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Part of the American
History & Genealogy Project |
Alice Bennet 1851 ~ 1925


Alice Bennet
Miss Bennet was born in Wrentham,
Massachusetts, January 31, 1851. She taught in the district
schools in her early youth but took up the study of medicine in
the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, from which she
graduated in March, 1876. Spent one year as an interne in the
New England Hospital, of Boston. After graduating, engaged in
dispensary work in the slums of Philadelphia.
In 1876 she pursued a course of scientific study in the
University of Pennsylvania, from which she received her degree
of Ph.D., in 1880, and that year she was elected superintendent
of the department for women of the State Hospital for the
Insane, in Norristown, Pennsylvania. The placing of a woman in
charge was without precedent and the results were awaited with
anxiety by the public and the profession. At the end of twelve
years the hospital was acknowledged to be the leading
institution of the kind in the state, if not in the country, and
this experiment has been the cause of this course being adopted
by other states and the question is being very generally
agitated as to whether this should not be generally adopted.
When Miss Bennet entered upon this field of her labors she had
but one patient and one nurse. More than two thousand, eight
hundred and seventy-five insane women have been cared for, and
in 1892 there was a force of ninety-five nurses under her.
She 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 several times delivered the annual address on mental
diseases before the State Medical Society and was appointed by
Governor Pattison, of Pennsylvania, as a member of the board of
five commissioners to erect the new hospital for the insane of
the state.
Women of
America

Source: The Part Taken by Women in
American History, By Mrs. John A. Logan, Published by The Perry-Nalle
Publishing Company, Wilmington, Delaware, 1912.
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