Early Women Physicians: Claribel Cone

 Claribel Cone was born on November 14, 1864, to German immigrants Herman and Helen (Guggenheimer) Cone (Kahn), the fifth of thirteen children. Her father had immigrated to Richmond, Virginia, in 1846 and worked as a dry-goods peddler. Within ten years he settled in Jonesboro, Tennessee, became a co-owner of a grocery store, married, and began a family.

In 1871, they moved to Baltimore, where Herman opened a wholesale grocery business and purchased an elegant, spacious home on Eutaw Place in 1880, becoming part of Baltimore’s flourishing German Jewish community. On Herman Cone’s retirement, his two oldest sons and business partners sold the grocery firm and went into the textile business, moving to Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 1890s and eventually building their own mills. Cone Mills prospered, becoming the world’s leading producer of denim by the 1920s.

Young Claribel Cone loved to read and write, studied botany and German, and enjoyed playing the piano and painting watercolors. She graduated from the Baltimore Western Female High School in 1883. Though her parents encouraged marriage, Cone decided to study at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore to become a physician. First in her class, she graduated in 1890 and undertook postgraduate study at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She won one of five internships at the Philadelphia Blockley Hospital for the Insane.

On returning to Baltimore in 1893, Claribel Cone announced that she preferred medical research and teaching to clinical practice. She secured a position as a lecturer in hygiene at the Women’s Medical College of Baltimore. Appointed full professor in 1895, she taught pathology at the college until it closed in 1910.

Between 1903 and 1913, Claribel Cone traveled to Europe nearly every summer and spent several winters at the Senckenberg Pathological Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focused on tuberculosis and the behavior of fatty tissue under normal and pathological conditions. She worked in laboratories under several distinguished pathologists and published at least two articles but did not seem to consider herself a fully established professional in her field and was grateful when mentors praised her work. “It is one of the most flattering and charming things that has ever happened to me in my life—to be approved of as woman and as worker by [Dr. E. Albrecht], one of the most talented yet critical and learned men in the world,” she wrote to her sister Etta in 1910.

Claribel Cone’s competing passion was collecting “beautiful things,” which she said in 1928 that she had enjoyed “ever since I was a small girl and picked up all the shells I could find, reveling in their color and in their forms.” 

In Paris in 1903, Leo and Gertrude Stein introduced their Baltimore friends Claribel and Etta Cone to struggling artists Picasso and Matisse, encouraging the sisters to “indulge in romantic charity” and buy some of the artists’ work. Drawing on their inherited yearly incomes of $2,400 ($64,500 today), the Cone sisters gradually purchased works by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Gaugin, Van Gogh, and others, selecting pieces to adorn the walls of their adjoining Baltimore apartments. 

After World War I, high profits at Cone Mills enabled the sisters to buy more expensive oil paintings. At Etta’s death in 1949, their extensive and world-famous art collection featured over two hundred works by their favorite, Henri Matisse, spanning fifty-two years.

Cone continued to work and study with medical colleagues while living in Munich from 1914 to 1921. Despite her delight in intellectual and social companionship, Cone always lived alone after she left the family home. Her Munich letters report nearly daily social engagements and frequent trips to the opera, concerts, and plays, though she commented in 1920, “On the whole I find things so much more satisfactory than people—people are interesting but you cannot live with them as satisfactorily as with things—things are soothing—if they are works of art—most people are overstimulating.”

Though described by a nephew as a “freethinker,” Claribel Cone was quite conscious of her identity as a Jew. She often commented on colleagues’ ethnic identities and labeled herself a Jewess. Her family belonged to a local Reform temple, observed some religious holidays, and maintained strong ties with other German Jews, but, like many immigrant families, they emphasized Americanization, insisting that their children speak and write in English. Because she lived abroad much of her adult life, Cone’s emotional and social connections to her community of origin are somewhat unclear, though her family generously supported Jewish institutions in Baltimore.

Claribel Cone’s legacy, as she saw it, was her art and artifact collection. Aware of her declining health, she decided to leave her collection to Etta, her most trusted relative and friend. She expressed hope that, “if the spirit of appreciation of modern art in Baltimore should improve,” Etta would will both collections to the Baltimore Museum of Art. She did so.

Claribel Cone died in Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 20, 1929. Dr. Claribel Cone was well known as a charming, dignified, well-informed, self-assured, idiosyncratic, and highly independent woman with two passions, medical research and collecting art and artifacts.

Jewish Women’s Archive

The Baltimore General Dispensary

Our friend, Johns Hopkins (the person, not the institution) has been creating a five-minute educational and entertaining video series about Baltimore over the past year for Baltimore Heritage. The videos have covered subjects as diverse as Formstone, Lumbee Indian Heritage and the Ministry of Brewing. 

