New York Medical College and Hospital for Women



New York Medical College and Hospital for Women (1863-1919)

New York Medical College and Hospital for Women

Location: 724 Broadway, New York, New York USA

Opened: 1863

Closed: 1918

The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women was founded by Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, a woman physician in practice in New York City at the time. A visionary leader, Dr. Lozier gave weekly health talks in her own parlor, and from these beginnings came the idea for a medical college for women. Until then, there was no place in New York City where a woman could study medicine.
According to Sylvain Cazalet's history of the New York Medical College for Women, Dr. Lozier's leadership was crucial to the college's early success:

During the next years, twenty-five in all, when Dr. Lozier was President and Dean, she saw the College and Hospital rise from its small beginning of seven students to a list of two hundred and nineteen graduate medical women, settled in practice from Maine to California. Prejudice had been partly overcome. No longer did men students hiss and jeer as visiting women students came to amphitheaters for clinical instruction.

The school continued to expand under the leadership of other women physicians over the next few decades. However, it was not until 1918 that women were accepted into the city's hospitals and that the women graduate physicians of the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women entered Bellevue, Cumberland Street, and Willard Parker Hospitals as interns. With that decision, the Board decided to close the school and transfer the existing students to the New York Homeopathic Medical College.

Unfortunately, like many anxious liberal efforts to eliminate women's institutions in an effort to look "fair," that optimism proved premature. For the most part, women medical students continued to face restrictive quotas and other forms of admission discrimination well into the 1970s.