"I Haven't Time to Write": Martha May Eliot and American Medical Education Reform

"We are up to our eyes in work. I have about 32 children tonight all with some contagious disease, if not two, and several very sick!" wrote Dr. Martha May Eliot to her parents in 1920, adding, "The hospital is full almost to overflowing and still they come." Eliot, who would go on to become an influential American pediatrician and public health authority, as well as the head of the Federal Children's Bureau, wrote her parents frequently during the course of her education at Radcliffe College (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, Maryland), Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (Boston, Massachusetts), St. Louis Children's Hospital (St. Louis, Missouri), and Yale University Medical School (New Haven, Connecticut). Through these letters, she detailed her experience as a woman professional at elite institutions during a key transformative period in U.S. medicine. This article uses Eliot's collection of correspondence to shed light on physicians' experience of the increasingly rigorous training, testing, and licensing processes introduced in top medical schools and to offer insights into the history of women's medical education and experience in building careers as academic professionals during that time. Eliot's letters also illustrate how the newer, higher standards for medical graduates and postgraduates may have hastened-rather than hindered-the progress of some elite women in the medical profession. Today's physicians and medical educators, as well as those completing graduate training, will find much to draw on from the experience revealed by this rich epistolary archive.