Marie Elisabeth Zakrzewska was a Polish physician who made her name as a pioneering female doctor in the United States.
Background
Zakrzewska was born on September 6, 1829 in Berlin, Germany. The Zakrzewski family, formerly extensive landowners in Poland, were dispersed in 1793. Marie's father, Ludwig Martin Zakrzewski, went to Berlin, where he served as an army officer and later as a governmental official, but his liberal tendencies lost him his position, and his wife, descended from the gypsy tribe of the Lombardi, became a midwife in order to support her family of seven children.
Thwarted in her desire to become a physician, Zakrzewska emigrated with one of her sisters to America, arriving in New York in May 1853. There she remained in poverty for a year, earning, by sewing, a meager living for herself, her sister, and two more of the children who had joined her. Not unmindful of her original idea in coming to America, she turned to Elizabeth Blackwell, already qualified as a physician, for help in obtaining a medical education. In spite of the fact that she could hardly say a word in English, she was sent to Cleveland Medical College, a department of Western Reserve College, which had opened its doors to women in 1847. Helped by friends and encouraged by the dean, John J. Delamater, she received her degree of M. D. in 1856. She returned to New York, helped Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister to raise funds both there and in Boston, and served as resident surgeon in the newly founded New York Infirmary (1857), staffed entirely by women. The next year she accepted the chair of obstetrics in the New-England Female Medical College, Boston. After three years, dissatisfied because of the lax standards of the college and the failure of the trustees to build her a hospital for clinical work, she resigned. Willing friends assisted her in starting a little ten-bed hospital of her own, the nucleus of the large New England Hospital for Women and Children. For some years she acted as resident physician, matron, head nurse, and general manager. She was virtually head of the hospital from its founding (1862) for a period of forty years. Here she carried on her duties as a physician and taught two generations of women to become nurses or doctors. At the same time her private practice increased rapidly, and she became the outstanding woman physician in New England. In addition, she gave many lectures on a wide variety of subjects, and became an outspoken and radical abolitionist, closely associated with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and others. Retiring in 1899, she died a few years later after a period of invalidism.