American Medical Biographies/Thompson, Mary Harris
Thompson, Mary Harris (1829-1895).
Mary Harris Thompson was known as the first woman who specialized in surgery and was remarkable for her splendid organizing and administrative ability. Little is known of her early life beyond the simple fact of her birth at Fort Ann, New York State, in 1829, and of her education at West Poultney Academy, Vermont.
In 1859, at the age of thirty, she began to study medicine at the New England Female Medical College. Dr. Zakrzewska (q.v.), at that time professor of obstetrics there, wrote: "Dr. Thompson commenced her studies with me in 1859. She graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, serving a year as interne with Dr. Emily Blackwell (q.v.). She was the first woman surgeon who performed capital operations entirely on her own responsibility."
Mary Thompson began to practise in Chicago in 1863, and two years later founded a hospital for women and children. The building which housed this work was swept away in the fire of 1871, and within twenty-four hours the Relief and Aid Society sent an appeal to Dr. Thompson to reestablish it, the society offering to provide means; during this period of tremendous emergency, first a house and later a barracks was utilized and the sick, maimed and burned were brought to the building before beds could be put in. In 1873, when the erection of permanent quarters was contemplated, the Relief and Aid Society gave $25,000 on condition that twenty-five patients should be cared for constantly. In the campaign for raising funds, Dr. Thompson visited Boston, her appeal there meeting with generous response, and the institution which bears her name, the Mary Thompson Hospital of Chicago for Women and Children, was soon an accomplished fact. Thirty years she labored there, doing all the surgical work, with wonderful precision and dexterity of manipulation.
But professional eminence was not her only claim to remembrance; her philanthropy was catholic, and she was also a firm suffragist and agitated the question among her pupils.
The Chicago Medical College Department of North Western University conferred a degree on Dr. Thompson in recognition of her work, the only one it had ever granted to a woman. She also became a member of the International Medical Association in 1887, and of the Chicago Medical Society.
Dr. Thompson passed away in the midst of her activities after an illness of only twenty- four hours on May 21, 1895.
Several years after her death a memorial bust of Dr. Thompson, the work of the well-known sculptor, Daniel C. French, was presented by her friends to the Art Institute of Chicago.