Early Diversity in the Health Sciences at the University of Michigan

n 1877, the Chronicle, a forerunner of the Michigan Daily, proudly reported that a "student of color" had just enrolled in the Medical Department. The case was noteworthy because the student, The first woman to enroll in the Medical Department, Amanda Sanford (m '71), who was white, had studied at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia and interned at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston before coming to Michigan. She completed her degree in one year, not the required two, while completing an unusually original, clinically based thesis on "Eclampsia puerperalis" (childbed fever). She also graduated with honors.

A year later (1872), the graduating class in medicine included six white women, and their numbers increased steadily thereafter. Eleven women graduated in 1873, thirteen in 1875, and nineteen in 1886, the latter comprising almost a quarter of the graduating class. These figures held through the nineteenth century and then declined as a result of the introduction of selective admissions policies at the urging of organized medicine.

As other health science programs began, women quickly enrolled in them as well. Two of the Upjohn women, Amelia Upjohn and Mary Northcote Upjohn received degrees in Pharmacy in 1871, only two years after the first Pharmacy degrees were awarded. They would be followed by three Upjohn women who took M.D. degrees: Helen M. Upjohn Kirkland (m '72), Pamela (Millie) Kirby Upjohn (m '76), and Mary L. Hoagland Upjohn (m '77). Women also entered dentistry, as noted below, and accounted for all of the enrollment in Nursing until the first degree was awarded to a man in 1968.

A classmate of Amanda Sanford, Gertrude Howe, was responsible for furthering Michigan's third early experiment with diversity in the health sciences--the admission of Asian students. Howe left school to work as a missionary in China before completing her degree. There she met and adopted the daughter of a local Chinese family, Ida Kahn. As the seventh daughter whose horoscope forecast that she was unsuited to marry, Ida Kahn had few prospects for a normal life in China. Howe therefore sent her and another Chinese girl, Mary Stone, to America to study medicine. She chose her alma mater, the University of Michigan.

Ida Kahn and Mary Stone were not the first Asian students at the University. They had been preceded by a Japanese medical student, Saiske Tagei (m '74). They were the first Asian women to graduate from Michigan in medicine, receiving their degrees in 1896. Upon graduation the two returned to Kiukiang, China where they took charge of a hospital built by the dean of the Northwestern University Women's Medical School in Chicago. After several years, Ida Kahn moved to Nanchang and set up a new hospital. Mary Stone later established a hospital in Shanghai. The work of these two women and a Japanese woman with a Michigan degree, Tomo Inouye (m '01) so impressed Regent Levi Barbour during a trip to Asia in 1910 that he resolved to begin a scholarship program to bring Asian women to Michigan--a scholarship program that continues to the present day.

Similar success came to Michigan's early African-American graduates in the health sciences, but without the recognition. Fitzbutler was not unique. Michigan's first woman African-American M.D., There were other pioneering African-American students in the health sciences on campus in the nineteenth century. Dentistry's first African-American student, Ida Gray (d '90), was also the first African-American woman D.D.S. in the US. and the first African-American woman to practice dentistry in Chicago. Born near Cincinnati, she was probably drawn to Michigan by the first Dean of Dentistry, Jonathan Taft (dean, 1875-1903), who had earlier been instrumental in getting women accepted into dentistry at the University of Cincinnati. She was the 23rd woman D.D.S. to graduate at Michigan and a respected community member during her long years of service in Chicago, where she died in 1953.

Two African-American students graduated in Pharmacy in 1892. One, George Jackson (p '92), was one of only two students that year to enter with a bachelor's degree (Oberlin College). He went on to establish the very successful Jackson Drug Store or New Era Pharmacy in Memphis Tennessee. A second unknown African-American Pharmacy student appears in the 1892 Pharmacy class picture.

The fact that so little notice was taken of these and other African-American students indicates that by and large, but within important limits, they were accepted as fellow students. This is not to say that there were no problems. In 1887, William Edward Steers (m '88), an African-American upperclassman, complained to the medical faculty about racial comments made by a white freshman medical student, Walter Sarnes Nash (m '89). The faculty found that Steers had been "obtruding himself upon Mr. Nash's company and interfering with him while in the pursuit of his legitimate work," which may be a polite way of saying that the upperclassman Steers was hazing freshman Nash. They therefore dismissed the charges, but not without warning Nash that he was "to refrain from similar language in the future, and from any insulting remarks based on prejudice on account of color in the presence of any colored student while in the University."

The limits of African-American student participation in university life before the 1960s are clearly illustrated by the case of Marjorie Franklin (n '27). Nursing students were required to live in the nursing quarters in the 1920s. As an African-American, Franklin was excluded. The University offered her separate "coloured" housing. Through her lawyer, Oscar Baker (l '02), she asked for equal treatment. Her case was appealed to the Regents but did not meet with sympathy. It was referred back to the University Hospital, where it was quietly dismissed a few months later.

The diversification of the health sciences does not end with African-Americans, women, Asians, and Hispanics. Limits were placed on the admission of Jewish students into the 1950s. White males filled most of the places in medicine, white females all of the places in nursing well into the 1960s and in dental hygiene through the 1980s. Moreover, as policies slowly changed in the 1970s and 1980s, new problems emerged. A hundred years ago, a Michigan education was inexpensive and within the reach of any student willing to wait tables in a boarding house or pick up other odd jobs. Today, rising costs are creating a new group of "excluded" students, the so-called middle class.

Michigan's pioneering "minority" students have enriched both the University and society as a whole. They have been achievers. They have broadened the University's ties to society and through these ties the University's ability to serve. Their experiences are vital to our understanding of a Michigan education, both historically and as it exists today. Their history, unfortunately, has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Important chapters on the history of the University's diversity are waiting to be written, even as that history continues to be made.

-Nicholas H. Steneck

-Photographs courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library, the Medical School, and School of Dentistry, University of Michigan.
-Steve Merrill, a graduate student in nursing, discovered the Marjorie Franklin case while doing research on the first male students in nursing.

Early Diversity in the Health Sciences at the University of Michigan

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