Rachel Brooks Gleason

Rachel Brooks Gleason (27 November 1820 to 13 March 1905) was an American physician and the fourth woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. Born in Winhall, Vermont, she gave herself a college education at home because no colleges were open to women, and studied medicine with her husband, Dr. Silas O. Gleason, who persuaded the Central Medical College in Rochester, New York to admit women. She graduated in 1851, practised at a sanitarium in Glen Haven and in Ithaca, then headed the Elmira Water Cure, opened in 1852 and later known as Gleason Sanitarium, for more than forty years. It was a hydropathic health resort for upper-class women with a specialty in women's complaints. She wrote Talks to my Patients (1870), lectured on physiology and hygiene, supported eighteen women students through medical college and worked against slavery. Nothing here is medical advice.