Lillian Welsh

Dr. Lillian Welsh was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania in 1858. She was educated locally and received her medical degree from the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. She graduated from the Pennsylvania State Normal School in 1975, and then taught in Pennsylvania public schools. 

In 1890, Dr. Welsh studied post-graduate chemistry at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. While there, she met Dr. Mary Sherwood who was studying bacteriology, a new field. Dr. Sherwood’s brother lived in Baltimore, so the two moved there in 1892 and opened a practice together. It was Sherwood's “unbounded optimism and a kind of characteristic obstinacy,” that saw them through the rocky first years of the practice when patients were still suspicious of two women doctors. 

In addition to their private practice, Drs. Sherwood and Welsh took charge of the Evening Dispensary for Working Women and Girls of Baltimore, a charitable clinic, in 1893.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Welsh served as a medical advisor and professor of physiology and hygiene at Goucher College. She did much for Goucher’s physical training and medical offices, urging the girls to abandon tight clothing and wear low-heeled shoes if they wanted to be sensible and healthy.

She fought to end the prejudice against women doctors. She was well-known as a lecturer at civic clubs around the city, and her lectures were often mentioned in the society pages of the Baltimore Sun.

In 1925, Dr. Welsh began traveling around the South to visit Goucher Alumnae Chapters to help raise funds for the $6 million Goucher Campaign Fund. Her work at Goucher won national praise including for her help in making the Department of Physiology at Goucher the finest in any women’s college in the nation. She was a pioneer social worker, seeking solutions to problems including the infant mortality rate, tuberculosis and compulsory school laws for children.

Dr. Welsh, and Dr. Sherwood were active in the suffragette movement and Dr. Welsh served as one of two members of a Maryland Suffragette Commission.

Dr. Welsh published a book called “My Thirty Years in Baltimore,” a memoir of her time in the city. She was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in Baltimore as a suffragette in 2017.

Dr. Lillian Welsh died at her home in Columbia, Pennsylvania, where she moved after Dr. Sherwood’s death, on February 23, 1938. Her funeral was held at Goucher College. She would have turned 80 on March 6.