Born: 31 January 1851, United States
Died: 1925
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary Alice Bennett
The following is republished from the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Achievements
1880: Dr. Bennett was the first woman superintendent of the women’s section of the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
1890: Dr. Bennett was the first woman president of the Montgomery County (Pennsylvania) Medical Society.
1880: Dr. Alice Bennett was the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Biography
Dr. Alice Bennett improved the treatment of women patients with mental illness by abolishing restraints and introducing occupational therapy at the state hospital where she served as superintendent. In 1880, she became the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman superintendent of the women’s section of the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pennsylvania. In 1890, she was the first woman to be elected president of the Montgomery County (Pennsylvania) Medical Society.
Alice Bennett was born in 1851 in Wrentham, Massachusetts, to Lydia Hayden and Isaac Francis Bennett, a blacksmith. She was the youngest of their six children. After teaching school locally for four years, she attended the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the first school anywhere in the world to offer a medical course and degree to women.
After earning her M.D. degree in 1876, Alice Bennett worked in a dispensary in the Philadelphia slums until being appointed later that year to teach anatomy at her alma mater. For the next four years she taught and maintained a private practice while working toward a Ph.D. in anatomy. In 1880, she crossed two historic barriers, receiving the first Ph.D. degree ever awarded to a woman by the University of Pennsylvania and becoming superintendent of the women’s section of the newly opened State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pennsylvania. She was the first woman appointed to such a position in the state.
In the 19th century, the mentally ill were often kept confined with little medical treatment. Some were even restrained in straitjackets or chains. Dr. Bennett abolished this practice in her institution, contending that such restraints were ineffective and would only result in a patient’s anger and resentment. She theorized that checking patients’ energy in one direction by physically constraining them would drive that energy to another outlet. She believed that restraints contradicted ethical treatment, one based on mutual respect between patient and caregiver. Dr. Bennett also introduced occupational therapy, such as music, painting, and handicrafts, to the Norristown hospital. Other hospitals for the mentally ill adopted this practice and her policy of non-restraint, winning her widespread professional recognition.
In 1890, the Montgomery County Medical Society in Pennsylvania elected her to be their first woman president. She was also a member of the American Medical Association, the Philadelphia Neurological Society, and the Philadelphia Medical Jurisprudence Society, and was one of the original incorporators of the Spring Garden Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. After sixteen years as superintendent, Bennett returned to private practice in her hometown of Wrentham. From 1910 until her death in 1925, Dr. Bennett donated her services as the head of the outpatient department of obstetrics in the historic New York Infirmary for Women and Children founded by Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell.
The following is excerpted from A Woman of the Century, edited by Frances E. Willard and Mary A Livermore, published in 1893 by Charles Wells Moulton.
BENNETT, Mrs. Alice, doctor of medicine, born in Wrentham, Mass., 31st January, 1851. She was the youngest of six children born to Francis I. and Lydia Hayden Bennett. She was educated in Day’s Academy, in her native town, and taught in the district schools there from her seventeenth to her twenty-first year. During that period she prepared herself for the step which, at that place and time, was a sort of social outlawry, and at the age of twenty-one she entered the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which she was graduated in March, 1876 One of the intervening years was spent as interne in the New England Hospital, Boston, under Dr. Susan Dimock. After her graduation Dr. Bennett went into dispensary work, living in the slums of Philadelphia for seven months. In October, 1876, she became demonstrator of anatomy in the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and during four years devoted herself to the study and teaching of anatomy, in connection with private practice. At the same time she was pursuing a course of scientific study in the University of Pennsylvania, and received the degree of Ph.D. from that institution in June, 1880. Her graduating thesis upon the anatomy of the fore-limb of the marmoset received honorable mention. In the same month she was elected to the important position she still occupies as superintendent of the department for women of the State Hospital for the Insane, in Norristown, Pa. The trustees of that hospital, then just completed and about to be opened, did a thing without precedent in placing a woman physician in absolute and independent charge of their women insane, and dire predictions were made of the results of that revolutionary experiment. At the end of twelve years that hospital is the acknowledged head of the institutions of its kind in the State, if not in the country, and from its successful work the movement, now everywhere felt, to place all insane women under the care of physicians of their own sex, is constantly gaining impetus. Since Dr. Bennett entered upon her work, with one patient and one nurse, 12th July, 1880, more than 2,825 insane women have been received and cared for, new buildings have been added, and the scope of her work has been enlarged in all directions. In 1892 there were 950 patients and a force of 95 nurses under her direction, subject only to the trustees of the hospital. Dr. Bennett is a member of the American Medical Association, of the Pennsylvania State Medical Society, of the Montgomery County Medical Society, of which she was made president in 1890, of the Philadelphia Neurological Society, of the Philadelphia Medical Jurisprudence Society, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She has twice received the appointment to deliver the annual address on mental diseases before the State Medical Society, and she was one of the original corporators of the Spring Garden Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, established by Charles G. Ames. She has recently been appointed by Governor Pattison of Pennsylvania, one of the board of five commissioners to erect a new hospital for the chronic insane of the State.