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- American National Biography
Mary Elizabeth Bass (Picture included)
5 April 1876 ? 26 January 1956
Bass, Mary Elizabeth (05 April 1876?26 January 1956), physician, medical educator, and historian, was born in Carley, Mississippi, the daughter of Isaac Esau Bass and Mary Eliza Wilkes. She grew up in Marion County, where her father operated a gristmill and dry goods store. The 1890s economic depression bankrupted Isaac Bass, and the family moved to Lumberton, Mississippi, to invest in pecan orchards. The Basses were pious Baptists and active in civic concerns.
Bass attended elementary and high schools in Columbia, Mississippi, assisting teachers and earning teaching certificates after her 1893 graduation. She taught in Texas and Mississippi. Her brother Charles had earned a degree from the Tulane University School of Medicine, and he encouraged Bass and their younger sister Cora to enroll in medical school. At that time no southern medical schools would accept women, and few schools in the United States welcomed female applicants. Many American women sought a medical education and qualifications to practice at foreign universities.
The Woman?s Medical College of Pennsylvania had opened in 1850, and the Bass sisters applied for the fall 1900 term. Together they completed the curricula in four years. Bass worked several weeks after graduation on the college dispensary staff before moving to New Orleans, Louisiana, with her sister to establish a private practice. In New Orleans, she encountered many obstacles and was shunned and scorned by the male-dominated medical profession. Bass stubbornly pursued her profession despite male doctors? rigidly controlling access to medical facilities. Women were not allowed to practice in New Orleans? clinics or hospitals.
Bass ignored her ostracism by the male medical community, and with five women doctors she established a free clinic for women and children. Opening in 1908, the New Orleans Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children (later called the Sara Mayo Hospital) provided crucial services. The hospital began in a house owned by one of Bass?s friends and expanded into a larger facility. At that time only five American hospitals had been founded and managed by women. Bass welcomed all women physicians to use the hospital to treat impoverished women and children and provide other patients with medical care.
In December 1911 Bass and Edith Ballard were named the first two female faculty members of Tulane?s medical school. Bass?s career as a medical educator began with a three-year position as an unpaid assistant demonstrator of surgical pathology. Outside the classroom, she participated in the city?s Equal Rights Association, demanding opportunities for women, and by 1914 Tulane accepted women in medical school perhaps because of her influence. Bass had been promoted to instructor in the laboratory of clinical medicine and was paid $500 a year. She divided her time between her university work, teaching pathology, bacteriology, and clinical laboratory diagnosis, and promoting issues regarding women and social issues. Bass acquired the rank of full professor in 1920.
During her thirty-year career as a pioneering female physician, Bass devoted her energy to advancing other women doctors in their careers. She was a valuable mentor to her students, advising them professionally and often providing financial assistance. She retired from Tulane in 1941 as emeritus professor of clinical laboratory diagnosis. Living in the Jung Hotel, Bass retained her private practice as house physician there and in the community because of the demand for doctors during the shortages of World War II.
The decade after her retirement resulted in perhaps Bass?s most significant accomplishment. She collected materials about women medical professionals to preserve the history of American women physicians. Her personal archives contained hundreds of clippings, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, letters, and photographs, which she used to write essays and the column, ?These Were the First,? for the Journal of the American Medical Women?s Association from 1946 to 1956. In addition to collecting works written by or about other women doctors, Bass published historical articles in medical journals.
Bass was an associate member of the American Medical Association, a fellow and life member of the American College of Physicians, an emeritus fellow of the College of American Pathologists, and a specialist certified by the American Board of Pathology. In 1913 she was the first woman elected to active membership in the Orleans Parish Medical Society. She served as secretary of that group in 1921 and vice president in 1923, and she edited its bulletin in 1939. She belonged to the Louisiana State Medical Society and was secretary for the Section of Pathology of the Southern Medical Association.
Bass joined the Women Physicians of the Southern Medical Association when it was founded in 1915 and was president of that organization from 1925 to 1927. In 1921?1922 she was the fifth president of the Medical Women?s National Association (later the American Medical Women?s Association). She also was affiliated with the Medical Women?s International Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the History of Medicine Society, the New Orleans Academy of Science, and the American Society of Tropical Medicine.
Active in the American Association of University Professors and the International Association of University Women, Bass served as a delegate to several international forums. She traveled to the first Pan Pacific Women?s Conference at Honolulu in 1928 and the 1934 Stockholm and 1937 Edinburgh conferences of the Medical Women?s International Association. A Democrat politically, Bass voiced demands for suffrage and strengthened child labor laws through women?s groups. She belonged to the Young Women?s Christian Association and was welcomed into some of the city?s more exclusive groups, including Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, Le Petit Salon, and the New Orleans Garden Society.
By 1949 Bass ceased her medical practice and returned to Lumberton, Mississippi, to supervise her ill mother?s health care. In 1952 the Woman?s Medical College of Pennsylvania gave her its Alumni Achievement Award, and in 1953 the American Medical Women?s Association presented Bass the Elizabeth Blackwell Centennial Medal Award. She died of cancer at the New Orleans Foundation Hospital. She was buried in Lumberton with her family, and a tuition fund for women students was established in her name at the Tulane School of Medicine.
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Bassett Family Association Database
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
d. 14 Oct 1933 (Age 83 years)