A physician and longtime champion of women’s health, Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen (A.B. 1884) was recognized for her surgical skills, commitment to childbirth that was safe for mothers, and mentoring of female physicians. Working at the turn of the 20th century, when men dominated the medical profession, she was a rarity and a rebel.
The foundation of her accomplishments was an LSA undergraduate experience—in the University of Michigan’s early years of enrolling women—that profoundly influenced her career and life.
“I shall always be thankful for the delightful relation that existed in the literary class of ’84 in regard to the sexes,” she recalled. “Comradeship, adequate representation in all class offices, and recognition of the work of the women students was thoroughly established in Ann Arbor at that period.”
As a first-year student from Oakland County, Van Hoosen’s medical knowledge was limited to her family’s barnyard animals. “The study of anatomy, my favorite subject, was begun in the backyard at hog-killing time,” she wrote in her memoir, Petticoat Surgeon.
And then she met Mary H. McLean and Harriet C. Beringer, U-M medical students who lived across the street from her in Ann Arbor. “Their enthusiasm for their work fired my imagination,” Van Hoosen wrote. “Before this time I had never considered what I would do with my life, but now, although there were few vocations open to women and fewer suitable for a college-educated woman, I turned my attention to the subject with positive ferocity.”
Van Hoosen dove into the sciences: Chemistry, toxicology, histology, hygiene, and sanitation. A medical career became her obsession. “Unconsciously,” she said, “I was responding to a call of the woman in me—woman, preserver of the race—to mitigate suffering and save life.”
She graduated a semester early and immediately enrolled at U-M Medical School, where she received her degree in 1888.
Where Van Hoosen found her fellow students inspiring and collegial, her feelings toward the all-male faculty were less than generous.
“I felt greatly displeased that we did not have more women teachers, and that when such women as Alice Freeman came into their own, it was never with the aid and encouragement of the Alma Mater. As far as giving women a chance in the teaching faculty, the University of Michigan is our Pseudo Mater and not our Alma Mater,” she wrote. Freeman (A.B. 1876) was president of Wellesley College and a dean at the University of Chicago.
Van Hoosen spent most of her career as a gynecological surgeon at universities and hospitals in Chicago, including being the first woman in the world to chair an obstetrics department at a co-educational medical school when she joined Loyola University. Several years earlier, the U-M Medical School had rejected her as a professor of obstetrics and gynecology because she was a woman. “If my own university will not administer justice to my sex, I will find some other school that will.” She performed her last surgery at age 88 and died a year later, in 1952.
This story is part of an occasional series about alums in LSA history.
Bertha Van Hoosen is pictured in the top left of the black and white image with her Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sisters in 1882, Bentley Historical Library. Illustration by Carly Parker.
