Mary Bennett Ritter: An Online Exhibit of a Stanford Medicine Pioneer

During California’s Mexican period (1821-1848), perhaps the most prominent medical practitioner near the present site of Stanford was the curandera (healer), Juana Briones. Like many residents of Mexican California, her forebears were African, Native, and Spanish.

Doña Juana Briones
Courtesy the US National Parks Service

By 1848, when the United States took control of California, the practice of medicine was undergoing a process of exclusion and professionalization. At that time, teaching and enrollment at US medical schools were almost exclusively the purview of white men. Countering this trend was the establishment in 1850 of one of the earliest medical schools for women: the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Among the Women’s Medical College’s predominantly white early graduates were Black and Native physicians such as Dr. Eliza Grier and Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte.

Dr. Eliza Grier
Courtesy the Legacy Center, Drexel University, College of Medicine

Dr. Euthanasia Meade received her MD degree from Women’s Medical College in 1869 and later established her practice in San Jose as one of California’s first female physicians.

Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania
Courtesy the National Library of Medicine

Dr. Meade was soon approached by a young local woman with an interest in medicine. Mary Bennett had grown up in a farming family in Salinas, California. Dr. Meade agreed to take Bennett on as her apprentice. Bennett subsequently enrolled at Cooper Medical College in San Francisco - the first medical school in California and the school that later became Stanford Medicine.

Tribute to Dr. Euthanasia Meade by Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter and Dr. Sarah Shuey, Published in the Pacific Medical Journal 1896
Courtesy the Stanford Medical History Center