A blog by Kimberly Jensen, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Western Oregon University, with a focus on my research and writing projects in women's history. My current research is for a book project tentatively titled “Civic Borderlands: Oregon Women’s Claims to Citizenship and Civil Liberties, 1913-1924”
One of my heroines is Lucy Davis Phillips, registrar at the University of Oregon Medical School from 1918 until just before her death in 1943. She knew that women students were making history and wanted to record it. Thanks to her work of keeping track of women students and their work after graduation we have a great deal of information on early Oregon women medical students and physicians. Davis Phillips compiled a scrapbook with notes, newspaper articles and correspondence that comprises a vital source for the biographies of medical women. She also sent out a survey in the mid-1930s to all of the women graduates for whom she could find an address and compiled the data. These records comprise the treasure-filled Lucy I. Davis Phillips Collection on Oregon Women Medical School Graduates at the Historical Collections & Archives at Oregon Health & ScienceUniversity in Portland. There are many Esther Lovejoy gems there and so much information about the careers of medical women graduates from Oregon.
She published a summary of her findings and a roster of graduates in Lucy I. Davis, “History of Women Graduates of OregonMedicalSchool,” Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting and Directory of the Alumni Association, University of OregonMedicalSchool (Portland: University of Oregon Alumni Association, 1937), 17-20.
Marion Reed East, M.D.,writing for the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association in 1964, recalled that Davis Phillips was "loved and respected by students and faculty alike." In addition to her work to preserve information about the lives of women students and doctors, East noted that the registrar was a strong advocate for women students. "The first unit of the new medical school building (1920) had no provision for a room where the women medical students could rest or hold a 'buzz' session," East noted. So Davis Phillips worked with librarian Bertha Hallam to get them a room of their own on Marquam Hill.
So here's to your memory, Lucy Davis Phillips: registrar, historian, advocate. The history of women in Oregon is richer because of you.
See
Marion Reed East, M.D., "Branch Five Presents . . . Friends of the Medical Students," Journal of the American Medical Women's Association 19 no. 1 (March 1964): 235.
When Esther Pohl gave her address of welcome to visiting physicians and suffragists at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in the summer of 1905 as president of Portland's all-female medical society, the Portland Medical Club, she drew on the strength of organized medical women dating from 1891 in Portland. As I've been posting this past week, five women were active in an 1891-1892 Portland Women's Medical Society.
Women were barred from membership in the Portland Medical Society (organized in 1884) but were eligible for membership in the Oregon State Medical Society since 1877. According to the Proceedings of the Oregon State Medical Society all of these women except for Florence King were members of the state society. This separate all-female society fulfilled several purposes. It provided networking and support for women doctors, challenged the ban on women in the local city society, and gave them experience in presenting and commenting on cases to prepare them to do the same in meetings of the state society.
The 1891-1892 Portland Women’s Medical Society was the first "regular" (as opposed to homeopathic) female medical society in the West and the third in the U.S. following the New England Women’s Medical Society (1878) and the Rochester, New York Practitioner’s Society (1887). And as Cora Bagley Marrett has shown, this first Portland group was the first of a wave of all-female medical associations across the nation in the 1890s. Following the Portland group were the Physicians’ League of Buffalo, 1892, Woman’s Medical Club of San Francisco, 1893, Puget Sound Woman’s Medical Club, 1894, Medical Women’s Club of Chicago, 1894, Denver Clinical Society, 1895, Woman’s Medical Club of Cincinnati, 1896, Woman’s Medical Club of Minneapolis, 1898, and the State Society of Iowa Medical Women, 1898.
After 1892 this first group "expired" but Mae Whitney Cardwell and a new group of women physicians would reorganize in 1900 as the Portland Medical Club, an organization that would last until after the Second World War. I'll be discussing the group and its members in depth in the Lovejoy biography.
See: Notebook, “Early Women Physicians of Oregon. Cardwell. Excerpted by K.C. Mead, January 1930,” 23, Lucy Davis Phillips Collection, Historical Collections & Archives, OregonHealth & ScienceUniversity. Cora Bagley Marrett, “Nineteenth Century Associations of Medical Women: The Beginning of a Movement,” Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association 32 no. 12 (December 1977): 469-74 _____ “On the Evolution of Women’s Medical Societies,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53 no. 3 (Fall 1979): 434-48. Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 180-81.
Ellen S. More, Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 45-56.
