Career
In 1867, she co-founded I.C. Sorosis at Monmouth College in Illinois, the first secret collegiate society for women patterned after men’s fraternities, which later adopted the Greek name Pi Beta Phi (ΠΒΦ). Pi Beta Phi is now an international organization with over 300,000 members. At a time when there were only a few hundred women physicians in the United States she received the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1879.
The only daughter among five children born to an Illinois farming couple, Nicol graduated from Monmouth College (Illinois) in 1868.
She continued her education at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and graduated with an Doctor of Medicine degree in 1879. She then interned at New England Hospital in Boston.
In 1880, she sailed to Switzerland and enrolled in the University of Zurich, where she "attended two lectures daily and the remainder of the time devoting to the clinics and the hospitals. Am also having practice work in the pathological laboratory…" There she died an untimely death from meningitis and/or complications of pneumonia.
In her honor, Pi Beta Phi, the sorority she helped found, built and supplied the Jennie Nicol Memorial Health Center that operated in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, from 1922 until 1965.
