Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska

• Born: September 6, 1829
• Birthplace: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: May 12, 1902
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

German-born American physician and social reformer

Zakrzewska brought to medicine a scientific rigor and demanding spirit that elevated the status of women in the medical professions. She was also an enthusiastic socialist and feminist, and both her life and her writing vividly illustrated the need for social and professional reform.

Early Life

Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska (zak-SHEHF-skah) was the daughter of Ludwig Martin Zakrzewska, a German civil servant who had been dismissed from the Prussian army for being too liberal, and Caroline Fredericke Wilhelmina Urban, a trained professional midwife. Her family was from the Polish nobility but had lost everything to Russia in 1793.

As a teenager, Marie accompanied her mother on her midwife’s rounds. In 1849, she enrolled as a midwifery student at Berlin’s Hospital Charité, where her mother had trained. Her mentor and champion there was Joseph Hermann Schmidt, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Berlin and the director of the school of midwifery at Charité. In 1850, Zakrzewska was appointed a teaching assistant and during the following year graduated with highest honors. Shortly before Schmidt died on May 15, 1852, he named Zakrzewska chief midwife at Charité. However, Zakrzewska’s youth and the fact that she was a woman turned the rest of the faculty and staff against her, despite her qualifications. After six months she resigned her prestigious position. In March, 1853, she emigrated to the United States.

Through much of 1853 and 1854, Zakrzewska and two of her four sisters eked out their livings in New York City by making and selling clothes and accessories. On May 15, 1854, Zakrzewska met Elizabeth Blackwell, who had become the world’s first professionally certified woman physician in 1849. Blackwell’s sister Emily had also recently earned a medical degree from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The Blackwell sisters encouraged Zakrzewska to become a physician and helped secure her admission to Western Reserve. Zakrzewska entered the medical school in October, 1854. In March, 1856, she graduated with a medical degree, after writing a thesis on the uterus.

Life’s Work

After obtaining her medical degree, Zakrzewska returned to New York City to begin a small practice under Elizabeth Blackwell’s roof. There she acquired the nickname “Dr. Zak” because few could pronounce her full name. Meanwhile Blackwell was working on her dream of opening a women’s hospital, and Zakrzewska soon proved to be adept at raising funds to support that project. With Emily Blackwell as chief of surgery and Zakrzewska as chief resident physician, Elizabeth Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857. It was the first institution of its kind run entirely by women. Over the next two years, Zakrzewska worked there without pay, while continuing her fund-raising efforts.

In March, 1859, Zakrzewska accepted an invitation to teach obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics at Boston’s New England Female Medical College, which Samuel Gregory had founded eleven years earlier as the world’s first medical school for women only. Zakrzewska began her work there with high hopes to expand the prospects for women in medicine but was soon disappointed. With the exception of obstetrical cases, the school provided no clinical training for its students. Its offerings in anatomy, histology, microscopy, physiology, and other basic medical sciences were far below the standards of contemporary men’s medical schools. Gregory saw nothing wrong with this discrepancy, but Zakrzewska disagreed. She published the lecture she delivered at the opening of the school’s 1859-1860 term; its articulation of her views on the need for higher standards for the medical school instantly created a conflict between her and Gregory.

One irony of Zakrzewska’s situation was that she received a better medical education as a midwifery student in Germany than the New England Female Medical College offered to its students in America. At Charité, she had learned how to use a microscope, but her American medical college refused her request to purchase one. Its administrators told her that American physicians should be capable of diagnosing and treating patients properly without having to use microscopes and other “new-fangled European” gadgets. The college’s founder, Gregory, was not a physician, and he resented Zakrzewska’s attempt to elevate female medical practitioners beyond the level of midwives. His own goal was ideological: to train female obstetricians and thus prevent what he called “man-midwives” from offending the modesty of women in childbirth. The differences between Zakrzewska’s and Gregory’s standards were irreconcilable. Zakrzewska resigned in 1862.