Today’s profile is of physician and suffragist Viola Mae Coe, one of the five women physicians in the 1891-1892 Portland Women’s Medical Society, a group that preceded the revitalized women’s association that Esther Pohl headed in 1905. In later years Coe and Esther Pohl Lovejoy would come into conflict in Oregon suffrage politics.
Coe was born in Indiana and taught school before her marriage to physician Henry Waldo Coe in North Dakota in 1882. After her first child was born she matriculated at the Woman’s Hospital Medical College of Chicago and received her M.D. in 1890. The Coes came to Portland in 1891 and Viola Coe became one of the founding members of the first Portland Women’s Medical Society. The Portland City Directories and references in the Medical Sentinel (of which her husband Henry Waldo Coe was editor) and other newspaper accounts indicate that she established a practice early in her Portland years and had a role in the family’s Sanitarium Company, incorporated by her husband Henry in 1899, which later became Morningside Hospital, specializing in care for mentally ill patients and nervous disorders. The Coes secured the contract to provide care for patients that the state of Alaska deemed “insane” (see below for resources and information on the unfolding story of the institution). Conflicts in their working and financial relationship, including competing bids for the Alaska contract, led to a divorce and suits regarding assets in 1914-15.
Coe was active in the campaign for votes for women in Oregon. When suffrage leader Abigail Scott Duniway became ill during the final 1912 campaign Coe became the chair of the Oregon State Equal Suffrage Association and was in that position when women achieved the vote that November. She is pictured in the iconic image of the signing of the Oregon equal suffrage proclamation on November 30, 1912 with Duniway and Governor Oswald West. After Oregon women achieved the vote Coe worked with the National Council of Women Voters. Across these years she and Esther Pohl (Lovejoy) tangled dramatically over suffrage tactics in rival organizations, but you’ll have to wait for the Lovejoy biography for the rest of that story!
In her later years Coe engaged in Red Cross work during the First World War and directed a maternity hospital in Portland from 1916-1925. She died in Portland in 1943.
For more information on Coe see:
“The Medical Club of Portland,” Medical Sentinel 13 no 3 (March 1905): 3.
“Suffragists Busy; Campaign Plans,” Oregon Journal, July 7, 1912, 7.
“Dr. Viola Coe Campaigns,” Oregonian, August 13, 1913, 2.
“Dr. Coe Gets Contract to Care for Insane,” Portland Telegram, March 21, 1914, 2.
Coe v. Coe 75 Or. 145 [1915]
“Hospital Lease Taken,” Oregonian, December 3, 1924, 6.
“Widely-Known Medical Woman Aged 80, Dies,” Oregon Journal, May 28, 1943, 4. For
For more on Morningside Hospital see the blog entries at “Historical Notes from OHSU, the incredible history of medicine site maintained by Sara Piasecki, Archivist at the Historical Collections & Archives at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland at:
Ellen Ganley and Karen Perdue and their research team have an excellent and developing resource blog on the role of Morningside in the history of Alaska mental and medical health history at http://www.morningsidehospital.com/
For more on the Woman’s Hospital Medical College of Chicago see Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 79-80; 247-48.
In addition to doctors Lydia Hunt King, Mae Cardwell, Helena J. Price and Viola Coe (to be profiled tomorrow) Florence King was one of the five women to be members of the original Portland women's medical society of 1891-1892. A graduate of Wooster (Ohio) University Medical School in 1879, she married homeopathic physician Samuel Lewis King. IN 1890 the Portland City Directory listed them both as practicing in their home office at 195 1st in Portland. Florence King died on May 2, 1895 in Portland, just four years after the founding of the women's medical society.
Yesterday I went to the Oregon State Archives in Salem to gather some additional information about Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy's extended family on the Clayson side and the Pohl side. I came away with more great information to weave into the biography.
While there I also wanted to check for additional information on Helena J. Price, another of the five women in the first Portland women's medical society 1891-1892 that I'm profiling on this and my Oregon Women's History blog.
Price is listed in the 1880 census as a 24 year old teacher in Portland, Oregon married to William R. Price, born about 1856 in Washington Territory. She attended the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, graduated in 1886, and served a residency at the Blockley charity hospital in Philadelphia. She came to Portland around 1889; her application for membership in the Oregon State Medical Society was accepted that July. She's listed in the Portland City Directory as a practicing physician from 1890 through the 1899-1900 edition.
