Doctor or Doctress?

Explore American history through the eyes of women physicians

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Eliza Anna Grier was an African American who graduated from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1897. In 1901 Grier was practicing medicine in South Carolina and struggling to maintain her practice while battling health issues of her own. On March 7 of that year Grier wrote to Susan B. Anthony, President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, to appeal to her for financial help.

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“She Has Undertaken a Herculean Task”: Early African American Women Physicians

Susan B. Anthony was a renowned activist for temperance, labor rights, educational reform, abolition, and most famously, women’s rights. Her work writing and speaking on behalf of these reforms convinced her that women needed the right to vote to truly influence legislation. She founded the A leader of the woman suffrage movement, Anthony was arrested in Rochester, NY in 1872 for voting in an election. She founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, which eventually became the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Anthony was serving as honorary president of NAWSA at the time she wrote this letter in 1901. Eliza Grier was born into the last years of slavery in North Carolina in 1862. She went on work her way through Fisk University in Tennessee and then attended Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania on scholarship, graduating with her MD in 1897. She eventually set up a practice in Greenville, South Carolina, serving an impoverished community.

Dr. Grier, sick with “La grippe” (the flu) and struggling to keep her practice afloat because most of her patients were poor and presumably not always able to pay for her care, sought the assistance of Susan B. Anthony, one the most famous women’s rights advocate and social reformers of her time. That Grier thought to appeal to this prominent white woman for help speaks to the changes in a society where women of disparate backgrounds found some common cause in the struggle to gain equal rights.

Creator: Grier, Eliza Anna

Contributor: Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906

Language: english

Item Number: a266_1897grier

Pages: 3

Size: 19.6x12.3

Physical Collection: Records of W/MCP: Registrar 1921-1975 (ACC-266), ACC-266

Finding Aid: archives.drexelmed.edu/collect/inventories/a266_inventory.pdf

Link to OPAC Record: http://innopac.library.drexel.edu/search/c?SEARCH=ACC-266

Cite this source: Title of document, date. Early African-American Woman Physicians: She has undertaken a Herculean task. Doctor or Doctress?: Explore American history through the eyes of women physicians. The Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine Archives & Special Collections. Philadelphia, PA. Date of access. http://lcdc.library.drexel.edu/islandora/object/islandora:1856

African American women physicians

Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906

Grier, Eliza Anna

Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania--Alumni and alumnae

Greenville (SC)

Rochester (NY)