North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Annie Lowrie Alexander: “A Woman Doing a Great Work in a Womanly Way”

241 Annie Lowrie Alexander “A Woman Doing a Great Work in a Womanly Way” James Douglas Alsop    Annie Lowrie Alexander was an early leader in maternal, child, and community health care in North Carolina and a successful professional and businesswoman in Charlotte from 1887 to 1929. She was born on the family farm in Lemley Township, Mecklenburg County, on January 10, 1864, and died on October 15, 1929, at 410 North Tyron Street, Charlotte, the site of her personal residence and medical practice since 1890. She was the first woman to be licensed to practice by the North Carolina Medical Association. For most of her career, she was the only female practitioner in Mecklenburg County and was always a strong advocate for the medical education of women. It is frequently stated that Alexander was the first southern woman with an md to practice medicine south of the Potomac. However, Alexander’s significance is found primarily in her conduct over the course of four decades as a white, elite southern woman and medical practitioner who stood out as an exemplar of community involvement in the New South. Alexander was the scion of a distinguished Mecklenburg plantation family and a devout Presbyterian. She became an astute investor in the new economy of urban development and cotton mills, earning praise as a professional leader and civic booster in Charlotte, which with its surroundings was undergoing profound social and economic transformation during her lifetime. Finally, Alexander was a physician and the only one in the locality who specialized in the care of women and children. Her concern for the health of her community was multifaceted. The universal praise and warm-hearted benevolence showered upon Charlotte’s “Dr. Annie” during her lifetime and afterward should Dr. Annie Alexander Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, Charlotte, N.C. Annie Lowrie Alexander 243 not obscure a more complex reality and legacy, firmly grounded in class, race, gender, profession, and time. Annie Alexander was the middle daughter and third child of Dr. John Brevard Alexander (1834–1911) and Annie Wall (neé Lowrie) Alexander (1834–93) and the most prominent of their six children. The lineage was distinguished. Her mother was a granddaughter of Superior Court Judge Samuel Lowrie. Her father was a member of a prominent landowning family of Mecklenburg County and a descendant of Revolutionary War patriots. He was educated at Davidson College and the Medical College of South Carolina, where he graduated in 1855. He and Wall married in 1858. During the Civil War, John Alexander served in the Thirty-Seventh North Carolina Infantry as a sergeant and then a surgeon . After the war he was a farmer, general practitioner, and druggist in rural Mecklenburg County. From 1890 until his death in 1911 he resided in daughter Annie’s Charlotte home and managed a drugstore for a period of years. John Alexander published frequently on local history, genealogy, and public and church affairs. He was known to be strong willed and assertive, and his writings were frequently polemical and strident, not least on questions of race. Annie Alexander was home-schooled by her father and by a tutor. Her surviving papers include undated essays on school topics including Roman and European history, the constitution of the United States, Shakespeare’s prose, classical Greek, and modern French literature. Alexander later stated that her father selected medicine as her career when she was fourteen years old. Certainly, the elder Alexander aggressively encouraged his daughter, selecting the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for her, and taking her to be enrolled shortly after Alexander’s seventeenth birthday. As a consequence , in 1884 she had to keep her graduating age of twenty a secret, for this fell one year below the college’s minimum. Alexander’s best subject was chemistry , where she was awarded 100 percent by her professor, Dr. Rachel L. Bodley, the distinguished dean of the college. The title of her final dissertation was “The Vascular Mechanism.” Alexander graduated with second-class standing but was one of the favored few awarded, by competitive exam, a coveted internship at the Women’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her teachers included Dr. G. Gibbons Hunt, later president of the microscopical section of the Academy of Natural Sciences; Dr. James B. Walker, the noted Philadelphia physician; and Dr. Hannah T. Croasdale, who was beginning her three-decade tenure at the college...