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

Cooper Medical College in San Francisco
Courtesy the Stanford Medical History Center

At Cooper Medical College, there was only one other woman in Mary Bennett’s class - Mary Delano Fletcher. The two became close friends. Bennett wrote of her student days with Fletcher:

The men students were for the most part friendly. Some left us severely alone but all save one were gentlemanly. He, although a scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, was not a gentleman in any sense of the word. He was simply vulgar; gloried in obscene stories, and so could make us very uncomfortable, especially in the dissecting room. But some of the men students squelched the vulgarity, which, with the utter indifference on our part, put an end to his petty persecutions.

Mary Bennett’s 1886 handwritten MD thesis
Courtesy the Stanford Medical History Center

Children’s Hospital in San Francisco in the 1930s
Courtesy the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Bennett and Fletcher received their MD degrees in 1886 and both went to intern at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. The hospital had been founded as the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children by three female physicians - Dr. Charlotte Blake Brown, Dr. Sara Brown, and Dr. Martha Bucknell - with funding from female philanthropists. Its mission was:

To provide for women the medical aid of competent women physicians and to assist in educating women for nurses and in the practice of medicine and kindred professions.

1882 portrait of Mary Bennett
Courtesy the Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego