Medical School Recollection
The Beginning
In the 1930s a woman entering the medical profession was out of the
ordinary
Joyce Thomas
Anatomy. The first class in the first year of medical school took place
in a long, cold room, with rows of examining tables that held shrouded
objects smelling of formaldehyde — their stark contents to be disclosed
and investigated. Eleanor Rodgerson, MD, class of 1935, still recalls
the “fear and apprehension” the class evoked for her and other
young medical students. Biochemistry followed, with its own particular
anxieties, this time in the form of sliderules, which some classmates
adroitly used for quick calculations but she had never even seen before.
At a time when very few women studied medicine, there were five women
in this incoming class of 50 students, more than twice the national average — not
an unusual statistic for Stanford where women had been admitted to train
in medicine from the school’s earliest days. Overall, Rodgerson
noticed little prejudice or discrimination though individual instances
of bias did occur. For example, the urology professor permitted no females
in his class. And a woman physician gave a short course in contraception
one afternoon — but no women were allowed to attend! In the final
year, however, competition for residencies grew very intense and then
just being female became a drawback. Rodgerson recalls hearing comments
such as “You’ll get pregnant and drop out” or “You’ll
take a good man’s place.”
The first year, on the Stanford campus, had allowed for quiet and meditation.
The second year brought the excitement of living in San Francisco and
studying at Lane Hospital, one of an imposing array of medical school
buildings at Webster and Clay.
“It was exciting, the steady murmur of activity stimulating,” Rodgerson
recalls. Beginning clinical students “worked up” patients,
doing all the preliminary blood work and preparing for formal rounds
with formidable, exacting professors. “We were the lowest rung of
the medical hierarchy,” she says. In the “L” (lues venera,
i.e. syphilis) clinic, students perfected intravenous and intramuscular
injection techniques using arsphenamines and bismuth, chemicals that
predated antibiotics in the treatment of the disease, which was called
by its more acceptable Latin name.
Some clinical cases were seen at San Francisco County Hospital. Normally,
the students rode the streetcar from Lane to County but one day a fellow
student drove her little, two-seated car, with four occupants in all.
The smallest woman sat on Rodgerson’s lap. On the way back to Lane,
all went well until at a busy intersection, a car hit them. Slowly, their
car tumbled over. A policeman ran up, opened the upper door and the women
climbed out, one by one, groaning but not hurt. “Passersby watched
in amazement as we continued to emerge from the vehicle,” she says.
Then the four students transferred to a streetcar.
“Medical school was a foundation and a beginning, but only a beginning,” says
Rodgerson now. “As years passed, I became more and more conscious
of how much more knowledge and practice would be necessary to care for
and better the problems of patients. It took more years of contact to
take what I had learned and to apply it with empathy.”
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