Emeline Horton Cleveland

Emeline Horton Cleveland (September 22, 1829 – December 8, 1878)^[1] was an American physician and dean of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She was one of the first women to perform major abdominal or gynecological surgery in the United States, and she established one of the first U.S. programs to train nursing assistants. She suffered from tuberculosis for the last several years of her life.

Early life

Born Emeline Horton in Ashford, Connecticut, to Chauncey Horton and Amanda Chaffee Horton, Cleveland was raised on a farm in Madison County, New York, where she received her schooling from tutors. Since her father died when she was young, Cleveland became a teacher in order to save enough money for college. She enrolled at Oberlin College in 1850, graduating three years later. She spent two years at the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania (later known as the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania), where she earned a medical degree.^[1]

Emeline's longtime friend, Giles Butler Cleveland, went to the Oberlin Theological Seminary at the same time that she went off to Oberlin. While she was in medical school, they married. The couple had some aspirations of working as missionaries, but her husband became ill, eliminating the possibility of mission work. To support them, Cleveland started a medical practice in Oneida Valley, New York. By late 1856, she was invited to teach anatomy courses at the Female Medical College of Philadelphia, so Cleveland and her husband moved back there.^[2]

Career

When the couple moved back to Philadelphia, Cleveland's husband was able to find a job as a teacher. A little over a year after their arrival, he became seriously ill again, and he was left partially paralyzed and out of work. Cleveland stayed at the Female Medical College until 1860, when physician colleague Ann Preston and several local Quaker women paid for Cleveland to go to Paris and London for further studies in obstetrics, gynecological surgery and hospital administration.^[2]

Returning to Philadelphia in 1862, Cleveland became chief resident at the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, which Ann Preston had established while Cleveland was in Europe. The goal of the hospital was to provide patient care experience for medical students at the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, as they often faced discrimination in trying to gain clinical experiences at other hospitals. In 1872, Cleveland became the dean of the medical school when Preston died.^[2] Cleveland established training programs for nurses at the college, and she started one of the earliest training programs for nursing assistants.^[3] Her health was tenuous, and that forced her to step down as dean in 1874.^[2]

In 1875, an article was published in a regional medical journal regarding Cleveland's performance of an ovariotomy in a patient who had been suffering from a cystic tumor of the ovary that had led to a large fluid collection within the abdomen.^[4] One of Cleveland's students wrote the journal article, making a concluding point that Cleveland's work was evidence that women could make good surgeons.^[5]

Influential female physician Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, who attended the Female Medical College in the 1860s, said that Cleveland was "a woman of real ability... personal beauty, and grace of manner."^[6] Author Steven Jay Peitzman wrote that people often commended Cleveland for her femininity and lack of pretension. These factors may have helped her succeed in a male-dominated field because she was not seen as trying to upset the social order between men and women.^[6]

In 1878, Cleveland was named a gynecologist for the Pennsylvania Hospital Department for the Insane, marking one of the first times that a woman had become a physician for a large public hospital. She died of tuberculosis later that year.^[2]

Notes

References

• Peitzman, Steven Jay (2000). A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 9780813528168.

Further reading

• Atwater, Edward C (2016). Women Medical Doctors in the United States before the Civil War: A Biographical Dictionary. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 9781580465717. OCLC 945359277.