Abstract
The Yale School of Medicine began accepting women as candidates for the degree of medicine in the fall of 1916. This decision was consistent with the trend in medical education at the time. While Yale was not the first prestigious Eastern medical school to admit women, joining Johns Hopkins (1893) and the University of Pennsylvania (1914), it was not one of the last. Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons admitted women a year later, but Harvard Medical School held out until 1945. The years 1916--1920 saw the number of women enrolled in medical school almost double. Yale's decision to admit women seems to have been made with little resistance from the faculty. The final decision was made through the encouragement and financial help of Henry Farnam, a professor of economics at Yale, who agreed to pay for the women's bathrooms. His daughter, Louise, was in the first class of women. At graduation she was awarded the highest scholastic honors, the Campbell Gold Prize. From Yale she travelled to the Yale-sponsored medical school in Changsha, China, where she became the first female faculty member, a position she held for twelve years. The impressions of Ella Clay Wakeman Calhoun, the only woman to graduate in the second class of women, are presented here. Since 1916 the Yale School of Medicine has undergone extensive physical and philosophical changes, developments in which women have participated.
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