The San Francisco Experiment: Female Medical Practitioners Caring for Women and Children, 1875-1935

Abstract

Prior to 1911 when California women gained suffrage, women’s health issues were rarely deemed important. In early 1875, Drs. Charlotte B. Brown and Martha E. Bucknell established the Pacific Dispensary Hospital for Women and Children as a public health model for indigent children and an urban clinical-training facility for female health professionals. This paper will look at how Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown (1846-1904) and Dr. Adelaide Brown (1867-1940), mother and daughter activists for women and children’s health, shaped medicine in San Francisco. They had forceful personalities, yet their experiment to foster a community of female health care providers to directly serve women and children proved to be more fragile than anticipated. After Dr. Charlotte Brown’s death in 1904, her daughter picked up where her mother left off despite opposition to take on the dairy industry throughout her career in long campaigns to regulate milk products.