Immediately after Zakrzewska left Gregory’s school, she used the New York Infirmary as her model to found the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. It was the world’s second such institution. She demanded the maximum in clinical competence and managed her hospital’s training facilities with the utmost regard for patients, staff, and trainees. She insisted that all staff members be women, that no alternative practitioners be allowed, and that the recommendations of the emerging science of sanitation be strictly followed. Her hospital flourished and soon became one of the main teaching hospitals in Boston. Among the first generation of women physicians who interned there was Mary Putnam Jacobi.

After starting with only ten beds, Zakrzewska’s New England Hospital grew steadily. In 1872, she moved it to Columbus Avenue in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It then became the first American hospital with a nursing school. In 1873, it graduated Linda Richards as America’s first fully credentialed nurse and in 1879 Mary Eliza Mahoney as the first African American nurse.

Zakrzewska was intensely political and was involved in many other reform causes in addition to medicine. Soon after arriving in Massachusetts, she bought a house in Roxbury, where she became a friend and landlord of Karl Heinzen, a notorious refugee from Germany’s 1848 revolution. Heinzen was an advocate of political assassination, a socialist firebrand, and the publisher of Der Pionier, a radical weekly newspaper, which Zakrzewska supported.

In 1890, Zakrzewska moved to Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where her home became a frequent meeting place for radicals of all sorts, especially feminists. She retired from medicine in 1899 and died in Boston on May 12, 1902, at the age of seventy-two.

Significance

Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska was among the first truly scientific women physicians. She had a dedication to the most challenging aspects of science that was without any trace of sentimentality. An atheist, feminist, radical socialist, and physicalist, she promoted egalitarianism and her chosen political causes boldly and straightforwardly. Nevertheless, she was a compassionate and broadminded clinician who came to be beloved in Boston.

Zakrzewska’s New England Hospital for Women and Children grew to eight buildings by the 1930’s. After World War II it was still a major institution in Boston medicine, but by then its mission had changed. In 1969, to reflect its new role, it was renamed the Dimock Community Health Center after Susan Dimock, a surgeon who had been on Zakrzewska’s staff from 1872 until her untimely death by shipwreck in 1875. The hospital’s modern mission is no longer clinical training for women physicians and nurses, but rather health care for the urban poor. Its campus includes the Zakrzewska Medical Building, first built in 1872 and restored during the 1980’s by Historic Boston Incorporated.

Bibliography

Goldstein, Linda Lehmann. “Without Compromising in Any Particular: The Success of Medical Coeducation in Cleveland, 1850-1856.” Caduceus 10, no. 2 (Autumn, 1994): 101-115. Contains information about Zakrzewska’s experience as one of the earliest women medical students.

Seller, Maxine, ed. Women Educators in the United States, 1820-1993: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Includes an article by Maureen A. Kingston on Zakrzewska.

Tuchman, Arleen Marcia. “’Only in a Republic Can It Be Proved That Science Has No Sex’: Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska (1829-1902) and the Multiple Meanings of Science in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 1 (Spring, 1999): 121-142. A scholarly analysis of the impact of Zakrzewska’s career on political reform.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Situating Gender: Marie E. Zakrzewska and the Place of Science in Women’s Medical Education.” Isis 95, no. 1 (March, 2004): 34-57. An extension of Tuchman’s 1999 article, focusing on Zakrzewska’s opposition to Samuel Gregory at Boston’s New England Female Medical College.

Zakrzewska, Marie Elizabeth. “Fifty Years Ago: A Retrospect.” Woman’s Medical Journal (Toledo) 1 (1893): 193-195. A brief reminiscence of the era in medicine before women physicians.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Practical Illustration of “Woman’s Right to Labor”; Or, A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D., Late of Berlin, Prussia. Edited by Caroline H. Dall. Boston: Walker, Wise, 1860. The earliest of Zakrzewska’s several autobiographies. The full text is on the Web at www.fullbooks.com/a-practical-illustration-of-woman-s-right-to.html.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Edited by Agnes C. Vietor. 1924. New York: D. Appleton, Arno, 1972. A compelling autobiography.