The Untold Story of a Champion for Gender Equity in the Field of Medicine
Hannah Glidden Myrick, a Pioneering Dorchester Native
By Isaque Rezende Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Note from the writer:
If you know me, you know how much I love Local History!
Researching the local history immediately surrounding where I live in Upham’s Corner has always been something I’ve been fascinated with. As a result of the research I’ve been doing, I came across a pioneer who was born and raised steps away from where I call home – Hannah Glidden Myrick.
Fully discovering Hannah’s story set me on a journey that included having multiple phone conversations with the Former Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and even Hannah’s living relatives to learn about this groundbreaking woman – of whom so little is known.
After gathering so much material, I reached out to the Dorchester Historical Society to make them aware of her, resulting in them requesting me to write a blog post that lays out her background & accomplishments. Now, I am not a writer by any means, but through dedication and some long hours, I put together the following blog post – my first ever essay that has been published outside of a classroom – just in time for Women’s History Month!
Enjoy!
Hannah Glidden Myrick was among the small number of women who graduatedfrom medical school by the turn of the 20th century.Her path to The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was not an easy one, starting with her early education at Boston’s Boys Latin School after being granted a rare exception as a female student. She went on tograduate from Smith College in 1896 and four years later became one of the first women to earn a medical degree from Johns Hopkins at a time when women were generally excluded from medical education.
She was born August 31, 1871, to James Howe &Mary Converse Myrick at their lofty, wood-framed house that once stoodat 58 Sumner Street in Dorchester. Her father had success as a merchant,beginning in the late 1840s, in the town of Tignish on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, where he managed three stores offering fishing supplies, clothing and various dry goods. He married Mary Converse Merrill in Dorchester in 1854, and they maintained the house on Sumner Street as well as a home in Tignish. The family was fortunate enough to spend summers in Tignish and the rest of the year in Boston. The Myrick family left behind a strong legacy in Tignish aftersupporting their community in various ways including the building of a wharf with railroad access to facilitate the importing and exporting of goods.The youngest of five children, Hannahwas best described by her great-grand-niece through marriage,Carolyn E. Myrick,in the following excerpt from her book, ‘The Myricks of Tignish’:
“She was the youngest in her generation and, from all I can gather, the liveliest, with plenty of backbone. She had a keen, quick mind and wanted to be a doctor like Dr. Josiah Myrick and Dr. John Converse before her. She displayed an early interest in anatomy by dissecting crabs on the dining room table. Hannah attended Miss Clark’s school in Dorchester, then Miss Wesselhopt’s; but she was a misfit at all these institutions, because she did not“behave like a lady.”
Myrick wanted to attend Boys Latin School, which offered requisite college preparatory courses that would allow her to pursue acareer in medicine. Her parents were willing to enroll her into Girls Latin School; at her pleading, she and her father met with the superintendent of the all-boys school to make arrangements for her to enroll which included hiring a tutor for her to learn Latin and Greek.She graduated in 1892 at age 20. Myrick then went on to earn her BA Degree from Smith College and then began to pursue a medical degree by enrolling at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
The pace of women in the white medical establishment was beginning to accelerate during this time.Johns Hopkins did not even have a medical school until the 1890s. If ithad not needed financial help to get off the ground, perhaps the University would not have accepted women as early as it did. Four daughters of the original trustees of the University offered to raise $500,000 to open the school, but only if it would open its doors to “qualified women.” By 1892, the money was raised, and the school opened the following year–reportedly shocking people when it became known that three women were in the first class of ten medical students.
The temper of the time was generally hostile to women in many professions – especially for those who were bold enough to pursue a career in medicine. Elizabeth Blackwell, her younger sister Emily Blackwell and Marie Zakrewska were three such women whoendured a male dominant environment in the field of medicine – facing resentment and prejudice at every turn. These women were routinely patronized by men and in many cases despised by the community at large for their decision to pursue medicine as a career. As the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell recalled difficult times when she would go out on night calls as a doctor and would be followed and harassed in the street. If a patient died, she was accused of killing the patient, and on occasions her hospital was stoned. Elizabeth is quoted as saying:
“I know why this life has never been lived before. It’s too hard to work against every form of social opposition. I would like a little fun now and then”.
But fun was in short supply. Due to pressure from the medical society, her sister, Emily’s medical education was discontinued by the institution she attended at the end of her first year. Zakrewska had attained her ranking as a chief midwife in Germany, but due to opposition to women in the field of medicine there, she came to America to fulfill her dreams. She remembers being welcomed on campus by her male counterparts with disgust and hostility – even going to the lengths of petitioning the institution to refuse her enrollment the following term. These three women forged ahead against tremendous, ferocious resistance, respectively earning their medical degreesat different times from various institutions – all by 1856.
Such tumultuous experiences by those earlier pioneers laid the groundwork for Myrick as she entered a similarly unreceptive and unwelcoming environment at Johns Hopkins in 1896. In a letter written to her sister back home in 1899, she vividly describes an old boy’s network atmosphere on campus during weeklysocial gatherings and the humor and grace with which she handled it:
“…several other M.D.’s had been having a social time in another room whence sounds of laughter and fumes of tobacco had been wafted to us all the evening, to give us some amount of their experiences….Meanwhile the butler served beer and polywater, pretzels, cakes, cigars and cigarettes – I perjured my soul by assuring Dr. Jacobs who sat next to me that I didn’t object in the least to cigarette smoke. …You would have enjoyed their talk muchly in spite of beer and smoke, one has to get used to little things like that, or lose half that’s going on…”
In duller times, Myrick had written a jingle used in her osteology course that she and classmates would chant to help bear the dreadfully boring material during study. She dedicated it to the instructor who she said was awfully bored by the subject himself:
“Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to learn these bones.”
