the University of North Carolina Press in 2009. She has published in the journals Centaurus and Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and contributed to the edited volume, Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine.

Her research has been supported by several grants, including a Scholar’s Award from the National Science Foundation. She is also a co-organizer of the Working Group, “Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge,” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Rose E. Frisch Papers Open to Research

By , February 4, 2019

~This post was co-written by Faith Plazarin, processing intern, and Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook, processing assistant.

The Center for the History of Medicine is pleased to announce that the Rose E. Frisch papers, 1921-2014 (inclusive), are open to research.

Rose E. Frisch (1918-2015) was born in the Bronx in New York. She graduated with her B.A. in 1939 from Smith College, which was partly financed by the Leopold Schepp Foundation, an organization founded by the entrepreneur and philanthropist Leopold Schepp for students in need of financial assistance. Frisch graduated with her M.A. from Columbia in 1940 in Zoology, and finally her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1943.

Rose worked on the Manhattan Project beginning in 1943. She was a computer doing calculations under Kitty Oppenheimer. After the bomb dropped, she left Los Alamos and returned to Boston to work in academia, where Frisch shifted her research focus from animals and reproduction to women’s reproduction. Her area of specialization was the relationship between fat content and female fertility as well as the links between fat content and breast cancer.  Her subjects were usually athletes, including ballerinas, runners, and swimmers, or those with lower fat content, such as women in underdeveloped areas of the world or women who suffered from anorexia nervosa. Frisch was one of the few women in her field of reproductive medicine. She laid the groundwork for the discovery of leptin, a protein hormone involved in the processes she researched. While leptin was not discovered until 1997, in the 1960s Dr. Gordon C. Kennedy of Cambridge University conducted initial experiments relating to a lipostat in rats.  Leptin was later to be discovered and connected to the lipostat’s function. Frisch was involved in confirming the results of Dr. Kennedy’s experiments and were linked to leptin and its connections to fertility over 30 years later. Frisch spent almost her entire academic career at Harvard University, where she taught as an Associate professor of Population Sciences and a worked as a researcher of the Center for Population Studies until she was granted emerita status in 1992.

She was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation. Most of Frisch’s body of published works consists of articles in larger books, journals, or other serial works. However, she was also the lead editor on the scientific volume Adipose Tissue and Reproduction in 1990. Frisch published outside of academia as well. She published a children’s book called Plants that Feed the World in 1966, and a book about her life’s work for a non-academic audience, called Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection, was published in 2002.  These publications are referenced throughout the collection.

The papers in this collection consist primarily of professional records created and collected by Rose Epstein Frisch during the course of her work as a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health in the Department of Population and Development Studies in Boston, Massachusetts.  The professional papers consist largely of research and reference materials, reprints, publications, and writings. Also included here, are some of her personal records involving her life outside of Harvard, primarily personal correspondence and photographs.

For more information about Rose Frisch, see this article from Schepp Connections Vol. 1 No. 17 2015 (p. 6).

For information regarding access to this collection, please contact the Public Services staff.

Dr. Fe del Mundo

By , November 27, 2018

Fe del Mundo’s 107th Birthday Google Doodle

 

Dr. Fe del Mundo is celebrated in today’s Google Doodle. She was the founder of the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines, and she was conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines as well as the Order of Lakandula, one of the highest honors given by the Philippines. She is also often called Harvard Medical School’s, or even Harvard University’s, first woman student.

While Dr. Del Mundo was remarkable in many ways, the evidence that she was a medical student at Harvard Medical School is largely anecdotal and not well sourced. As far as my research using Harvard Medical School catalogs and records shows, she earned her Medical Degree from the University of the Philippines Manila in 1933, and in 1936, came to Boston to further her studies in pediatrics. The fact that Harvard Medical School did not admit women students and Dr. Del Mundo already earned her medical degree suggests that she was not admitted as a student, even in error, and I cannot find proof that she graduated from Harvard Medical School.

Instead, it seems more likely that she completed graduate work at Harvard Medical School through an appointment at Boston Children’s Hospital. Women physicians were admitted to courses in the Harvard Medical School Graduate School of Medicine (later called the Courses for Graduates) beginning in the late 19th century. The 1936 announcement of the Courses for Graduates clearly states that women could be admitted to graduate courses: “Women are not admitted to the regular undergraduate classes of the Harvard Medical School. The admission of women to the various courses offered under the department of the School is at the discretion of the instructor in charge of the course. The catalogue usually states in connection with each course whether or not it is open to women.”

There is very little archival documentation about the graduate courses from this period, and no list of enrolled students, but Dr. Fe del Mundo is listed as an Assistant Physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a Research Fellow in Pediatrics in 1940. Further suggesting that she was a graduate student and not a medical student, in her autobiographical statement in Women Physicians of the World (1977), Dr. Del Mundo explains “I spent three years of my postgraduate studies at the Children’s Hospital in Boston and at Harvard Medical School, one year at the University of Chicago, six months at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and short terms in various pediatric institutions, all to round out my training.”

Furthermore, other women studied at Harvard University before 1936, such as the women who studied at the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers (later the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) including its first woman graduate Linda Frances James (who completed her certificate in 1917). Two additional women, Ann Hogue Stewart and Hester Balch Curtis, were both awarded the Master of Public Health in 1936.

Given the restrictions placed on student records, and the fact that Harvard Medical School did not celebrate or acknowledge the academic work of women prior to officially accepting women students in 1945, it is difficult to determine if Dr. Del Mundo was Harvard Medical School’s first woman student. Given her degree and course of study, it is unlikely.

If Dr. Fe del Mundo is not the first woman graduate of Harvard Medical School, does that mean her story isn’t important or isn’t a part of Harvard Medical School’s history? No. I cannot yet determine if she was the first Filipina or Asian woman admitted to the Courses for Graduates, but I imagine that she is among the first. Currently, the Center for the History of Medicine, in partnership with the Office for Diversity Inclusion and Community Partnership, is funding research on Harvard Medical School’s other “firsts,” searching our archives for evidence of students who represent ethnic and cultural backgrounds that have been historically marginalized. I’m not sure who we’ll find in the archives, but at the conclusion of this project, I hope to surface other stories like Dr. Del Mundo’s. I can only imagine the pushback that a woman doctor from the Philippines may have encountered when she came to Boston in the 1930s. Despite not being Harvard Medical School’s first woman student, Dr. Fe del Mundo is still an important and inspirational figure in the history of Harvard Medical School and the history of medicine in the Philippines.


Please send any questions to Joan Ilacqua, Archivist for Diversity and Inclusion.

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