Zakrzewska, Marie

Zakrzewska, Marie (1829–1902), midwife, physician, founder of the New England Hospital for Women and Children.Born in Berlin, Zakrzewska (pronounced Zak‐shef'‐ska) studied midwifery in Germany before coming to America in 1853 to pursue a medical education. Earning her M.D. from Western Reserve College in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1856, she first practiced at the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. In 1859, she moved to Boston to teach at the New England Female Medical College, but soon clashed with the College's founder, Samuel Gregory, over her desire to instruct students in such new scientific techniques as microscopy and thermometry. In 1862, with the support of several of Boston's leading liberal reformers, including Caroline Severance and William Lloyd Garrison, Zakrzewska founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children, where she worked until her retirement in 1899. This institution provided women an opportunity to receive clinical training at a time when most hospital positions were closed to them.

Zakrzewska's strong commitment to scientific medicine was unusual among her contemporaries. At a time when most women physicians justified their entry into the medical profession by emphasizing their caring and sympathetic natures, she insisted that women physicians, like their male counterparts, must develop their scientific investigative skills. Zakrzewska's battles to help women gain entry into the medical profession earned her a reputation as one of the leading women physicians of the nineteenth century.
See also Hospitals; Medicine: From 1776 to the 1870s; Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945.

Bibliography

Agnes Vietor , A Woman's Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D., 1924, reprint 1972.
Virginia G. Drachman , Hospital with a Heart. Women Doctors and the Paradox of Separatism at the New England Hospital, 1862–1969, 1984.

Arleen Marcia Tuchman