By Shannon Butler
Poughkeepsie is an enigma. It’s a place that has inspired people to come and to do great work. Its views have inspired beautiful art, and its schools have produced great minds. On the other hand, it is also a place that has inspired people to leave because of its reputation for making people ill. In the latter half of the 19th century, Poughkeepsie was both the glorious Queen City on the Hudson, full of opportunity and progressive thinkers, as well as the “Sickly City,” with water problems and constant outbreaks of various diseases, most commonly typhoid fever. With the opening of Vassar College in 1865, Poughkeepsie also began to attract a new lifeform, which had not before been seen in professional circles: the female physician. We will be going into much greater depth on this topic at an upcoming event this summer; check your Summer Rotunda!
Now, I don’t wish to go into a full history of women in medicine, as that subject is well covered by historians such as Regina Morantz-Sanchez and Olivia Campbell. But just to give a little timeline here, the first American woman to earn a degree in medicine was Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849, at the Geneva Medical College. By 1880, there were a few medical schools that accepted women on a regular basis, and by the end of the nineteenth century, female physicians numbered between four and five percent of the profession. Interestingly, this figure would remain relatively stable until the 1960s.
One Dutchess County native was born to be a part of the medical profession, even if she had to fight for her place. Phoebe Thorne was born in 1851 in Millbrook, the daughter of Dr. John Thorne, and she seemed destined to enter into medicine at an early age. After her literary education at the Nine Partners Boarding School, she assisted her father with his medical work in Millbrook. From there she studied in a four year course at the Women’s Medical College in New York, where she studied under Dr. Emily Blackwell, and graduated in 1878. During the course of her education, she married a man named Albert Williamson. They had a daughter together, but by 1891 Albert divorced Phoebe on the grounds of desertion.
And of course he did; Dr. Williamson was a busy woman after all, not just some housewife. Not only was she a practicing physician who had taken over her father’s practice in Millbrook, but by 1884 she had made her way down to New York City, where she became the first woman to be appointed to the medical staff of the Brooklyn Eastern District Hospital. She was voted in by the trustees for her ability to treat “women’s diseases.” However, she was not met with approval from her male colleagues. In fact, there was a rumor going around that some of the younger male physicians were going to submit their resignations as a result of her being appointed. One such doctor said that her, “appointment is simply a sentimental one and sentiment is a dangerous element to enter into the practice of medicine,” to which one of the hospital trustees who approved her appointment replied, “That was a queer remark to make, it seems to me that the opposition is sentimental, and the appointment is purely practical.”
After working in Brooklyn for a couple of years, Dr. Williamson decided to come back to Dutchess County. In 1886, she purchased a brick building at 40 Cannon Street in Poughkeepsie to establish a woman’s hospital. A year later, in July, she purchased the old Brook’s Seminary for Young Ladies that stood on Hooker Avenue for $11,000, and began refitting it into a grand hospital for women. She called it the Poughkeepsie Sanitarium. You could find regular advertisements for this establishment in the Poughkeepsie Journal with an image that showed the lovely building and the statement made that: “Medical and Surgical Diseases of Women a Specialty, persons also received for treatment, change, rest or recreation, placing them under well regulated hygienic conditions so helpful in the treatment of chronic invalids or the overtaxed.”
Newspapers claimed that she had a lucrative practice, but she closed down the Poughkeepsie Sanitarium sometime around 1894. She continued to maintain a small practice and lived at 221 Mill Street. In 1900, she appeared as a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine before retiring to her old residence here on Mill Street. In 1912, she sold the giant building on Hooker Ave to the Putnam Hall School for $19,200. She died in 1920 at the age of 68, and is buried at the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. She has the honor of being one of the first female physicians voted into the Dutchess County Medical Society.
