Women’s Medical College in Pennsylvania Opens Timelines: The Catto Years

Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania opens in Philadelphia. It is the second medical institution in the world established to train women in medicine and offer them the M.D. degree. The school had strong abolition connections. In 1867, Rebecca Cole became the first black women to graduate from the school and receives a medical degree. She was the second in the nation to do so. Cole was an ICY graduate. The school’s first African American student was Sarah Mapps Douglass in 1852. Douglass did not graduate, but went on to teach at ICY.