Glances and Glimpses; or Fifty Years Social, Including Twenty Years Professional Life.
Hunt, Harriot K., M.D. Glances and Glimpses. Or Fifty Years Social, Including Twenty Years Professional Life. Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1856.
8vo.; purple cloth, decoratively stamped in blind and gilt; rubbed; spine sunned.
First edition of this memoir by a pioneer woman physician; with separate dedications to Hunt’s only sibling, her younger sister Sarah, and to Sarah M. Grimké; the tribute to the latter reads, in part: “You have elevated, deepened, and brightened my public life, by your high-toned principles…Your moral courage in living out the internal, is so blended with your religious responsibilities, that harmony has a meaning when applied to you. (Heaven bless and guide your declining years.) As a woman, rare and true, you have done much for me, and also for every woman engaged in the reforms of the day.”
A wonderful secondary association: James Russell Lowell’s copy, with his charming pencil note made on the final text leaf in the year of his death: “Feb. 8, 1891—This day I have finished reading this book, and have found it to be one of the most interesting books I have ever perused.”
Boston-born Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805-1875) began school at the age of 22, but gave up education for medicine following her sister’s recovery, in 1833, from a severe three-year illness. Without formal training, the Hunt girls devoted every spare moment to the study of medicine, and gradually established themselves in the community. (The “M.D.” Harriot appended to her name on the title page of this book and elsewhere derives from the honorary degree granted her in 1853 from the Female Medical College of Philadelphia, following an unsuccessful attempt to convince Harvard Medical School to admit her; in 1850 they reversed their opinion, but she was driven away by the public protests of irate students.) Their surprisingly successful methods, directed primarily at women and children, “consisted of good nursing and attention to diet, bathing, exercise, rest, and sanitation. Their patience, sympathy, and quiet confidence, which did much to relax tensions, seem to have been a major source of their success” (NAW II, pp. 235-36). Though their work led them to inquiry into the treatment of mental illness, after Sarah gave over medicine for marriage in 1840 Harriot narrowed her focus on physiologically-based treatments, and “continued an ever-widening practice in Boston and the vicinity that in time brought her an independent fortune.
She also began to play a more public role, first as an advocate of health education and then in the cause of social reform. Convinced that ignorance of physiology was a major cause of illness among married women, she organized in 1843 a Ladies Physiological Society among some of her patients and their friends in Charlestown, Mass., to which she gave informal talks, followed by discussion. …In 1849 [she] undertook a course of free public lectures in physiology and hygiene in a working-class district of Boston. (NAW II, p. 236)
Primed for a career in public advocacy, Hunt attended the first national woman’s rights convention, in Worcester, October 1850, where she met and was inspired by Lucretia Mott, Paulina Wright Davis, Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown (Blackwell). Both the necessity for female M.D.s and her commitment to abolition motivated her nationwide lecture tours, and by the mid-‘50s she was an established feminist.
She subsequently helped found a school of design in Boston for women, to widen their opportunities for employment; she petitioned the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1853 for equal educational rights for women; and for two decades, beginning in 1852, she accompanied her annual tax payment to the Boston authorities with a protest against taxing the property of one not permitted to vote because of sex, her protests being regularly published in the newspapers… Sometimes called the first woman to practice medicine in the United States, Harriot Hunt was cle
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