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57 3 Invisible Writing I Ann Preston Invents an Institution Nothing from the first thirty-seven years of Ann Preston’s life suggests that she was interested in medicine, let alone that she would become dean of a medical school. In a letter to her teacher and lifelong friend, Hannah Monaghan Darlington, the twenty-year-old Preston reported some casual botanizing ,1 but most of her letters concerned political issues and recent literature rather than amateur scientific pursuits. She was active in the very lively intellectual and political life of Chester County, which was, like the western New York “burnt over district,” no rural backwater but a center of advanced thought. The county had not only organized the Farmer’s Library but also a lyceum visited by well-known speakers, a literary society, and an antislavery society, for which Preston served as secretary.2 Ann Preston herself wrote poems, including a commemoration of the burning of the Pennsylvania Hall by a proslavery mob in 1837 and a published book of children’s poetry, Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children.3 She was politically active; she probably wrote for the West Chester Bee, a temperance paper, circulated a petition against capital punishment, and addressed the West Chester Women’s Rights Convention, arguing against any arbitrary definition of women’s sphere.4 Benjamin Fussell, a physician and supporter of women’s medical education, was a near neighbor, and his nephew, Edwin Fussell, also a physician and a neighbor, married Ann’s friend Rebecca Morris. Preston nursed sick family and friends; she was deeply affected by her younger sister Lavinia’s death. In a letter to her friend Lavinia Passmore, she wrote about another young woman “who appears to be dying with a terrible and loathsome disease”: “Allas for ‘the ills which flesh is heir to.’ How strong would that spirit be that has to endure the probations of this world. I gazed upon that poor woman, and realized that ‘all flesh is grass and the loveliness thereof as the flowers of the field.’ I felt that beings capable of such intense suffering had the strongest claims on each other for mutual sympathy and kindness.”5 It was not unusual for nineteenth-century American women to draw moral lessons from their all too frequent encounters with fatal illness. But Preston’s re- 58 Invisible Writing I sponse enacts her sense of mutual vulnerability and speaks of an ethic of responsiveness in the face of death, a responsiveness which marks the best of Preston’s medical writing. Hers was not an attachment to medicine, and still less an attachment to science; her sense of calling was rooted in the fragility of the body. One of the projects of Preston’s medical career would be to animate the institutional genres of regular medicine with this sense. At the age of thirty-seven, Ann Preston began her medical education. She was the oldest girl in a family of ten, seven of whom were still alive; her youngest brother was nearly twenty. Preston had been freed from family obligations and was occupied with teaching, privately studying physiology and hygiene in order to lecture on those subjects. After hearing of plans for the Woman’s Medical College, she decided that it was both right for women in general to learn medicine and possible for her in particular to do so.6 She took the Philadelphia physician Nathaniel Moseley, whom she would later refer to as “a capable modest, and agreeable young man,” as her preceptor, studying informally in his clinic. When the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania opened, she enrolled, describing herself as “restful in spirit and well satisfied that I came.” She dismissed rumors that the college would close and remarked, “There is a considerable and increasing apparatus and the Professors seem enthusiastic and to have their hearts in their business.”7 The college did reopen, and Preston listened to the second round of lectures , wrote her thesis, “A Disquicition on General Diagnosis,” passed her examination, and received her medical degree with the first graduating class in 1852. After graduation, she returned to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and heard its round of seven lectures for a third time while herself giving lectures on physiology to general audiences. Sarah Mapps Douglass, an inveterate lecture-goer, described one of these lectures in an undated letter: “I work very hard just now, and recreate by attending Ann Preston’s lectures. I cannot describe...

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