Mary Jane Safford

Mary Jane Safford

Mary Jane Safford-Blake (born December 31, 1834 in Hyde Park , Vermont , † December 8, 1891 in Tarpon Springs , Florida ) was a nurse , doctor , teacher and professor at Boston University . She was the first woman to be elected to the Boston School Committee .

Life

Mary Jane Safford was born in Hyde Park, Vermont, the youngest of five children. Her father was the farmer Joseph Safford and her mother Diantha Little Safford. Her brother Anson was the future governor of the Arizona Territory. Her family moved to Crete , Illinois when she was three years old. Her father died in 1848, and after her mother's death in 1849, Safford returned to Vermont and attended Brigham Academy in Bakersfield . She then went to Montreal for a year to learn French. She learned German while temporarily living with a German family. She returned to Illinois, lived with her brother Alfred Boardman Safford, a businessman, and worked as a teacher at a public school in Shawneetown . In 1858 she moved with her brother to Cairo , where Alfred worked as a banker.

Safford met James Blake in Chicago , whom she married in 1872. She moved to Boston with him . The couple adopted two girls, Margarita and Gladys. After the wedding she called herself Mary Jane Safford-Blake. The marriage ended in divorce in 1880. After the divorce, she resumed her maiden name. Her health was troubled, and in 1886 she and her daughters moved to Tarpon Springs to live with her brother Anson, the former governor of the Arizona Territory. She died in Tarpon Springs on December 8, 1891, at the age of 56. Her grave is in Cycadia Cemetery in Tarpon Springs.

Career

At the beginning of the Civil War , Safford lived with her brother Alfred in Cairo, Illinois. Because of its location, Cairo quickly became a major military supply depot and training center. Diseases spread quickly here. Safford worked as a nurse in the camps. She was introduced to the duties of a nurse by Mary Ann Bickerdyke , also known as Mother Bickerdyke . With the support of her brother Alfred, she provided her patients with food, games, books and writing materials and, in addition to their physical needs, also took care of the psychological ones. She worked tirelessly and also cared for the wounded after the Battle of Shiloh . This gave her the name Cairo Angel , Angel of Cairo. She later worked on the hospital ships on the Mississippi River , the City of Memphis, and the Hazel Dell .

To recover from the exertions and horrors of war, she traveled to Europe in the summer of 1862 . She was a member of the tour company of a friend from Joliet , former Illinois Governor Joel Aldrich Matteson . Her interest in medicine led her to visit hospitals on her travels across Europe and her desire for medical training was awakened. Back in America, she attended the New York Medical College for Women , which was headed by Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier . There she graduated in 1869. That same year she attended a meeting for women's suffrage in Chicago to which she had invited her friend Mary Livermore . The introduction of women's suffrage was another 50 years in coming.

In autumn 1869 Safford traveled to Europe again to study at the General Hospital of the City of Vienna . She then studied in Heidelberg , and at the University of Breslau she was the first woman to perform an ovariectomy . After three years she returned to America and opened a private practice in Chicago in 1872. It was there that she earned her reputation as an excellent medical doctor and became the first female gynecologist in the United States. She married that year and moved to Boston with her husband. She was Professor of Women's Diseases at Boston University School of Medicine . She focused on women's issues, continued to run a private practice and tried to improve the living conditions of working class women. In 1875, she was one of the first women to be elected to the Boston School Committee .

Publications

• Dress Reform: a series of lectures on dress as it affects the health of women , 1874.
• Papers, read at the second congress of women, Chicago, October 15, 16, and 17, 1874: a plea for fallen women , 1874.
• Lac Defloratum , 1874.
• The Etiology and Infectiousness of Puerperal Fever , 1875.
• Pre-natal influence , 1878.
• Health and strength for girls , 1884.

literature

• Leroy H. Fischer: Cairo's Civil War Angel, Mary Jane Safford . In: Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society , No. 54, 1961.
• Mary Elizabeth Massey: Women in the Civil War , University of Nebraska Press, 1994, ISBN 0-8032-8213-3

Web links

• Mary Jane Safford in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Safford, Mary Jane (1834-1891) - Dictionary definition of Safford, Mary Jane (1834-1891) | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary. In: encyclopedia.com. Retrieved April 22, 2017 (English). 
2. ^ Dr Mary Jane Safford (1834-1891) - Find A Grave Memorial. In: findagrave.com. Retrieved April 22, 2017 . 
3. ^ History was made on Dorchester's Meeting House Hill . June 5, 1999 ( highbeam.com ). highbeam.com ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.