Harriot Kezia Hunt

• Harriot Hunt
• Born: November 9, 1805
• Died: January 2, 1875

Physician and medical reformer, was born in Boston, the daughter of Joab Hunt and Kezia (Wentworth) Hunt. Her father was a ship joiner and navigator who made small investments in ships sailing from Boston wharves. Harriot and her younger sister Sarah Augusta were raised in a nautical milieu and a religious atmosphere. Their mother, a former Episcopalian, and their father, a Congregationalist, reared the children as Universalists (Harriot Hunt eventually became a Swedenborgian), encouraging them to read extensively and to think about social and political issues. They were educated in schools set up by women in the neighborhood. Inspired, Hunt established a school of her own in 1827, a few months before her father died of a heart attack.

In 1830 Sarah Hunt became ill. Conventional doctors used leeches and calomel unsuccessfully. The Motts, a British couple just arrived in Boston, helped her considerably, interesting both sisters in medical science. With only their mother’s encouragement, they learned from the Motts and pushed through the “huge, unwieldy body” of established medical understanding, to a focus on physiology and prevention. Starting to practice in 1835, the sisters often succeeded where other physicians failed. Like many women reformers of their time, they viewed the science of life as their proper professional sphere, and in concentrating on prevention they forged ties to bourgeois reform as a whole—ties that accounted in part for the viability of their activity. They stressed hydrotheraphy, diet, and hygiene and provided reassurance and, in a sense, psychotherapy for many neurasthenic women. Harriot Hunt later wrote in her autobiography that she and her sister were greatly surprised “by the successful termination of many of our cases through prescriptions for mental states.”

Excluded from hospitals, the Hunts attended to many cases that had been viewed as lost in the Boston countryside. Continuing on her own after her sister married and dropped medicine in 1840, Harriot Hunt widened her practice and used her growing reputation to advocate health education; in 1843 she organized a Ladies’ Physiological Society among patients and friends. After Elizabeth Blackwell enrolled in the Geneva (New York) Medical College in 1847, Hunt won the support of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes for admission to Harvard Medical School, of which he was the dean. The Harvard board, however, rejected her application.

Hunt returned to her own practice and lectures, beginning to connect women’s medical needs with the exploitation of female labor and lack of education. In October 1850 she met Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and other feminists at the first national women’s rights convention at Worcester, Massachusetts. Lecturing widely on why women should become medical doctors, she now also fought against slavery. Allowed in November 1850 to attend medical lectures at Harvard, she was forced out by students, whose hostility, she said, gained “for themselves a notoriety they will not covet in years to come.” Nevertheless, she felt that the public discussion of her presence had much educational value.

An honorary M.D. from the Female Medical College of Philadelphia pleased her, however, and she continued to serve as a medical consultant for the rest of her life and to champion reform. She founded a school of design in Boston to widen economic opportunities for women, organizing petitions for equal educational opportunities and protesting taxation by a state that would not permit her to vote. To friends Hunt expressed satisfaction with her medical accomplishments. She commissioned a statue of the goddess Hygeia by the black sculptor Edmonia Lewis for her family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. She died in Boston at sixty-nine of Blight’s disease and was buried at Mount Auburn.

Among the first women to make a mark in the American medical profession, she paved the way for others in the 1850s and 1860s. This, and the fact that she connected the activity of female medical practice to other reforms, distinguished her life.

Biographical sources include her autobiography, Glances and Glimpses (1856); J. R. Chadwick, “The Study and Practice of Medicine by Women,” International Review, October 1979; B. R. Parkes, Vignettes (1866); Eminent Women of the Age (1869); E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881); W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980). See also Notable American Women (1971) and the Dictionary of American Biography (1932).