Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805-1875) was a self-supporting spinster school teacher when she first became interested in medicine. Her younger sister, Sarah, suffered a debilitating aliment, later identified as consumption, that was exacerbated by the treatment she received from the physicians.
At the time Harriot Hunt began her practice, there were no medical colleges that admitted women. Hunt studied homeopathic medicine under the guidance of Elizabeth and Richard Mott, a pair of homeopaths whose treatments had improved the health of her sister. In 1830, she began practicing in Boston as a physician specializing in the ailments of women and children. Desiring a degree, she applied to Harvard Medical School in 1843, becoming the first woman to apply to Harvard. But her application was denied. Then, in 1850, the university gave her permission to attend lectures. However, the all-male student body refused to attend classes unless she, and the three black students also admitted, withdrew.
Despite the lack of a degree, her renown spread, and she became known as the United State’s first woman doctor. In 1853, the new Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, founded by Lucretia Mott, awarded her an honorary degree.
Over her lifetime, Dr. Harriot Hunt specialized in treating female patients and children. She believed that women patients would be more amenable to sharing personal details with a woman physician. As a homeopath, she used natural herbal medicines and took what she called “heart histories” believing that personal experiences should be used to determine proper treatments. And advocate for healthy living, she gave many lectures on health issues to women
Hunt was a strong supporter of abolition and the rights of women and was an organizer of the First Women’s Rights Convention in 1850. She went on to found several women’s rights organizations. She also protested strongly against to having to pay taxes when she had no vote, submitting petitions to the Boston Tax Department for twenty-five years straight.
This excerpt is taken from the preface of her 1855 book Glances and Glimpses: Or Fifty Years Social including Twenty Years of Professional Life based on the diary she kept since childhood.
Critics, satirists! Here is work for you; there are plenty of defects, plenty of rough granite for your hard natures to hammer upon; an overflow of enthusiasm for you to brand as mere impulse; a coincidence in intuition which will startle your causality, and an undoubting faith in even a grain of “mustard seed.” Farewell on the door steps; let us enter the building, and in examining of its apartments and the uses of each, we shall soon feel at home.
The picture gallery is ready; the sun is at mid-day, (fifty years,) and you are all entitled to your opinions on the pictures. Be kind in your severity, charitable in your criticisms, and find the “stand-point” of the writer before you adjust your glass.
Harriot Kesia Hunt’s Works
“… bringing up daughters for nothing but marriage, mingles poison in the cup of domestic life, is traitorous to the virtue of both sexes, for neither suffers alone–is adverse to the happiness, to the development of conscience and to religion, and introduces to the dwellings of wretchedness and despair. The result of this degradation is pride, intemperance, licentiousness–nay, every vice, misery, and degradation.”
Harriot Kezia Hunt
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