Elizabeth A. Follansbee

Elizabeth Ann Follansbee (December 9, 1839 – August 22, 1917) was an American medical doctor, the first woman on the faculty of a medical school in California.

Elizabeth A. Follansbee, from a 1910 publication.

Early life

Elizabeth Ann Follansbee was born in Pittston, Maine,[1] or possibly Dorchester, Massachusetts, the daughter Nancy Sherman (Macintosh) and sea captain Alonzo Follansbee.[2] She was the great-granddaughter of Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.[3] She attended medical school at the University of California, one of only two women students enrolled there in 1875. Facing much resistance, she left after a year and continued her medical training at the University of Michigan, before completing her degree in 1877 at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.[1]

Career
A photo spread of the faculty members of the medical school at Southern California, published in 1905, with Follansbee as the only woman professor.

Follansbee returned to California. Along with Charlotte Blake Brown and a few other women doctors, she co-founded the Women and Children's Hospital of San Francisco.[2] For health reasons she moved to Los Angeles in 1883,[1] where she was the first woman admitted as a member of the Los Angeles County Medical Association. She taught pediatrics and chaired the pediatrics department at the University of Southern California,[4] "the first woman medical school faculty member in California".[5] She arranged for women medical school graduates of the school to intern at the Children's Hospital of San Francisco.[6]

She was an assistant editor of The California Medical and Surgical Reporter when it launched in 1905.[7] For two years, she shared a small practice in pediatrics with Rose Talbot Bullard, another early woman physician in Los Angeles.[8] She was also on-call physician at the Florence Home for Erring Girls in the 1890s.[9] When Charlotte Blake Brown died in 1904, Follansbee wrote her colleague's obituary for a professional journal.[10]

Personal life

Follansbee died in 1917, aged 77 years, in Los Angeles.[11] In 1919, the Cabrillo Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution raised money to dedicate a children's hospital bed in memory of Follansbee.[12]

References
  1. George H. Kress, A History of the Medical Profession of Southern California (1910): 134-135.
  2. Adelaide Brown, "The History of the Development of Women in California" California and Western Medicine (May 1925): 579-580.
  3. "Patriotic Ancestry" Southern California Practitioner (1905): 327-328.
  4. "Faculty, Medical College, University of Southern California 1886" Southern California Practitioner (October 1905): frontispiece.
  5. Janice Mall, "Becoming a Doctor in the 19th Century" Los Angeles Times (July 21, 1985).
  6. A. Lois Scully, PMC 1026634 "Medical Women of the West" Western Journal of Medicine (December 1988): 761-763.
  7. "Editorial Notes" Southern California Practitioner (1905): 40.
  8. Cecilia Rasmussen, "2 Doctors Who Overcame Sexism" Los Angeles Times (February 27, 2000).
  9. "It Shelters the Shelterless" Los Angeles Herald (August 31, 1893): 7. via Newspapers.comopen access
  10. Elizabeth A. Follansbee, "Death of Noted Medical Woman" Southern California Practitioner (May 1904): 180-181.
  11. "Dr. Elizabeth Follansbee Dead" Southern California Practitioner (September 1917): 147.
  12. Alice M. Church, "Cabrillo Chapter" Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine (November 1919): 689.
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