A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998 (review)

Steven J. Peitzman. A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. xiii + 322 pp. Ill. $60.00 (cloth, 0-8135-2815-1), $22.00 (paperbound, 0-8135-2816-X).

Ask anyone who has ever tried it: writing the history of one's own institution can be a thankless task. Who to include, who to exclude, how much to tell, or retell . . . the pitfalls are numerous and very deep. Happily, Steven Peitzman, nephrologist and historian of medicine at Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP), has undertaken this labor of love and duty to good effect; he should be in no danger of internal exile. What is more, he has added an important book to the historiography of women in American medicine. Between 1850 and 1969, the Woman's Medical College (WMC) was one of the first (the question of "firsts" here is still controversial) and indubitably the last of the women's medical colleges in the United States. Several works have already told its story in whole or part. ¹ Peitzman's history of "Woman's Med," however, is the most complete so far.

This story deepens our understanding rather than, on the whole, discovering startling new aspects of WMC/MCP's history. For example, Peitzman recounts one of the signal events in the identity formation of nineteenth-century women medical students, an incident he headlines as "blackguardism" (he is not averse to adopting an occasional archaism). The incident in question was the raucous and humiliating heckling of WMC students by many of Philadelphia's men students when the women first attended the lectures and clinical demonstrations at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1869. Peitzman treats the incident not merely as an instance of hostility to the women, but as one of the "defining stories . . . of the College's saga" (p. 37). Such trials added a perverse value to the school by cementing the loyalties of successive generations of WMC alumnae. Peitzman helpfully analyzes the men's behavior, treating it as a defensive response to the feminine incursion into a previously all-male enclave--hospital wards and surgical amphitheaters. Drawing on the newer histories of Victorian manhood, he situates the all-male clinical arena within the world of all-male secret societies and other institutions of male bonding, barricades against further feminine intrusions into Victorian manhood's rightful sphere (pp. 33-37).

Peitzman's two most prominent themes, and the signature themes of his book, stand in creative tension with each other. He underscores that WMC ought to be understood first as one of the species of "Alma Mater"--that is, the nineteenth-century woman's college (pp. 110-12). On the other hand, acknowledging the importance of male faculty and benefactors throughout WMC's history, he argues that it was never "a separatist enclave; male-female collaboration served it well through much of its history" (p. 254). He is aware of the apparent paradox and attempts to resolve it:

And here lies the central phenomenon of four years at WMC in the 1890s: the whole experience wove together the increasingly valued features of women's collegiate life--including the formation of autonomy and friendships--with the powerful and intense tutelage in the ways and values of medicine. The "life" took place mainly in the company of women and fostered friendships and female identity; the medical education proceeded under the guidance of both genders and of course shaped professional identity. (p. 112)

Thus Peitzman consciously juxtaposes these two aspects of the college, but without as deep an examination of their interconnections as one might wish for. For example, without an overview, statistical and otherwise, of WMC graduates' careers, it is hard to judge whether their socialization into medicine was shaped more...