In the waning years of the nineteenth century, future doctors kept falling sick. Students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) in Philadelphia regularly described the illnesses roiling their ranks. In diaries and other manuscripts relating their classroom triumphs, clinical foibles, and romantic entanglements, students recounted classmates who were wracked with pneumonia or delirious with fevers that kept them “rav[ing] all night long.” Much of the city shuddered from waves of typhoid fever, likely due to feces-flecked water squiggling through the Schuylkill River and into homes and businesses. WMCP wasn’t spared. Ingesting contaminated water could leave students clammy and uncomfortable, feverish and splotched with a rash. Someone’s stomach would heave as they vomited, their abdomen cramping with bouts of diarrhea. Resulting dehydration could be fatal.
Of course, this period at the cusp of the twentieth century was neither the first nor the last time that a school would wrestle with outbreaks of illness; that continues today. Long before universities responded to Covid-19 with testing infrastructure or by cloistering infectious students in isolation housing, the trainees at WMCP pushed for a collaborative and long-term solution on their own terms. Students insisted on an endowed bed at the local Woman’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where cash-strapped classmates could convalesce at no cost to themselves.
Archival materials don’t paint a clear picture of why students pushed for a hospital bed at this particular moment, but the women were acutely aware of classmates’ illnesses and deaths. In addition to commenting on these in diary entries, student groups sometimes drafted sorrowful condolences to mail to mourning families. And mutual aid had deep roots in the city; Philadelphia had been home to mutual aid efforts for over a century. Local collectives such as the Free African Society had been instrumental in responding to the city’s devastating yellow fever epidemic in 1793, often at great risk to the group’s already marginalized Black members, who could contract the disease while offering assistance. Whether they knew it or not, students at WMCP, a racially integrated school, were participating in a rich tradition when they set up a system for taking care of each other.