Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska was a German-born physician of Polish descent who became one of the most effective organizers of women’s medicine in nineteenth-century America. Born in Berlin on September 6, 1829, she was the eldest of six children of Ludwig Martin Zakrzewski and Caroline Fredericke Wilhelmina Urban. Her father came from a Polish noble family that had lost its estates after the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century; he worked as a civil servant in Prussia. Her mother was a midwife, and her maternal grandmother had practiced as a veterinary surgeon. From about the age of thirteen Zakrzewska accompanied her mother on rounds, and the practical work of childbirth and the care of the sick shaped her ambitions more than any formal school could.
At twenty she entered the midwifery school attached to the Charité hospital in Berlin, the institution where her mother had trained. She became a teaching assistant in her second year and graduated in 1851. The following year, with the support of Joseph Hermann Schmidt, professor of obstetrics and director of the school, she was appointed chief midwife and professor. Faculty opposition to a young woman in so visible a post was immediate. After six months she resigned. In 1853 she left for the United States, carrying letters and a determination to obtain a full medical degree rather than remain confined to midwifery.
In New York she met Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. Blackwell helped her learn English and secured her admission to the medical department of Western Reserve College in Cleveland, an all-male institution that had begun, cautiously, to accept a few women. Zakrzewska enrolled in 1854 and graduated with the degree of doctor of medicine in March 1856, at the age of twenty-six. She was one of only six women admitted to the school during the 1850s. Male students petitioned against the presence of women, and the social atmosphere was hostile, yet she completed the course. The faculty later remitted her lecture fees as a mark of respect. Like other women of that first generation of physicians, she then found almost no hospital willing to employ her.
She returned to New York and joined Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell in the effort to create a place where women doctors could practice and train. On May 12, 1857, they opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Zakrzewska served as its resident physician and general manager for the next two years, combining clinical work with the endless practical tasks of fundraising, housekeeping, and administration. The infirmary demonstrated that women physicians could run a hospital and that women patients would seek them out.
In 1859 she accepted an invitation to Boston to become professor of obstetrics at the New England Female Medical College and to take charge of its small clinical service. She went with the understanding that a proper hospital for clinical teaching would be developed. After three years she concluded that neither the college nor its hospital would grow under existing management, and she resigned. Friends and reformers in Boston were ready to help her start an independent institution. On July 1, 1862, she opened a ten-bed hospital in a rented house on Pleasant Street. It was incorporated on March 12, 1863, as the New England Hospital for Women and Children, with Lucy Goddard, Zakrzewska, and Ednah D. Cheney among the incorporators. It was the first hospital in Boston, and the second in the United States, to be conducted by women physicians.
Its stated purposes were precise: to give women medical care from competent physicians of their own sex, to furnish educated women with clinical training in medicine, and to train nurses. Zakrzewska served as resident physician in 1862–63, attending physician from 1863 to 1887, and advisory physician from 1887 to 1899, while also building a private practice across Boston. The hospital moved from cramped rented quarters to a substantial campus in Roxbury. By the 1890s its staff included dozens of women physicians, and its buildings covered medicine, surgery, maternity care, a dispensary, and a nurses’ home. In 1899 the main building was renamed the Zakrzewska Building.
Within the hospital she organized what is widely regarded as the first general training school for nurses in the United States. The program was practical and rigorous, and it admitted students who were excluded elsewhere. In 1879 Mary Eliza Mahoney completed the course and became the first African American woman to graduate from an American nursing school. Zakrzewska’s insistence on clinical standards rather than mere benevolence gave the institution a reputation that outlasted the era in which women were still barred from most hospital appointments and medical societies.
She did not limit herself to the wards. She helped found the New England Woman’s Club and was active in the American Woman Suffrage Association, linking the campaign for professional access to the broader demand for political rights. She is also credited with initiating the first sand gardens for children in America, early supervised play spaces that grew out of her concern for the health of poor children in dense neighborhoods. Her correspondence and the memoir later edited by Agnes C. Vietor show a woman who was exacting about medical standards, impatient with sentimental arguments for women’s special fitness, and convinced that competence, not special pleading, would eventually open the profession.
She retired from active attending duties in the late 1880s but remained the hospital’s guiding presence almost until her death. She died on May 12, 1902, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-two, of what was thought to be a heart attack. Colleagues read farewell letters she had prepared. Her house later became a stop on the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.
Zakrzewska’s achievement was institutional as much as personal. The New York Infirmary proved that a women’s hospital could survive; the New England Hospital proved that it could train successive generations of physicians and nurses and grow into a large, endowed institution. By the time of her death the idea that women could practice medicine was no longer an experiment confined to a handful of determined individuals. She had supplied one of the places where that idea was turned into daily clinical work.