Myrick’s pioneering spirit lead her to break through the various barriers and challenges set before her –progressing towards earning her medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1900.
Just over forty years before Myrick earned her degree, the Blackwell sisters and Zakrewska established the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. In 1859, Zakrewska left New York to teach in Boston, where, in 1862, she opened the New England Hospital for Women and Children (NEWHC) which operates today as The Dimock Center. A teaching hospital established for women and run by women, this institution is where Myrick finished her residency and continued to practice with the goal of expanding their maternity department. Eventually Myrick became the hospital’s Superintendent. She would also share a private practice close to her family home in Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner with a two-person practice.
A prize-winning amateur photographer, Myrick was credited with developing some of the earliest X-ray film used at NEHWC,introducing and broadening the use of X-rays in the treatment of women and children. From 1922 to 1947,she worked at Schrafft’s Candy Company in Charlestown as a specialist in industrial medicine. During this twenty-five-year period, she undertook special studies relating to the comfort and health of workers – many of them women – especially where part of their working day required them to perform in areas with steam or unusually high temperatures.
Myrick never married and had no children. Her career kept her quite busy, but she had two passions that she pursued for many years: one was gardening and the other was photography. The gardens around her Sumner Street home were well-maintained, vibrant, and she kept extensive annual journals about her gardening activity. Myricktook black and white photos with assorted camerasand also did her own developing and printing. An early adopter of color, by 1939 she began taking Kodachrome slides and took notes about many of her pictures as well as about the developing parameters and papersshe used. In1906 at age 35,she wrote the following clever premonition in a letter to a friend that demonstrated her humor amidst social pressures and herfascination with photographyin an excerpt from‘The Myricks of Tignish’:
“I don’t see that it is up to me to devise some startling matrimonial scheme for the edification of my friends…I have a new camera with which I take atrocious pictures and squander my patrimony experimenting with it. It is well to have patrimony if one can’t indulge in matrimony. If my photographic fever lasts much longer I shall have neither.”
In her later years, Myrickdid not actively practice medicine, but she remained a tireless worker for these causes. She became an advocate for local medical and charitable activities, financially supporting a free dispensary inthe Fields Corner neighborhood. She was also on the board of the Industrial School for Girls on Centre Street. Always a devoted healer, Myrick cared for her older brother, Edward, who after retiring from the family business in Tignish, returned to the Sumner Street home to live with her in 1942 until his death in 1957 at the age of 100.
Myrick continued to live at the family home until 1959, when the stately house was taken through eminent domain by the City of Boston and demolished – making way for Elderly/Disabled Public Housing called the Annapolis Apartments which still exists on that land. She subsequently moved to an apartment building at 50 Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay, living with her cousin, Josephine Bryant. After Josephine’s death in 1970, Myrick lived her final years at the Wellesley Manor Nursing Home in Wellesley, reportedly maintaining her faculties and keeping up to date on current events. According to family, she had a remarkable rapport with and was well loved by the nurses there, who were entertained by her cheerful philosophy of life and sense of humor which Carolyn E. Myrick described in the following excerpt from ‘The Myricks of Tignish’:
“She was full of witticisms. One that made me chuckle was, “The rain falls on the just and unjust, but the unjust have the just’s umbrellas.”
On Myrick’s 102nd birthday on August 31, 1973, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, Donald Dwight, presented her a commendation for her life’s contributions. Two months later, she died on October 23, 1973, and was buried at the Myrick family plot at The Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.
During this month in which we honor women pioneers, we need to take the time to remember the contributions women have made in the field of medicine in Boston. In the mid-1800s, educational opportunities for women were beginning to open up, although slowly. That all changed on the heels of the historic 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. The change was furthered when Boston University School of Medicine was launched in 1848 as the first female medical school in the United States—and in the world. In addition to the advances made by the likes of Zakrewska and Myrick in Boston, we also need to recognize Dr. Zakrewska’s medical student Rebecca Lee Crumpler, who in 1864, after studying at Boston University, became the first black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. Dr. Crumpler’s story of overcoming a sadly common environment of discrimination for her gender and the color of her skin is truly remarkable.Crumpler, Zakrewska and the Blackwell sistersare all at the vanguard of women in medicine and their determination helped to pave the way for other women who aspire to become doctors, including Dorchester’s very own daughter – Hannah Glidden Myrick.
Sources
Myrick, Carolyn E. The Myricks of Tignish1853-1969. Summerside, PEI, Canada: Williams and Crue Ltd., 1995:
The Myricks
The Myricks continued
Medicine in Maryland, 1752-1920: Hannah Glidden Myrick
George Byron Merrick. Genealogy of the Merrick–Mirick–Myrick family of Massachusetts. (1902)
Smith College
Troy Mckenzie. Women’s Worth Priceless. Written by a Man for Women Empowerment. (2014)
Women Working, 1800-1930. Hannah Glidden Myrick, corresponsence, 1896-1905, papers 1892-1971
The ‘Doctresses of Medicine’: The World’s 1st Female Medical School Was Established in Boston.
The Dorchester Beacon, June 20, 1908; January 16, 1909.
The Boston Globe, December 30, 1957; October 25, 1973