Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/785

744 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.

Born November 30, 1843, in Lowell, Massachusetts. She married William W. Ripley, June 25, 1867, and removed to Boston, where she entered the Boston School of Medicine, in 1880. At her graduation in 1883 she was pronounced by the faculty one of the most thorough medical students who had ever received a diploma from the university. Soon after she settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and founded the Maternity Hospital. Mrs. Ripley was always deeply interested in the cause of woman's suffrage, and in 1883 she was elected president of the Minnesota Woman's Suffrage Association, serving as such for six years.

Was born January 15, 1839, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Was the daughter of John and Mary Anne Hosmer Hapgood. Her mother belonged to the same family of Hosmers from which Harriet Hosmer, the noted sculptor was descended. Soon after her marriage in 1869 to Frederick Cushing Nash, of Maine, she began the study of law and in 1872 was admitted to the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine, being the first woman admitted to the bar, in New England.