Physician's Receipt.
Philadelphia’s Preeminent Female Physician
[Health issues]. Longshore, Hannah E., M.D. Physician’s Receipt. January 2, 1865.
Half-leaf; recto prinited.; faintly browned; creased.
Dr. Hannah Longshore’s printed receipt, filled-in in ink, to Henry J. White and signed by Longshore; paid in full in the amount of fifty dollars. The receipt notes that Longshore’s office – and home – was at 1116 Callowhill Street in Philadelphia, and she kept office hours “From 7 to 9 A.M. and 1 to 3 P.M.” There is a two cent “bank check” stamp affixed to the bottom left-hand corner of the receipt.
Longshore was one of eight members of the first graduating class of the Female (later Women’s) Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1851. Her classmates included Susanna Ellis, Agenette Hunt, Anna Longshore (Hannah’s sister-in-law), Frances Mitchell, Ann Preston, Martha Sawin, and Phoebe Way. Jospeh Longshore – one of the founders of the school and the professor of obstetrics – was Longshore’s brother-in-law, and Anna’s husband.
The first term at the school lasted four months:
[d]uring her first term as a student Hannah probably also acted as demonstrator of anatomy, one of the ‘competent female assistants’ described in the first annual announcement. For the second session, from September to December 1851, her name appears below the faculty as demonstrator: by virtue of this fact she has been called the first woman to hold a faculty position (not a professorship) in an American medical school. (NAW, Vol. II, p. 427)
After graduating, Longshore – a wife and a mother of two children – taught anatomy at the New England Female Medical College in Boston, the Female Medical College in Philadelphia, and Penn Medical University. Around 1852-1853, she set up her private practice at her home on Callowhill Street which was met with public hostility. After Lucretia Mott encouraged her to hold public lectures on physiology and hygiene, Longshore’s reputation soared:
by 1855 she had no further time for teaching or lecturing. Male colleagues who rejected open consultation secretly referred patients to her, often their own wives and daughters. It has been estimated that in her prime she had no fewer than three hundred families in her care, a record rarely succeeded by any of her colleagues, male or female. Ever defiant of convention, she drove her own horse and carriage. She inspired confidence in patients of all classes by her warmth, assurance, and directness, achieved, it is said, at the price of constant struggle with her natural reserve. (NAW, Vol. II, p. 428)
Longshore retired in 1892, after forty years of running her own private practice.
Longshore (1819-1901) was one of seven children born to Samuel and Paulina Myers, a fifth generation Pennsylvania Quaker. She was educated in Quaker schools and supported abolition from an early age; indeed, her parents fostered an atmosphere of liberalism, encouraging regular discussion of current religious and social reforms. She married Thomas Longshore in 1841 and had two children, Channing and Lucretia, who were named for reformers of the period. Hannah – together with Anna, her sister-in-law and future classmate –became an apprentice and tutee of her brother-in-law, Joseph, prior to attending the school he helped to found.
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History of Philadelphia 1609-1884: http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/divinity.063.con.html
American Journal of Public Health: http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/full/94/3/367
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