From later notes made by her colleague Mae Cardwell (part of the Lucy Davis Phillips Collectionat the Historical Collections & Archives at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland) that Olof Larsell consulted for his 1947 book The Doctor in Oregon we learn that Price specialized in diseases of the skin (p 417). But these notes also suggest that Price died in 1892 and that her death was the cause of the "disintegration" of the Portland women's medical society
But evidence from the Portland City Directory places Price in Portland through the end of the 1890s. Did Cardwell mean Lydia Hunt King, who died in 1900? Perhaps Florence King, (to be profiled here soon) another of the five women in the first Portland medical society who died in 1895?
I had the expert help of reference archivist Austin Schulz but we could not find additional traces of Helena J. Price in the State Archives holdings. I've contacted the archives of the former Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and hope they will have more information about her. But for now, we know that she was a part of the first group of five women to establish a medical society in Portland. I've profiled Hunt King, Cardwell, and Price, and in the coming days will post more about the two other women, Florence King and Viola Coe.
And in the meantime, if you have more information about Helena J. Price please do let me know.
I'm at work on materials concerning early women physicians and their medical societies in Portland for my biography of Esther Lovejoy. On the Oregon Women's History Blog (http://oregonwomenshistory.blogspot.com) I've posted information on Mae Whitney Cardwell, another of the five women physicians who were part of the first women's medical society in the West,the Portland Women's Medical Society of 1891-1892.
This week I am working on a chapter for the Esther Pohl Lovejoy biography that deals with women in early medical societies in Oregon and the nation. Portland women doctors established the first all-female medical society in Western states in 1891 (and the third women's medical society in the nation) and the five women members met for just over a year. This group was short-lived, but in 1900 women doctors in Portland, including two of the original group, revived what they called the Portland Medical Club. Esther Pohl was active in this second group and was its president in 1905 when both the American Medical Association and the National American Woman Suffrage Association held their annual conferences in Portland to coincide with the Lewis and Clark Exposition. Pohl's speech at the exposition will be a key part of this chapter.
But there are many details that I can't include in the book, so I'd like to share some information about some of the early women doctors in the 1891 society. I'll also be posting this to my Oregon Women's History blog at http://www.oregonwomenshistory.blogspot.com/
Lydia Hunt King, M.D.(1837-1900) was one of these five Portland women physicians active in this first women’s medical society. She was also a leader in the movement for women’s right to vote in Oregon.
A graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1881, Lydia Hunt came to Portland to establish a medical practice in 1883 and married Samuel Willard King, a former educator who turned to business and founded the department store of Olds, Wortman and King in Portland. Hunt King joined the Oregon State Medical Society in 1884 and presented a paper on “Attention to Little Things in Normal Labor” at the 1889 annual conference of the association. She was one of five members of the original Portland Women’s Medical Society, which she joined in the fall of 1891.
In 1894 she became president of the newly-revived Oregon State Woman Suffrage Association and in July published an open letter “To the Friends of Equal Suffrage in the Northwest” announcing the “revival of our work in the Pacific Northwest” and inviting supporters to weekly meetings at the home of Abigail Scott Duniway, secretary of the OSWSA. At a OSWSA meeting in August, the Oregonian reporter noted her “sparking 10-minutes’ talk” in which she spoke “from a physician’s standpoint” and “held the right of self-government was inherent in all female life, and the times were out of joint because this principle was not recognized in the human species.” Hunt King resigned the OSWSA presidency later that fall due to ill health. She died March 10, 1900 following a four year illness. Her obituary, from the Oregonian, March 11, 1900, 24 appears below.
See:
Joseph Gaston, Portland, Oregon: Its History and Builders vol. 2 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1911): 244-45.
Proceedings of the OregonState Medical Society 11 (1884): 97.
Proceedings of OregonState Medical Society 16 (1890): 218-222.
Mae Cardwell Notebook “Early Women Physicians of Oregon. Cardwell. Excerpted by K.C. Mead, January 1930,” 23, Lucy Davis Phillips Collection, Historical Collections & Archives, OregonHealth & ScienceUniversity.
“Woman Suffrage; An Open Letter Through the Press by the O.S.W.S.A.,” Oregonian, July 5, 1894, 3.
“Equal Suffragists,” Oregonian, August 20, 1894, 5.
“Dr. Lydia Hunt King,” Oregonian, March 11, 1900, 24.
Kimberly Jensen received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in women’s and U.S. history and teaches history and gender studies at Western Oregon University.
She is the author of Oregon's Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism (University of Washington Press, 2012), Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and coeditor, with Erika Kuhlman, of Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2010).
She is working on a new book project tentatively titled “Civic Borderlands: Oregon Women’s Claims to Citizenship and Civil Liberties, 1913-1924”
