Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier and the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women by Phillip Twining From 1863 to 1918, the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women (NYMCHW) provided medical education and care to women in Manhattan. The hospital was notable for being the first medical college for women in New York City during a time when medical colleges across the country did not permit women to attend.1 The story of the NYMCHW is also the story of its founder, Dr. Clemence Sophia Lozier (1813-1888), and the story of women's rights movements of the nineteenth century in the United States. Within the scope of this essay, I admit that I am only scratching the barest surface of a story that deserves to be told in full. Unfortunately, there is no known collection of Lozier's papers, which is a deep shame because the one available article of hers is piercing and deeply intellectual.2 In response to Dr. William A. Hammond, a practicing physician of neurology in New York City, who in 1883 wrote an article stating that women's brains were simply not structured and sized appropriately for medical study and practice, Lozier challenged his claims within a broader frame of inequality. She wrote, In a true democracy, the question of sex, size, color, property, education, vocation, or race has nothing to do with the inherent right of each individual citizen to be heard in the choice of his or her rulers. Our Government is not a democracy. It is an androcracy. Men rule. The majority even does not rule, for the census shows that women are in the majority in many States. Notwithstanding man's claim to represent woman, cruel laws oppress her. In this State of New York no wife has a right to her offspring, though for them she may have jeoparded her very life. Her husband can legally snatch them away, even in infancy. Nay, he can will them away before their birth. The only child a mother has a right to is an illegitimate one. If women were legislators, would such laws disgrace our statute books? A woman sits disfranchised while a drunken pauper may vote to so open a road as to confiscate her house.3 Other than this article, Lozier haunts the footnotes of biographies of more prominent women trailblazers of the nineteenth century such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She is referred to as a member of the first generation of female gynecologists, an obstetrician, and a general surgeon. She was also an ardent supporter and participant of liberation movements in the United States, including the abolition of slavery and extension of suffrage rights to women.4 Lozier was born Clemence Sophia Harned on December 11, 1813, in Plainfield, New Jersey, and was the youngest of thirteen children. Not much is known about her early childhood, but her mother seems to have encouraged her education and moral development. Harned became an orphan at eleven years old, though the reasons why are not known.5 By 1829 she was married to Abraham W. Lozier. He soon became an invalid, which influenced her decision to pursue an education in medicine.6 Figure 1: circa 1860, Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier (1812-1888), American homeopathic physician and supporter of women's rights (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) From 1832 to 1843, Lozier ran a school for young women at her home on 10th Street near 5th Avenue. (She also hosted meetings of the Anti-Slavery Society at this address.) Since women were not permitted to attend medical colleges, Lozier was forced to borrow medical textbooks from her brother who was studying the field.  She taught other women physiology and female hygiene, which earned her "unfavorable criticism," ostensibly because such things were not talked about openly and seriously.7 But Lozier was determined to provide women with medical knowledge that extended into their cultural world. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later say that such knowledge saved women from the "tyranny of fashion" by explaining "that tight lacing laps the ribs and displaces every vital organ; that high heels throw the spine out of plumb, lay the foundation for all nervous diseases; that tight garters, boots, waistbands, gloves and collars, make so many blockades at every point impeding the free circulation of the blood; that spotted veils over the eyes and nose, injure the sight, and check respiration."8 In 1849, Lozier was finally admitted to Rochester Eclectic Medical College. Later she attended the Syracuse Eclectic Medical College, where she graduated in 1853. In 1860, she began to conduct lectures to women on medicine in her home parlor at 361 West 34th Street.9 Because women were barred from practicing medicine, Lozier was unable though to conduct clinical classes and studies. She decided to work on a campaign with Stanton and other women activists to persuade the New York State Legislature to grant a charter to build her own medical college and hospital.10 After considerable opposition, the Legislature granted her a charter. On November 1,1863, NYMCHW was founded at 724 Broadway. It was the first medical college solely for women students in the state of New York. Lozier assumed the role of Clinical Professor of Diseases of Women and Children and also the Dean of the Faculty, a position she held for twenty-five years without taking a salary. NYMCHW moved locations several times in its history. In 1868 the College moved to 12th Street and 2nd Avenue. In 1872, the College moved to 37th Street and Lexington Avenue, but the site was soon abandoned due to some poor financial decisions that left the institution vulnerable to the Panic of 1873 and declining real estate values. Stanton said that certain male professors influenced the Board of Trustees to buy these large, heavily mortgaged properties over the protestations of Lozier. In 1897, the College and Hospital moved again, this time to 101st Street and Manhattan Avenue in the Bloomingdale neighborhood (referred to as Manhattan Valley today).11 One of the stipulations of the state charter was that women at the college would be permitted to attend clinical lectures at Bellevue Hospital in Kips Bay in Manhattan.  