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Biographies

The First Women to Attend the Washington University School of Medicine

The first female medical student at the then Washington University Medical School was Harriet Hirrel Stevens. Stevens, born in 1883, received the A.B. degree from Washington University in 1906, and then studied for 3 years in the medical school. She was not listed as among the members of the first-, second-, or third-year classes in the University’s 1907, 1908, and 1909 Bulletins – rather, she was listed as “Hirrel Stevens” under the category of “Special Students.” Stevens then transferred to the Rush Medical College in Chicago and received her medical degree in 1910, and her medical license in 1911. Stevens married Professor Charles Edward Cory, the head of the Washington University Philosophy Department from 1907 to 1949. Practicing medicine under her married name, Dr. Harriet S. Cory served as executive director of the Missouri Social Hygiene Association and as director of the American Social Hygiene Association. In the early 1940s Dr. Cory was instrumental in the passage of the marriage health law and the compulsory prenatal blood test in the state of Missouri. In 1955 Dr. Cory was honored with the Washington University Distinguished Alumni Award for her contributions in the area of public service.

In 1918 the Executive Faculty recommended to the University’s Chancellor that women be admitted to the School of Medicine under the same conditions as men. Among the first women to do so was Faye Cashatt, who transferred as a third-year student in 1919. Cashatt had received her undergraduate degree from the University of South Dakota. Cashatt was listed in the Bulletin of the School of Medicine as a member of the regular class, and received her degree in June 1921. Cashatt married one of her classmates, William Benjamin Lewis, and together they worked in Webster City, Iowa. As Faye Cashatt Lewis, she wrote several books. The first, Doc’s Wife, details her experiences as the wife of a country doctor. Though Cashatt had earned a medical degree, at first she only worked as her husband’s office secretary and only occasionally as substitute physician for her husband. During the early years of World War II, Faye Cashatt Lewis reentered medicine full-time. She retired in 1970. Lewis wrote several other books, including Patients, Doctors, and Families, A Doctor Looks at Heart Trouble, and All Out Against Arthritis.

The first two women to have entered as a freshmen and to graduate from the Washington University School of Medicine were Mrs. Carol Skinner Cole and Aphrodite Maria Jannopoulo. Cole, who was born in 1888, received her degree in June 1922. After her graduation, Dr. Cole went into practice with her mother, Dr. Caroline Skinner, a homeopath. Dr. Skinner, born in 1858, was a 1897 graduate of the Homeopathic Medical College of Missouri, which was located in St. Louis. Within a few years Dr. Carol Skinner Cole left her mother’s practice and specialized in Obstetrics and Gynecology in St. Louis. Dr. Cole was killed when the airmail plane in which she was a passenger crashed into the Ohio River north of Steubenville, Ohio sometime in the early morning hours of March 21, 1932. She had taken the overnight flight, in bad weather, anxious to reach her daughter in New Jersey who had suddenly become ill.

Though Aphrodite Jannopoulo completed her medical coursework in 1922, she received her medical degree in 1923, due to late completion of an undergraduate academic requirement. Aphrodite Maria Jannopoulo married her classmate Armin C. Hofsommer and the couple settled in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. While raising her young children, Aphrodite combined her artistic talents with her medical knowledge to illustrate two medical textbooks. She then joined the Webster Groves School District as physician in 1931 and worked there until her retirement. The Hofsommers moved to California in 1965, where Aphrodite became interested in orchid culture. She became known internationally for developing a method of growing orchids under fluorescent lights. Aphrodite Hofsommer died in 1976.

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