Baltimore Heritage just posted a video near and dear to our hearts here at MedChi. It's all about the dispensary movement, prevalent in the 1800's and into the early 1900's. In reviewing the biographies of our members during that period, many of them did a stint at the dispensaries in Baltimore. 

Dispensaries were mainly out-patient clinics for the poor. A wide range of people, including pregnant women, children, incurables and those with contagious diseases, were often excluded from inpatient hospital services, so this was the reason for the dispensary movement. 

There were at least 34 dispensaries in the city, including the First and Second; the North, West, East and South Dispensaries; Nervous Diseases; Eyes, Ears, Noses and Throats; Women and Children; Hebrews and Protestants; and even a homeopathic dispensary. 

One of the most interestingly-named is the Dispensary for Plaster of Paris Jackets and Free School. This dispensary was primarily for children suffering from curvature of the spine. The plaster jacket was changed frequently to help with the straightening.

I hope that you will take a few minutes to watch Johns explain about the dispensary movement in Baltimore. 

Early Maryland Women Physicians: Amanda Norris, MD

As a lifelong resident of Maryland, Amanda Taylor Norris paved the way for women interested in the field of medicine by becoming the first woman physician in Maryland who had received a medical degree from a "regular" college before she attended medical school. 

Along with her brothers and sisters, Amanda received her early education at home from a tutor. Earlier, her parents had sent her to reside with family members to give her an opportunity to attend a nearby school. This arrangement did not last as she was terribly homesick and returned home to her parents and siblings. At the age of seventeen she attended a girl's seminary in Carroll County for one year where her studies included grammar, arithmetic, history, composition, sciences, and German.

Amanda's lifestyle was leisurely and pleasant as expected for a well-to-do family at that time. In the spring of 1875 she attended the graduation of her brother, William, from a medical school in Baltimore. Upon her return trip home she read an article on the Woman's Medical College located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of a handful of medical schools for women. She was excited about the possibility of attending medical school, in part because of the moving commencement she had just attended for her brother. Once home she approached her father; who, although willing to provide the opportunity did not in fact believe Amanda would complete the schooling.

She graduated in 1880 from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania and returned to Baltimore where she began her career in private practice. Sadly, her father died in 1879, unable to see his daughter accomplish her goal.

The Maryland Medical College, a small co-educational school offered her a faculty position as a demonstrator of anatomy, which she readily accepted. The school was later closed due to the opening of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. In January 1882, a group of influential Baltimore women organized in the hope of establishing a women's medical school in Baltimore. It took only a short time before a group of Baltimore physicians had become convinced of the need for such a school and lent their support. Amazingly by the fall of 1882, the Women's Medical College of Baltimore opened its doors to its first class of female students.

For two years Dr. Norris served on the faculty of the school as an assistant in the Throat and Chest Clinic, at which point she became a lecturer on the pharmaceutical aspects of medicine. She was appointed to a full professorship in that field in 1886 and was later appointed Professor of Practical Obstetrics.

As Dr. Norris' patient responsibilities increased it became more difficult for her to continue with her teaching, and so after eighteen years of practicing and teaching in Baltimore, she moved her office to Baltimore County to devote all of her time to her practice.

She became a member of the Medical Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland in 1882, and in 1914 became a member of the Women's Medical Society, which was created in response to the increased numbers of women practicing medicine.

In 1929 the Women's Medical Society honored her nearly 50 years of service to her profession. One of the speakers at this ceremony, Dr. William Welch of Johns Hopkins, remarked that it was not necessary to make note of the fact that Dr. Norris was a woman, but more importantly that recognition be given to her accomplishments as a physician and professor; which alone had earned her the respect and admiration of her colleagues.

Dr. Norris married her cousin, a Harford County businessman, early in life and had one child. In 1939 she suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed and died in 1944 at 95 years of age.

Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame

World Book Day

Today is World Book Day. World Book Day changes lives through a love of books and shared reading. Their mission is to promote reading for pleasure, which is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success – more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.  

MedChi has an extensive collection of books, mostly medical journals from the 20th century, from each state, national and specialty medical society. Fortunately, most of these have now been digitized, many through Archive.org, who digitized our pre-1900 medical journals. 

In addition to the journals, we have hundreds of books, some medical, some botanical and some anatomical. Many of these date from the 1700's and 1800's and are fascinating to look through. 

As I was poking though the stacks recently, I took some pictures of some books which caught my eye.

This book, A Treatise on Madness, came with a pressed four-leaf clover. Very poignant.

Someone, who presumably didn't know any better, cut out the inner pages of this book from the 1600's to make a secret hiding place.

This book, dated 1787, is an illustrated guide to skin problems. 

I love how you can see, and feel, the imprint from the type-pieces on the reverse side of the page. 

This is an illustrated 1789 botanical guide.

See if you can take a half-hour or so and read just for fun today, and try to read from an actual book. Happy World Book Day!