ìPAR@ ` ²TEXT ` ∩Stevenson, Sarah Ann Hackett1841╨1909physicianBorn in Buffalo Grove (now Polo), Illinois, on February 2, 1841, Sarah Stevenson was educated at the Mount Carroll Seminary and at the State Normal University (now Illinois State University) in Normal, graduating from the latter in 1863. She taught school for several years in Bloomington, Mount Morris, and Sterling, Illinois, and in the last town was also principal. She then went to Chicago and began studying anatomy and physiology at the Woman╒s Hospital Medical College. After a year at the South Kensington Science School in London, where she studied under Thomas Huxley, she returned to the Woman╒s Hospital Medical College in Chicago and received her M.D. degree in 1874. She began her practice in Chicago in 1875 and in that year published Boys and Girls in Biology, a high school textbook. In 1876 she was chosen one of the Illinois State Medical Society╒s delegates to the American Medical Association convention in Philadelphia. Five years earlier the AMA had refused even to discuss the question of women members, but at Philadelphia the matter was dealt with quietly, and Stevenson became the association╒s first woman member. In 1875 she became professor of physiology and histology at the Woman╒s Hospital Medical College, which four years later became the Woman╒s Medical College and in 1891 became the Northwestern University Woman╒s Medical School; from 1880 to 1894 she was professor of obstetrics. She was also on the staffs of the Woman╒s, Provident, Mary Thompson, and, from 1881, Cook County hospitals; at the last she was the first woman staff physician. In 1880 she joined Lucy Flower and others in founding the Illinois Training School for Nurses. She was active also in the work of the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union, serving as the first superintendent of its Department of Hygiene in 1881╨1882 and as president of the staff of its National Temperance (later the Frances Willard) Hospital from its founding in 1886. In 1880 she published The Physiology of Woman. In 1893 she was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health (where again she was the first woman) by Governor John P. Altgeld. She retired from her large private practice in 1903 and died in Chicago on August 14, 1909. Nstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ ' 5¬ 2 !I 5¬ !I & !I ? !I k 5¬ l !I !I ▐ è !I ⌐ !I ▐ ╕ !I ⌡ !I !I .link ` HYPR èHYPR ⌐ ╕