In fact students of any accredited medical institution were permitted to attend these lectures. However, their presence was met with hostility from the male students and professors. Stanton, who marched the women to the first clinical lecture reflected on the experience, Accordingly, at the appointed time, with a class of thirty, I entered the amphitheatre. We were greeted by a thousand students with shouts of derisive laughter, and, ever and anon, during the lecture, were pelted with chewed balls of paper. The professor selected the most offensive subject and disease for the day, thinking thereby to end the experiment. But the question how much we could, should, and would endure had been freely discussed and decided, and it was agreed, by both trustees and students that, barring forcible expulsion, whatever was done and said, we would maintain our ground for one season at least and vindicate the right of our students to all the advantages of clinics and lectures in the hospital . . . . As we left the building, the students had formed themselves into a double line, through which we passed, 'mid jeers and groans, coarse jokes and shouts, pelted with bits of wood and gravel. When seated at last in the omnibuses, they gave three cheers and a tiger. Of course, the lecturer of the day had it in his power to check all such manifestations, but as he encouraged it, we had no appeal.12 In indignation, Lozier called for a public demonstration against Bellevue at Cooper Union Hall. The demonstration was presided over by Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New-York Tribune, and Henry Ward Beecher, famed abolitionist and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. According to Lozier's son, the demonstration paid off and the women were undisturbed from then on.13 Figure 2: New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, Tenth Annual Report, 1872-1873 Although not much is written about the original instructors of the college, Stanton wrote that because of the bar against women studying and practicing medicine the faculty in the beginning was all men by necessity.14 But by 1879, one hundred thirty-six women had graduated from the college and several of the alumnae took positions on the Board of Trustees. Almost immediately the female trustees began to push for more female instructors and for women to take the chairs of the various departments in the college. They then pushed to make all the physicians in the hospital female. This was important to women who had been made to feel ill at ease with the sexism and insensitivity many women had experienced with male doctors.15 Another big change the Board of Trustees enacted was making medical care and prescriptions entirely free--at least for a time--by raising voluntary contributions. The hospital also announced that they would never turn down a patient as long as there was an empty bed.16 The college also steadily increased its resources and requirements for a medical degree, to ensure that its students would be able to work anywhere as medical practitioners. Following Lozier's death in 1888, the new dean of NYMCHW, Dr. Phoebe J. Wait, attested that Lozier had exceeded her expectations. She saw two hundred and nineteen graduated and variously settled in practice from Maine to California; three of them in foreign lands, as medical missionaries. She saw the hospital caring for nearly two hundred patients and the dispensary nearly two thousand annually, and all this done entirely by women whom she had helped to educate. She saw the alumnae unite in their allegiance to their alma mater in efforts which resulted in raising thousands of dollars to sustain the hospital in its usefulness. She saw other colleges established for women in the East and in the West, and old established colleges open their doors to women. More and better than this, she saw the effect which the medical education of women had upon public and private sentiment.17 Figure 3:  Numbers related to care, New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, Annual Report, 1907 Atop her responsibilities at the college and hospital, Lozier became a mainstay in activist circles, hosting and befriending people like Wendell Phillips, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglass. As her son recalled, Her house was a Mecca for all reformers, and bristled like a fortress from garret to cellar with ammunitions of war—documents and pamphlets upon woman's disabilities under the law, arguments and petitions in behalf of suffrage, anti-slavery and temperance, sanitary reform, international arbitration, amelioration of the condition of the Indians, moral education, reform of prisons and insane asylums, etc.18 Her short obituary in the New York Times on April 28, 1888 included an invitation for officers and members of numerous civil rights organizations, including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the National Woman Suffrage Association, the New York City Suffrage League, the City Ladies' Suffrage Committee, the Universal Peace Union, the New York Abolitionists' Reunion, the American Female Guardian Society, and the Moral Education Society. It would not be a stretch to assert that Lozier's political beliefs and activism had some influence in the mission and structure of the Medical College for Women.19 1.  Hospital and Dispensary of the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, Annual Reports 1872-1873, 1907 (New York: New York Medical College and Hospital for Women); Jonathan Davidson, A Century of Homeopaths: Their Influence on Medicine and Health (New York: Springer, 2014), 10-11. 2.  Lillie Devereux Blake, Nina Morais, Sara A. Underwood and Clemence Sophia. "Dr. Hammond's Estimate of Woman,"  The North American Review 137, no. 324 (Nov., 1883): 495-51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25118332. 3.  Ibid., see William A. Hammond, "Women in Politics," The North American Review, 137 no. 32 (August, 1883): 137-146, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25118300 and Albert F. Heck, M.D., "William Alexander Hammond, 1828-1900, Journal of the American Medical Association, 183 (February 9, 1963):170-172), doi:10.1001/jama.1963.63700060033013. 4.  In Memoriam: Clemence Sophia Lozier, M.D., n.p., 1888, 6, 10-12,15.] 5.  Ibid., 50. 6.  "Death of Mrs. Lozier," New York Times, April 28, 1888; "Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier," Encyclopedia of World Biography, Vol. 25 (Detroit: Gale, 2005). 7.  "Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier." 8.  In Memoriam: Clemence Sophia Harned, 50. 9.  Ibid., 28. 10.  Elizabeth Griffin, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1885, 180. 11.  Ibid., 14, 32. 12.  Ibid., 9. 13.  Ibid. 14.  Ibid., 40. 15.  Ibid., 30-35. 16.  Ibid., 33. 17.  Ibid., 31. 18.  Ibid., 11. 19.  "Death of Mrs. Lozier."